Court Supports NY State’s Quest To Require $15 Broadband For Poor People, Much To Big Telecom’s Horror
from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept
When the Trump administration killed net neutrality, telecom industry giants convinced them to push their luck and declared that not only would federal regulators no longer try to meaningfully oversee telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T, but that states couldn’t either. They got greedy.
The courts didn’t like that much, repeatedly ruling that the FCC can’t abdicate its authority over broadband consumer protection, then turn around tell states what they can or can’t do.
The courts took that stance again last week, with a new ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit restoring a New York State law (the Affordable Broadband Act) requiring that ISPs provide low-income state residents $15 broadband at speeds of 25 Mbps. The law was blocked in June of 2021 by a US District Judge who claimed that the state law was preempted by the federal net neutrality repeal.
Giant ISPs, and the Trump administration officials who love them, desperately tried to insist that states were magically barred from regulating broadband because the Trump administration said so. But the appeals court ruled, once again, those efforts aren’t supported by logic or the law:
“the ABA is not conflict-preempted by the Federal Communications Commission’s 2018 order classifying broadband as an information service. That order stripped the agency of its authority to regulate the rates charged for broadband Internet, and a federal agency cannot exclude states from regulating in an area where the agency itself lacks regulatory authority. Accordingly, we REVERSE the judgment of the district court and VACATE the permanent injunction.”
This ruling is once again good news for future fights over net neutrality and broadband consumer protection, Stanford Law Professor and net neutrality expert Barbara van Schewick notes in a statement:
“Today’s decision means that if a future FCC again decided to abdicate its oversight over broadband like it did in 2017, the states have strong legal precedent, across circuits, to institute their own protections or re-activate dormant ones.”
Telecom lobbyists have spent years lobbying to ensure federal broadband oversight is as captured and feckless as possible. And, with the occasional exception, they’ve largely succeeded. Big telecom had really hoped they could extend that winning streak even further and bar states from standing up to them as well, but so far that really hasn’t gone as planned.
One of the things that absolutely terrifies telecom monopoly lobbyists is the idea of rate regulation, or that government would ever stop them from ripping off captive customers stuck in uncompetitive markets. It’s never been a serious threat on the federal level due to regulatory capture and lobbying, even though it’s thrown around a lot by monopoly apologists as a terrifying bogeyman akin to leprosy.
Here you not only have a state retaining its authority to protect consumers from monopoly harm, but dictating to them that they must provide poor people with 25 Mbps broadband (which really costs ISPs at Comcast’s scale virtually nothing to provide in the gigabit era). Still, it’s the kind of ruling that’s going to give AT&T and Comcast lobbyists (and consultants and think tank proxies) cold sweats for years.
Filed Under: 25 mbps, affordable broadband act, broadband, low income, new york state, rate regulation
Comments on “Court Supports NY State’s Quest To Require $15 Broadband For Poor People, Much To Big Telecom’s Horror”
Not sure how this minimum wage economy is supposed to work …
Many if not most employment is now only available via online application. How are minimum wage potential employees supposed to apply when they can not afford the monthly ISP rates? Go to the library they said .. the ones that some folk want to close? Yeah, that’s gonna work just fine. Use your cell phone they said … how do they afford that? Can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip.
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Get an Obamaphone.
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Use a mobile phone. As you say, probably many of them can’t afford to buy such a phone, so they’ll pay the rip-off lease/rental prices. And they’ll hit their data-transfer cap quickly, but on most services that just reduces the speed rather than cutting them off. Even many homeless people have mobile phones now.
The “minimum wage economy” is a pretty new thing. Such jobs used to very temporary, to hold one over till one got a real job, or to fill a summer in high school. People without much money would have roommates (cf. Friends), sharing a phone and other utilities, never traveling for pleasure, etc. Now, people want to “have it all”—live alone in an arbitrarily expensive area, with discretionary entertainment spending—while making literally the least amount of money it’s legal to pay an employee. Society and goverment haven’t really caught up with this idea.
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Very rosy picture you painted there.
I imagine a different pov might be experienced by those actually living, or attempting to anyway, a life in the minimum wage economy.
Why are the youngsters not having children and buying houses? I am guessing it has something to do with the prevailing low wages being paid these days. Post WWII a single earner could provide a family with a roof and food with a blue collar job, not today. I doubt the maga types include higher wages in their time machine fantasies but that and higher funding of education were two very important features of the post WWII booming economy.
/rant
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That and the rising costs of living in general. Even if somone makes a living wage, they still have to stretch it thin to afford housing, clothing, utilities (including Internet access), transportation, food, and a mobile phone while still having some money left over for savings, medical bills, and simple luxuries like entertainment (e.g., books, movies, music) and vacations. Having a child shrinks budgets in a way that often leaves many of those luxuries off the table.
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Well then, that would not be a living wage, would it? A living wage allows you to pay off all your bills each month and still be left with a comfortable amount of discretionary funding.
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It would be, if not for the fact that prices keep going up on everything thanks to corporate greed. Costs have risen (and will continue to rise) faster than wages will grow because, for some reason, C-suite executives need to be paid a salary thousands of times larger than the average worker for doing a fraction of the work that keeps their companies from going down the drain.
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Would that include student debt?
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Yes. Student debt would be included in the calculation of a living wage.
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How so? It’s certainly not rosy at present. Do you mean it’ll be rosy once society and government catch up with the idea? That might not happen in our lifetimes; the 40-hour work week took like a century to catch on.
I think that’s unrealistically rosy. My grandparents did that in the 1960s and 1970s, but they had near-zero discretionary spending: travel was a road-trip every few years, eating out was only for birthdays, and their house remains a circa-1970 time-capsule to this day. In the 1980s, both my parents were working, and they still occasionally borrowed money from my grandparents (unbeknownst to me at the time); they couldn’t afford a house till I was 15, although they used mortgages to buy before that time.
Personally, I’m not so willing to commit to things I can’t afford, and I certainly didn’t feel financially or emotionally ready for children before about age 35. And I was better off financially than most people; biologically, age 40 or 45 is really quite late to be having children.
There’s a lot going on here, and it’s not just financial; see the stories of 25-year-olds having their parents arrange job interviews (my parents were younger than that when I was born, and it was normal).
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This ain’t no way to run a railroad.
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The “idea” lacks merit and evidence.
Are there people like that? Sure. Always have been. They’ve been trained to be like that.
Who actually wants to have it all is corporate America. They want people to consume their stuff, but not pay anyone to produce it. This idiocy has cult support throughout government and society.
The “rosy” part (my guess) is that all these people would be fine or well-off if they didn’t just “want it all”. The fix would be technically easy, but the problem isn’t particularly true.
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The people on minimum wage? No, they wouldn’t be, but I don’t think they ever were. They maybe rented a basement apartment and eked out barely enough to survive; but no savings, no health insurance, no ability to handle job loss. If they had a family, they were likely getting government financial help.
Maybe one minimum-wage job should be enough to comfortably raise a family. But despite the living-wage campaigns appearing to enjoy broad support, I just don’t see society as currently very committed to actually getting there. Passing those laws in the USA won’t help the workers in places like China and Bangladesh that make most of the stuff sold in America; and as long as these wage laws have carve-outs for prison labor, even buying “made in USA” stuff could be sketchy.
“Want it all”, by the way, was in scare-quotes for a reason. It’s meant to semi-facetiously represent the hardcore-capitalist view on what the workers want.
That’s what everyone wants, right? We often go into the store and buy the cheapest thing. Partially because we expect the extra money spent on “premium” items is just gonna line the pockets of the executives—there’s not really any good way for us to know, is there? Even if there’s a once-reputable product in the category of thing I’m buying, I have to wonder: is it still good, do they license out the brand to the highest bidder now, or did they sell outright to some private equity firm?
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Regarding low birth rates, blaming it on low wages is extremely silly. The US fertility rate is 1.7, just behind France (1.8), tied with Sweden and Denmark, and ahead of all the other first-world nations. In the US and all other countries, fertility rate within the population is inversely related to wage. A woman making $250k as a lawyer has, on average, fewer children than a woman making minimum wage frying burgers.
The home ownership rate in the US is 65.6%. It was lower than that for the entirety of the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. It is down slightly from its 2005 peak of 69.2%, though.
You’re correct that post-WW2 blue collar workers could command a good wage. That’s *because it was post World War Two”! The war decimated the population of working-age men while simultaneously crippling the production capacity and infrastructure of most of Europe and Asia. This created a massive demand for blue-collar labor paired with a shortage of that very same labor. Wages rose; basic supply and demand. Once the rest of the world got back up to speed, the generation that had grown up expecting factory jobs to be cash cows got a rude awakening.
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“Regarding low birth rates, blaming it on low wages is extremely silly.”
I guess it was silly for those young adults interviewed when they said they lacked the income to justify bringing another life into this world. Better that they be irresponsible and have children they can house or feed?
Point being that rhetoric from the conservatives complaining about youngsters not buying houses and having children was all bullshit ignorant ranting. These same folk tell children that money does not grow on trees but when those children become employable they are not paid like an employee, they are treated like slaves.
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Yeah, how dare people be born in areas where they face housing and rental prices that have gone up 10x while wages have gone up 1.1x
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The minimum wage was/still is a concept about paying even the lowest-end workers enough money to afford the necessities of life and still have some money left over for savings and maybe a little luxury spending here and there. The whole point of the minimum wage was to lift people out of extreme poverty. Don’t blame that concept for the greed of corporations—or the ignorance, cowardice, and intransigence of politicians in the face (or the pockets) of corporate greed.
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Or, hear me out, maybe there’s another set of explanations.
People live in expensive areas because that’s where the jobs that pay the best are. Silicon Valley for the programmers. Wall Street for the finance analysts. Out of sheer demand, costs of housing and rent start to skyrocket. Hell, if you’re someone who lives in a rural place, the odds are you’re going to move to the city if you want a shot at a higher paying job.
And the odds are good that these people are going to live alone. Or do you think the bulk of these younger workers already have family units of their own? Chances are, they’re not dating. If you can’t afford a life on your own you sure as hell are not affording a life with a partner, never mind offspring.
I’m not going to argue that millennials and Gen Zs today don’t have dubious spending habits. But let’s be realistic here. Costs have absolutely outpaced what even non-minimum wage jobs pay these days. What these kids are saving on entertainment is not going to be remotely enough for them to pay on life milestones like home ownership. It’s not a stretch for them to think “If I can’t afford a home, a spouse, why the fuck would I not spend a little to make myself feel a little less shitty?”
Sure, minimum wage jobs are supposed to be temporary… in theory. The problem is that there’s always going to be demand for those. There’s always going to be vacancies. The same cannot be said for highly sought-after jobs, whether it’s due to the money involved or hiring booms. Just look at the situation with mass layoffs in tech after the pandemic years. It’s not a surprise so many people are stuck in miserable gig work.
Society and government haven’t really caught up, sure. What they haven’t caught up is that screaming at graduates and young workers to do more with less will only work up to a point. The system we currently have is simply not sustainable, no matter where you are in the world. It doesn’t matter whether it’s “quiet quitting” and “doomspending” in the US, or “lying flat” and mass deflation in China. The younger generations don’t have anything to look forward to.
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I have no problem paying higher minimum wages but earn some skills first. Does a Electrician make minimum wage as a journeyman no because him/her have skills.
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Grammar sure as hell isn’t an important skill to you, apparently. But let’s do a little deconstruction of what you mean when you say you want to pay for skills… because how many of those skills are actually being passed onto the next generation? How much investment do you think is going to be put into training new electricians, technicians, plumbers and so on?
It’s not even that these are blue-collar work that Gen Z’s parents and their parents have shunned; it’s that to get into these industries, you need someone to get you in. There’s a reason why a lot of these technical jobs are family businesses. You’re not getting in without someone’s recommendation.
And even with these specialist skills, it doesn’t mean people get paid more. It means that people demand more value add for the same amount of money. It leads to another paper chase of qualifications in the same way that companies demand a Master’s degree for entry level jobs.
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Just so you know, the minimum wage in New York State is $15 ($16 in NYC, Long Island, and Westchester County) and increases every year, adjusting to inflation. That’s how it should be, IMHO. Source: https://dol.ny.gov/minimum-wage-0
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” minimum wage in New York State is $15 ($16 in NYC, Long Island, and Westchester County) and increases every year, adjusting to inflation.”
This is better than many other locales, but can a person live in nyc on 16 per hour?
$15 BROADBAND is an insult to the Poor — it should be totally free
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$15 for 25 mbps is an insult anywhere.
No, no, no. It’s Big Tech that’s so evil, remember?
You can certainly invent a “right to cheap broadband”. What I don’t see is where ISPs’ obligation to pay for it comes from. If the government wants a welfare program, that’s what tax dollars are for.
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“You can certainly invent a “right to cheap broadband”.”
Or one could look at it from a different perspective. For example, a business type might want employees to help run the day to day activities but how would that happen if all potential applicants were unable to use the most awesome website you had designed for their use?
Internet should be a utility. There is no argument for it not being so at this point in history.
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Yeah, the problem is that some people still think of internet as a luxury, whereas in the modern world it’s as necessary as electricity, water or sewage. You can do without it and you can provide your own, but you’ll be at a general disadvantage and you have little hope if you’re in an urban area.
Generally speaking, you can’t compete in the modern job market, financial market or various other markets if you’re not online, so a minimum should be provided.
Republicans don’t understand btoadband, and many of them still think of “the Bangles” or “Bananarama” when they hear the term.