Lifeline Panelists Agree on Covering Broadband, Shifting Eligibility Verification
Lifeline USF should subsidize broadband, and eligibility verification should shift from service providers to a neutral third party or parties, speakers said on a panel Wednesday organized by the Internet Innovation Alliance. Most IIA panelists also supported coordinating Lifeline enrollment with other federal-assistance programs overseen by states. Moderator and IIA co-Chairman Rick Boucher pressed speakers for as much consensus as possible, but there were differences over some concepts and proposals, including to give Lifeline users vouchers. The panelists generally supported establishing a Lifeline “budget” instead of a cap, but declined to discuss specific figures.
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Florida Public Service Commissioner Ronald Brise said Lifeline “absolutely” should subsidize broadband service for low-income consumers. “Broadband is no longer a luxury, it’s an item of necessity.” Nicol Turner-Lee, vice president at the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council; Dottie Rosenbaum, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy; and Randolph May, president of the Free State Foundation, all supported extending Lifeline to broadband. “I want it to remain a safety net and not become something else,” May said.
All four panelists agreed the FCC should shift responsibility for verifying consumer eligibility from participating telecom carriers to a neutral third party or parties. “We want to get the carriers out of the way and get to the people,” Turner-Lee said. May suggested it wasn’t all bad to give carriers some incentive to increase Lifeline subscribership, but Boucher declared a consensus had been achieved.
Boucher plugged a proposal from FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. He backed a “coordinated enrollment” program that would sign consumers up for Lifeline by harnessing the power of state agencies already overseeing other federal efforts to assist low-income consumers, including food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) and the school lunch program. He said many states have boosted voter registration by coordinating it with driver’s license applications and renewals.
Brise said Florida is coordinating Lifeline enrollment through programs such as SNAP and Medicaid. Rosenbaum said coordinated enrollment makes sense but shouldn’t be the only way to sign up for Lifeline because some low-income people don’t use the other programs. Turner-Lee said Lifeline coordination efforts should begin with SNAP because it covers the most children and is well established.
But May voiced concerns over coordinating Lifeline with other entitlement programs because the FCC could lose control, subscribership could “creep up” the income ladder, and there's fraud in the food stamp program. He said it would be better if Congress expanded Lifeline and tapped general revenue, but in the meantime, he advocated the FCC take an “incremental approach” with constraints to prevent fraud and control costs, which are ultimately born by consumers through USF fees passed on by carriers. Others pushed back. Rosenbaum disputed that SNAP was rife with fraud; Brise said there's no conflict between providing a safety net and a helping hand; and Turner-Lee disputed the notion that Lifeline is an entitlement or a safety net. “It’s a right,” she said. “We need to change the language.”
Boucher asked about giving consumers Lifeline vouchers. Turner-Lee suggested the FCC give eligible consumers a Lifeline benefit card and make the sign-up process “seamless and easy.” Rosenbaum said a benefit card would facilitate Lifeline subscribers shopping among providers. But May said the concern was such benefits could invite “trafficking” and fraud, which the FCC had managed to restrain in recent years. Brise said benefit cards made sense conceptually but said portable benefits could become a tradable “commodity.”
Panelists said there should be some sort of budgetary control but shied away from advocating a funding cap for Lifeline, which costs about $1.6 billion annually (it was over $2 billion before the FCC cracked down on eligibility abuse). Brise suggested the FCC could devise a budget or “rational ceiling" by comparing Lifeline’s subscribership of about 12 million households to the 22 million in the food stamps program, and then designing support to achieve that higher level over time. Rosenbaum supported a budget but not a cap and said it could take five to 10 years to boost subscribership to desired levels. Turner-Lee said the FCC and stakeholders need to first get a better grasp on the “mechanics” of a new broadband-oriented Lifeline. “I don’t think we yet need to talk about a hard cap because we don’t yet have a hard program,” Turner-Lee said.
May said cost issues need to be addressed because otherwise the hopes for boosting low-income consumer broadband adoption were “fairy tales.” He said Lifeline’s current $9.25 monthly subscriber benefit isn't enough to pay for broadband service, so advocates need to be “forthright” about “where they want to go, how far, how fast." Neither May nor Rosenbaum supported mandatory co-payments. May opposed a hard cap because it could deny support to eligible consumers in economic downturns, but he said the FCC should define the program’s “parameters and relate them to cost.” Without effective oversight and controls, the program could “go haywire” and generate costs and abuses that provoke a backlash, he said.
Turner-Lee said there wasn't much support in the record for raising the current $9.25/month benefit for Lifeline subscribers, though it was possible it could be increased a couple of dollars a month. She said inducing more industry players to compete for Lifeline subscribers could help drive down costs.