Digital Injustice

The Digital Divide is No Accident

How Corporate Incentives and Deliberate Decisions Kept Americans Offline

Amy Robinson

March 26, 2023

I needed to remove a tree. So I did what most any millennial would do and Googled “Tree Removal Companies Near Me” and had dozens of results in less than a minute. Tom Murphy, a local tree trimmer from Virginia, called me up to put together a quote. “Would you mind just texting me when you get the quote after I email it to you this evening?” Tom asked in a soft drawl. “We don’t have Internet at home so my wife has to drive into town to email quotes to customers, and I’d hate for her to have to turn around and drive back if it didn’t go through.” Tom’s cumbersome experience of trying to send an email for his family business stood in sharp contrast to the deluge of tree trimmer information I had looked up moments before. Despite living less than an hour’s drive apart, Tom and I lived in completely different digital worlds.

The Internet is a physical marvel – a feat of tubes and cables crisscrossing below and around us. Talk-show hosts ridiculed the late Senator Ted Stevens back in 2006 for referring to the Internet as a “series of tubes,” but there is more truth in his statement than most people like to recognize. Consider the path that a simple online request takes – the raw physicality of it all. The seemingly mundane task of sending an email requires surprisingly complex infrastructure. First, the request – communicated through a series of pulsing light – travels from my home router to a switchbox of cables for my street. That switchbox is then connected to the cable running down a street, which then tunnels under city streets and trapezes utility poles to finds its way to a local data center. From the local data center, the data travels across the backhaul fiber optic cable connecting cities. If this were an international communication, the pulses of light then traverse the bottom of the ocean. Even wireless communication, such as the novel 5G network, are still all grounded in the crude physicality of cables and wires crisscrossing our cities, underlying our roads, and keeping company with deep sea creatures. Yes, the physical marvels underpinning the Internet are easy to forget. Unless you don’t have access to it.

The digital divide is not an inevitable reality; it was deliberately developed.

One in four households fall on the wrong side of the digital divide in America. The phrase “digital divide” captures the gap between those with reliable, affordable Internet access and those without. The Commerce Department first identified the digital divide as a significant societal problem in 1999 when it stated that lack of Internet created a divide between “haves” and “have nots.” Over twenty years later, the digital divide remains entrenched in the United States. While “digital divide” is the traditional term used to describe the lack of Internet access, it oftentimes doesn’t sit right with me. “Digital divide” paints an image of an uncontested fact of nature – like the Grand Canyon. A phenomenon that simply emerged outside of human actions. But more accurate terms would be “digital discrimination” or even “digital redlining,” since the inequitable state of broadband today is the direct result of deliberate corporate action. Private companies that have focused on profit rather than equity have resulted in low-income, minority, and rural communities being left in the digital dust. Regional internet service provider (“ISP”) monopolies that can charge whatever price they want have resulted in the U.S. ranking second to last (just above Mexico) in broadband affordability compared to the other OECD counties. Meanwhile, telecom lobbying forces have squashed any meaningful push for change. The digital divide is not an inevitable reality; it was deliberately developed.

Digital discrimination lurks in every community. Take for instance, the City of Pharr, a mid-sized city located at the southernmost tip of Texas, where almost 60 percent of households lack broadband of any kind (including cellphone data plans). Yet the digital divide is not just a rural problem. If you look close enough, you will find that most urban communities also suffer from digital discrimination. One third of households in Lynwood, California, a city located in Los Angeles county, lack access to broadband. On the other coast, in the nation’s capital, 20 percent of households lack access to broadband. Similarly, just an hour drive north, Baltimore suffers from a whopping 40 percent of households without access to broadband.

Broadband refers to high-speed Internet. Technically speaking, an Internet connection must have a download speed 25 megabits per second (“Mbps”) and an upload speed of 3 Mbps in order to classify as broadband. It is important to understand what these terms and benchmarks refer to, since they become political terms of art. The Federal Communication Commission (“FCC”), which oversees much of the regulations regarding Internet infrastructure and pricing, sets these benchmark minimal speeds for broadband download and upload speeds. Download speed refers to the speed necessary to load a webpage or watch a movie on Netflix or listen to a song on Spotify. Traditionally, download traffic was prioritized since the Internet largely focused on consumption. However, new online activities, especially during the pandemic, require much stronger upload speeds than traditional Internet activities. These new virtual activities, such as Zoom happy hours, work teleconferences, or online teaching, are data-intensive activities that now require strong and symmetrical download and upload speeds.

The FCC’s current 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps Mbps upload threshold for broadband is seven years outdated. For reference, in 2015, Drake’s “Hotline Bling” played nonstop, Hamilton first hit Broadway, and people were blissfully unaware of virtual happy hours and “quarantinis.” The U.S. Government Accountability Office recommended that the FCC change its definition of broadband after finding that the current minimum benchmark speeds are too slow to meet many small businesses’ needs. Last year, a bipartisan group of senators urged federal agencies to “update federal broadband program speed requirements to reflect current and anticipated 21st century uses” and stated that the new benchmark should be symmetrical speeds of 100 Mbps. The senators lamented, “Ask any senior who connects with their physician via telemedicine, any farmer hoping to unlock the benefits of precision agriculture, any student who receives livestreamed instruction, or any family where both parents telework and multiple children are remote learning, and they will tell you that many networks fail to come close to ‘high-speed’ in the year 2021.” The 25 Mbps download/ 3 Mbps upload benchmark does not even meet Zoom’s recommended standards, which calls for 3.8 Mbps upload for one video stream and does not take into account the modern reality of multiple household members streaming videos at once.

Despite these recommendations, as well as the lived experiences of millions of Americans, the FCC has not updated its definition of broadband. This can partially be explained by political incentives to keep benchmarks low in order to skew reporting one way or the other. If you say that a 25 Mbps download speed counts as “broadband” (instead of, say, 50 Mbps as a minimum speed) then more households have so-called “broadband” (even if those Internet speeds are not sufficient for a multiple person household to actively engage online). More households with “broadband” mean that the administration in charge gets to claim that the digital divide is closing due to its efforts. In fact, former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s Commission even suggested that it would be appropriate to consider a household “served” by an ISP if it had access to a 10 Mbps wireless connection, which would superficially inflate the number of served Americans without providing meaningfully better Internet service. Conservatives tend to prefer lower benchmarks to prove that the private sector is doing its job in connecting Americans, whereas Liberals tend to prefer higher benchmarks to justify funneling more money into federal broadband programs.

The FCC map of the United States that shows census blocks shaded with colors yellow, green, and blue to represent broadband availability.

Credit: The FCC map of broadband availability, which relies on data provided by ISPs themselves. Map available at https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov.

Regardless of the political definition of broadband, the FCC’s mapping still efforts woefully undercount the number of Americans without Internet access. This stems from how the FCC defines “served” as well as the reporting mechanism itself. First, the FCC considers an entire area “served” if one home in a census block has broadband. In rural regions, census blocks can encompass miles – hardly granular enough data to see who actually has access. Second, the FCC relies on self-reported data about coverage and speeds from the ISPs themselves. ISPs often provide information on their advertised maximum speeds rather than the speeds that people actually experience. This results in enormous disparities between the FCC’s reported digital divide and the lived realities of Americans. For instance, the FCC lists Lincoln County, Washington (just west of Spokane) as having 100 percent broadband availability. Yet an independent study conducted by Microsoft found that only 5 percent of households actually had access to broadband speeds.

Regardless of the political definition of broadband, the FCC’s mapping still efforts woefully undercount the number of Americans without Internet access.

This is all to say that the FCC’s definition of served and unserved households has devolved into a political battlefield and that the true number of American households with adequate Internet to meaningfully participate online is much worse than we realize.

No matter how you define broadband, the fact remains that many communities simply do not have the necessary infrastructure for broadband because ISPs have decided certain areas are not profitable enough to deploy a network. Building a broadband network is a costly endeavor. Again, think of the breathtaking number of wires that need to travel beneath us and over us to make the Internet function. Because of this huge infrastructure undertaking, an Internet network requires significant upfront capital to dig up city streets and access utility pole lines. But once set up, the company benefits enormously from economies of scale. It costs very little to provide Internet to a household once the main backbone of the service has been built. This makes it significantly difficult for a competitor to enter the market because a competitor would also have to pay to build the expensive infrastructure but would not yet benefit from the profits associated with a large customer base.

Leslie Morissette, founder of the nonprofit Grahamtastic Connections, has experienced the pains of attempting to connect a home in a currently unserved area. Grahamtastic Connections provides technology and home Internet connections to children with cancer and other serious illnesses while they undergo treatment. One sick child in need of a broadband connection lived in Standish, Maine. With just over 10,000 people, Standish is certainly not a metropolis, but it is also not an isolated rural town. Yet Morissette lamented that a cable company demanded $3000 to install a physical line that would connect one sick child in Standish. A physical cable line was the only option since the nearest cellphone tower was too far away. Ultimately, the service was too expensive for Grahamtastic Connections to afford, and the child couldn’t receive an Internet connection.

As shown by Grahamtastic Connections’ mission, home Internet serves as a lifeline for at-risk populations, especially during a pandemic. Elderly, immunocompromised, and chronically ill Americans rely on Internet connections to safely access telehealth services, stay connected, and continue their education. Morissette underscored how much of a necessity home Internet is for these children. “The children we support, many of them, can’t leave their homes or their hospital beds,” Morissette explained, “so they count on technology to connect them to their classrooms, to their family and friends, even to a medical consultation through the Internet.” Despite the critical nature of a broadband connections, many at-risk Americans remain offline due to the lack of broadband infrastructure in their region.

In addition to health implications, lack of broadband infrastructures can also impact non-urban residents ability to work. Daryl Myers, a resident of Whatcom County, Washington (located just south of the Canadian border), was determined to get an Internet connection in order to telecommute and to help his wife grow her photography business. Showing just how frustrating such efforts can be, Myers said, “I called up the business division of Comcast, knowing they had just run cable in the ground only a quarter of a mile away, and asked about getting a business class line of service for my home. The first rep that I spoke with assured me that it would be no problem […]. A few weeks passed. I reached out again and was informed that service wasn’t an option after all. The cost of construction was too high: $181,000.” After continuous talks with Comcast, Myers learned that Comcast decided it could do the work for $48,000, but that it would require $8,000 to cover the “customer contribution,” a number that was too cost-prohibitive for Myers to proceed. “I shouldn’t have to move my family a quarter of a mile down the road just to get [Internet],” Myers vented.

By enabling residents to telecommute, broadband empowers rural communities to attract and maintain talent, combatting the “brain drain” phenomenon. Emporia, Kansas suffered so severely from younger generations leaving that The Onion jokingly dubbed it the “Best Town in America to Escape From.” To combat the brain drain, Emporia decided to build a fiber optic network to provide highspeed broadband. Casey Woods, Executive Director of Emporia Main Street, a nonprofit that advocates for local business, stated, “Broadband is the new railroad. Broadband is that new iteration. It represents commerce, just in a digital format.” Zooming out, it becomes apparent that lack of broadband results in significant economic costs for the country as a whole. Broadband helps job seekers apply to jobs online, it results in greater productivity of employees, and it enables small businesses to reach national and international markets. One study found that a 10 percentage point increase in broadband access in 2016 would have resulted in more than 806,000 additional jobs and $186 billion more in economic output in 2019.

Urban metropolitan areas also suffer from persistent underinvestment of broadband infrastructure, yet it has different roots. While the non-urban digital divide can be attributed to sparse population and difficult terrain, the urban digital divide stems from decades-long discrimination. Lack of broadband in metropolitan areas disproportionately impacts low-income communities and communities of color, mirroring the historic redlining in housing discrimination – giving rise to the term “digital redlining.”

In a 2017 study of digital redlining in Cleveland, OH, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (“NDIA”) found that AT&T only provided 34 percent of census blocks within city limits with fiber broadband (the gold standard for broadband). The remaining census blocks relied on Internet service over outdated copper cables. Meanwhile, AT&T provided 61 percent of census blocks in neighboring Cuyahoga County with fiber broadband. The difference? Cuyahoga County is wealthier and whiter. “Is it intentionally race?” Angela Siefer, NDIA’s Executive Director, asked. “One doesn’t know intentions. But one knows the outcome, which is the majority of the neighborhoods that have slower speeds from providers … are lower-income neighborhoods, and they tend to be communities of color.”

The majority of the neighborhoods that have slower speeds from providers … are lower-income neighborhoods, and they tend to be communities of color.

Similar accounts of digital redlining have been observed in Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Oakland. Unlike redlining of utilities like water or electricity, digital redlining is perfectly legal. ISPs don’t have to follow specific coverage requirements regarding where they must build their networks. Therefore, ISPs get to determine which areas are “most desirable” and will produce the most profit. As Dr. Brian Whitacre, the lead researcher in NDIA’s digital redlining study for Dallas, explained, “Because the patterns revealed by this analysis result from a decade of deliberate infrastructure investment decisions, I argue that they constitute strong evidence of a policy and practice of ‘digital redlining’ by AT&T — i.e. income-based discrimination against residents of lower-income urban neighborhoods in the types of broadband service AT&T offers, and in the company’s investment in improved service.” To underscore Dr. Whitacre’s statement, this is a deliberate decision. ISPs have chosen to deny certain neighborhoods access to high-speed broadband in order to maximize profits. AT&T, meanwhile, has denied the accusation, claiming that their investment decisions are simply driven by demand for their services – i.e. the ability to pay for higher prices for premium service. But that statement alone is basically an admission that AT&T was only interested in deploying broadband in wealthy neighborhoods.

To make the most money, ISPs have the incentive to only serve high-income and urban areas that will be the most profitable. As these stories show, companies like AT&T and Comcast won’t invest in a neighborhood if they don’t think they will receive a return on their investment. This profit-maximization mindset directly results in ISPs’ digital redlining of major metropolitan cities as well as the requirement of a non-urban resident to pay $8000 before receiving service. Deb Socia, former Executive Director of the municipal advocacy group Next Century Cities drives the point home: “The issue is: the market isn’t solving the problem. I don’t expect a for-profit company to take on an effort that will not make them money; that’s not what they do, they are for-profit.”

The answer then seems to be – treat broadband as a utility, like electricity or water, which would require service providers to provide complete coverage to residents. Yet many Republicans argue that heavy-handed regulation will reduce ISPs’ profits and therefore reduce their future infrastructure investment. Former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who led the FCC during the Trump administration, strongly championed this light-touch regulatory approach. Ajit Pai wears a large, toothy grin and is often seen sipping from a cartoonishly-large Reese’s coffee mug. He likes to quote “The Big Lebowski” on his Twitter feed as well as post pictures of his objectively cute bulldog puppy. Yet one more “fun” fact – Ajit Pai worked as General Counsel at Verizon from 2001 to 2003, which means he understands and often touts the industry perspective, even when he served as a regulator of that industry.

As Pai and other Republicans warn, companies need profits in order to spur investment. They point to the $1.8 billion in private broadband investment in the last 25 years under a light-touch regulatory regime. As Pai explained, “After the Federal Communications Commission embraced utility-style regulation, the United States experienced the first-ever decline in broadband investment outside of a recession.” He continued, “In the United States, we are in the process of returning to the light-touch approach to regulation that produced tremendous investment and innovation throughout our entire Internet ecosystem—from the core of our networks to providers at the edge.”

Yet, as shown by the countless personal stories and harrowing statistics, the free-market approach is not working. Instead, ISPs have become too big to fail and customers and regulators too small to fight back.

Even if an ISP builds infrastructure in a particular community, the price of the service could be too high for many families to afford. That brings us to the second main contributing factor of the digital divide – exorbitant pricing. “The prices that families have to pay now for Internet access are absolutely astronomical and unaffordable for a lot of families,” Morissette of Grahamtastic Connections, bemoans. “I mean they do it, but they’re going without other things. They’re going without college funds and things like that in order to pay for Internet access. It’s really gotten out of control.” [Leslie Morissette, 13:18]. Take for instance, eighth-grader Joshua Edwards of Citronelle, Alabama. Joshua made multiple visits to the local McDonald’s to complete homework assignments over the past few years. Joshua’s mother, who relies on $1,200 to support her family, explained that she could not afford the $250 deposit needed for satellite Internet to their trailer home.

They’re going without college funds and things like that in order to pay for Internet access. It’s really gotten out of control.

Yet home broadband connections have become a necessity for school, as many teachers assign homework that requires Internet access and online research. After the public library closes at night, Internet-deprived students, like Joshua, resort to studying at McDonald’s or Starbucks to finish assignments. A viral photo of two young girls sitting in a Taco Bell parking lot finishing their homework in Salinas City, California demonstrates the burden that many schoolchildren without home Internet face when trying to keep up with their peers. FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel expressed, “This is an especially cruel part of the digital divide, known as the Homework Gap. Recent estimates suggest it may affect as many as 17 million kids.”

This lack of home broadband has real repercussions for education outcomes. A pre-pandemic 2019 study from Michigan State University found that students with no home Internet access, slow home access, or cellphone access had half a letter grade lower overall GPA than students with robust home broadband, even after controlling for socioeconomic and other factors. Researchers also noted a correlation between lack of home broadband and lower SAT scores. As Johannes Bauer, one of the study’s researchers, explained, “Students engage in numerous activities and tasks online, from conducting research, working with peers on a project, watching and reading education materials, and checking grades. But they also use the Internet to email teachers, message their classmates for help, and video chat with classmates to solve homework problems—and the data shows that students with fast internet access at home utilize these opportunities more regularly and more often than students without that access.”

Two girls sit in a parking lot, finishing their homework on computers, while two Taco Bell employees talk to them.

Viral photo of two girls in Salinas City, California, completing their homework in a Taco Bell parking lot to access free Internet. Photo by @bandicootmila.

Most of these offline students, like Joshua, don’t have home broadband because the price of broadband is too high to justify. In fact, cost has consistently been the number one reason people remain on the wrong side of the digital divide. That explains why complaining about an Internet bill has become a common trope. And for good reason. The average U.S. home Internet bill rose 19 percent during the Trump presidency (from $39.35 in 2016 to $47.01 in 2019), after accounting for inflation. Yet this rise in consumer prices is happening at the same time that ISPs are investing less in their networks – contrary to former FCC Chairman Pai’s claim that ISPs are investing more in their networks under a light-touch regulatory regime. In fact, Comcast’s capital investment in 2020 was 22 percent lower than in 2016. Similarly, AT&T’s capital investment was a whopping 52 percent lower than in 2016.

Home internet was already expensive before the pandemic. And the problem has only become more magnified.

The decrease in investment is a result of ISPs slowing deployment in the remaining unconnected communities as well as delaying much needed upgrades to their networks. This means that ISPs are reaping the benefits; as consumers pay more, the companies spend less. As the organization Free Press explained, ISPs “grew their profits to record levels before and during the COVID-19 pandemic by increasing their prices during an unprecedented economic downturn,” and that “low-priced entry-level options for high-speed Internet service are disappearing, raising the adoption barrier for low-income families.” Home internet was already expensive before the pandemic. And the problem has only become more magnified.

Despite the clear evidence of digital redlining and exorbitant prices, not everyone agrees that the answer is more regulation – or even that there is a problem. Industry representatives point to the growth of broadband adoption in the past few years as a sign that the current light-touch regulatory approach is working. After all, why should we regulate broadband when the current industry is already “ultra-competitive.” The broadband industry points to the fact that the percentage of Americans with access to two or more broadband service providers increased fourfold between 2015 and 2019.

Yet a quick pursual of the subreddit r/f*ckcomcast shows that many Americans would not agree with the conclusion that the current broadband marketplace is “ultra-competitive.” Take, for instance, the colorful account of u/Brotatochips posted in November 2021:

Its [sic] insane to me that I only have ONE option available in my area if I want anything over 40mbps. I’m being charged $100 overage fees even though I HAVE UNLIMITED DATA. […] I’m so tired to getting f*cked in the mouth over and over by this company, and if I had another gigabit option in my area, I’d take it immediately. God damn I hate this company. I hope everyone of them steps on a Lego in the middle of the night.

It’s claims like these that resulted in Baltimore officials calling on the Maryland Attorney General to open an investigation into Comcast’s “predatory price gouging.” As Baltimore City Councilmember Kristerfer Burnett expressed, “To learn that in the midst of a global pandemic and economic downturn, that Comcast would establish a data cap on its service and raise fees on customers is simply appalling.” Such actions are not of a company trying to help customers but a company furthering shareholder interest.

Exorbitant pricing is directly linked to ISPs’ local monopolistic control. Big ISPs don’t have to worry about a competitor undercutting them for two big reasons. First, it is cost-prohibitive for a new ISP to enter the market and provide meaningful competition due to the high upfront capital expenditure of building a new network. Second, ISPs have arranged themselves into regional monopolies so as not to step on each other’s toes. Two cable powerhouses, Comcast and Charter, account for more than half of the broadband market. In fact, more than a third of the country lives under a monopoly or duopoly broadband regime. As Harvard professor Susan Crawford explains in her book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, “Even though there are several large cable companies nationwide, each dominates its own region. The major cable companies never compete with one another because each wants to reap the advantage of scale that comes with control over entire markets.” In fact, the summer of 1997 was dubbed the “Summer of Love” because cable companies actively swapped and pursued partnerships to cluster their networks.

Despite this drastic regional monopolization, any significant antitrust enforcement is blocked. This is largely because Congress has granted the FCC the power to regulate broadband. Accordingly, the courts defer to the FCC to determine if the “bad actor” ISP was doing something it shouldn’t, such as anti-competitive behavior. If the FCC classified broadband as a utility, then it would have greater power to ensure ISPs are providing equal access at affordable rates. But in the meantime, people and municipalities have essentially lost the ability to sue their broadband providers under the Sherman Antitrust Act. ISPs’ abilities to consolidate and dominant regions remains unchecked in a vacuum of regulatory oversight.

On September 21, 1932 in Portland, Oregon, President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid out what he believed to be a fundamental American right: “That where a community – a city or county or a district is not satisfied with the service rendered or the rates charged by the private utility; it has the undeniable basic right, as one of its functions of Government, [..] to set up […] its own governmentally owned and operated service.” President Roosevelt described this right of the people to own and operate their own utility as a “birch rod” to be “taken out and used only when the ‘child’ gets beyond the point where a mere scolding does no good.” That is, if the private ISPs are failing communities, the communities should have the right to provide the service themselves. Community broadband promises to be the necessary “birch rod” to whip ISPs into shape.

Community broadband promises to be the necessary “birch rod” to whip ISPs into shape.

In fact, more than 600 localities in the U.S. provide some form of community broadband. Take, for instance, Chattanooga, Tennessee, the first city to provide its own community broadband. Nicknamed the “Gig City,” Chattanooga’s municipal electric and telecommunications utility built and manages its own fiber network for residents. Instead of being guided by profit maximization, Chattanooga seeks to provide equitable and affordable service. In fact, it was able to offer low-income households broadband for $26.99, which is less than half of the normal rate. During the pandemic, the city was also able to provide free Internet to households with K-12 students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. As the Chattanooga model shows, community broadband offers a promising alternative to the status quo. Community broadband can provide more equitable Internet service based on needs rather than profit (preventing digital redlining), inject competition into a marketplace (preventing exorbitant pricing), and provide public accountability. Despite the benefits of community broadband, one big barrier stands in its way – ISPs strong lobbying forces.

And community broadband entered the crosshairs of ISPs lobbying efforts.

Big ISPs like Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, and Verizon can unleash a firehose of spending for lobbying on hot button issues. And community broadband entered the crosshairs of ISPs lobbying efforts. ISPs’ intense lobbying has resulted in more than a third of states banning community broadband or putting significant barriers in place. Some states (like Arkansas, Nebraska, and Texas) have absolute bans on municipal broadband while other states impose significant barriers, such as requirements for public hearings or local referenda, that make community broadband practically impossible to deploy. None of these states imposes similar restrictions on private providers.

An abstract visualization of the United States, showing which states have laws restricting community broadband (WA, MT, MN, WI, MI, NV, UT, NE, MO, AT, LA, TX, TN, AL, FL, NC, SC, VA, PA)

Visualization of states that have laws that restrict community broadband. Source: Bloomberg Law with data from Baller Stokes & Lide, P.C., https://news.bloomberglaw.com/tech-and-telecom-law/municipal-broadband-war-reignited-in-bidens-infrastructure-push.

Even though Tennessee is home to the prominent “Gig City,” Tennessee lawmakers also feel the intense lobbying pressure of ISPs. “On a scale of 1 to 10 on who is the most powerful lobbying presence in Tennessee, AT&T is a 12,” said one anonymous Tennessee lobbyist. State Senator Janice Bowling, who herself comes from a rural town in Tennessee, wanted to serve her rural constituents who were not being served by the large providers. However, a 1999 Tennessee state law stood in the way. The law prohibited cities from operating their own Internet networks outside of their own electrical footprint. That’s why the “Gig City” of Chattanooga can provide free Internet to school children on one block but a block over cannot offer the same Internet package to a kid going to the same school because they technically live outside the city limits. Senator Bowling introduced a bill to change that. “We don’t quarrel with the fact that AT&T has shareholders that it has to answer to,” she explained. “That’s fine, and I believe in capitalism and the free market. But when they won’t come in, then Tennesseans have an obligation to do it themselves.” This is the birch rod that President Roosevelt imagined.

But she found herself up against a well-funded and decades-long orchestrated campaign to maintain the status quo. Senator Bowling recalled one meeting in which the president of AT&T’s Tennessee operations leaned across the conference table and threatened, “Well, I’d hate for this to end up in litigation.” Telecom companies have the deep pockets to fund countless lawsuits that stymie these types of local and state advocacy efforts.

There is currently a couple of bills in the pipeline that would remove the state barriers for community broadband. The Community Broadband Act (H.R. 1631) would “enable municipally-owned or operated broadband networks throughout the country by removing state legal barriers to local investment in broadband infrastructure.” Similarly, the broadband-specific provisions int the Leading Infrastructure for Tomorrow’s America Act (“LIFT America Act”) (H.R. 1848) would also remove barriers for community broadband. However, these provisions will also face the well-oiled lobbying machine of the large telecom providers.

In general, ISPs have both federal legislators and regulators in their pockets. When the FCC tried to regulate the Internet as a utility in 2010, AT&T spent nearly $6 million to lobby legislators and federal regulators in the first quarter alone. During that same time, AT&T also contributed to the campaigns of all of the Congressional members who were part of the House subcommittee that dealt with Internet issues (save for three Democrats). More recently, Comcast senior executive David Cohen raised over $100,000 for Biden’s campaign and even hosted a high-dollar fundraiser for Biden at his home. In turn, Biden appointed Cohen as U.S. ambassador to Canada.

As shown by former FCC Chairman Pai’s ties to Verizons, there is a swift revolving door between industry and regulators that further cements ISPs’ influence in DC. In her book Captive Audience, Professor Crawford tells the tale of the Comcast-NBC merger during which Comcast hired almost eighty former government employees as lobbyists for the merger. In fact, Professor Crawford explains that David Cohen (the same man who President Biden later appointed as the Canadian ambassador) supposedly joked, “Let me know if there’s anyone I haven’t hired.” Taken together, the ISPs’ deep pockets and close ties to regulators mean that any legislative push to change the status quo will face an uphill battle.

By some accounts, over 160 million Americans lack access to high-speed broadband. But we didn’t get here by accident. The current digital divide is the direct result of ISPs valuing profit over people, earnings over equity. By purposefully only building in “profitable” locations, ISPs deliberately developed a network with significant coverage gaps in both urban and non-urban areas. By purposefully consolidating into regional monopolies, ISPs ensured that the sky was limit for how high they could hike broadband prices. And by lobbying (and employing) regulators, ISPs all but guaranteed that they could maintain their lucrative status quo.

The current digital divide is the direct result of ISPs valuing profit over people, earnings over equity.

While any substantive legislative push to regulate broadband as a utility or to remove barriers to community broadband will face an uphill battle, all is not lost. Local leaders are employing their own creative (some might even say subversive) solutions to inject competition and consumer protections into their communities. Take, for instance, the “guerilla WiFi” movements of nonprofits installing mesh networks across cities to connect residents that otherwise could not afford broadband. “Welcome to the Mesh, brother,” Daniel Heredia, a 19-year-old volunteer with NYC mesh, told a customer after setting up his broadband connection on an apartment roof. Or, take, the efforts of Lincoln, Nebraska to circumvent the state’s ban on municipal broadband. The City of Lincoln installed a network of conduit (the underground pipe that broadband cables pass through) so that the city had a say in where the network was deployed. The conduit network also attracted multiple ISPs by reducing the cost of deployment, injecting competition and lowering prices for residents. Nebraska may have banned municipal broadband, but it didn’t say anything about the tubes.

Stories like these show how wily, piecemeal solutions can put pressure on large ISPs. It shows how local leaders can craft local solutions and respond directly to residents’ needs. And – as we await more sweeping reform – we can find solace in the fact that Americans are fighting back. Communities across the country are rejecting the narrative that ISPs have spun – that a digital divide is inevitable – and are ensuring that all citizens have access to a broadband connection.