Carr Criticizes Biden Broadband Infrastructure Proposal

Broadband “clears the definitional hurdle” of what constitutes infrastructure, but President Joe Biden’s proposal for $100 billion in broadband spending (see 2103310064) is a “blunder,” FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said Thursday in an opinion piece in The Hill. It’s “not a good thing” that Biden’s proposal “tracks many of the ideas” contained in congressional Democrats’ Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. HR-1783/S-745 proposes $94 billion for broadband (see 2103110060). “At the outset, their efforts ignore” the $40 billion in existing broadband funding the FCC is working to distribute, including via the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund and the new $3.2 billion emergency broadband benefit program, Carr said. “Not one penny from this $40 billion tranche has been spent.” Price tag “aside, the Democrats’ approach is plagued with substantive flaws that will only make it harder to close the digital divide,” he said. “It dedicates funds to upgrade communities that already have high-speed Internet services so that they can receive the superfast ‘future proof’ connections of tomorrow.” Carr criticized the proposal for betting “on government-owned networks as the future of connectivity” and for putting “price controls squarely on the table” when “rate regulation would be a surefire way to scare off the private sector investment needed to bridge the digital divide.” He compared the current infrastructure effort to the rollout of broadband funding in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, in which “waste, fraud, and abuse flourished.” Congressional oversight hearings “followed with vows of ‘never again,’” yet “here we are again,” Carr said. “Rather than appropriating additional dollars in blunderbuss fashion, we can administer the substantial funds already available to the FCC while unleashing additional private sector investment” by reducing regulatory barriers, as House Commerce Committee Republicans proposed in February (see 2102160067). USTelecom and others also criticized Biden’s proposal (see 2104070057).