NCTA's Powell Warns of Big Risks From US Broadband Spending
With "astounding" amounts of money being allocated for subsidization of broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas, a big challenge for agencies and providers is ensuring the funding isn't wasted, NCTA President Michael Powell said at a Media Institute talk (password required) Tuesday. He said there's a sizable implantation risk stemming from federal oversight centering on Commerce and the NTIA rather than the FCC, and oversight expertise is a challenge both for Commerce and the industry. Compounding that is the funding being focused on state grants rather than federal programs, he said.
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Without sufficient transparency, governments and private partners will be embarrassed four years from now, having "waste[d] this once-in-a-century opportunity," Powell said.
Those implementation risks include a lack of rigor in ensuring money goes to unserved areas, which typically aren't lucrative for operators, with the result being redundancy and overbuilding in more-lucrative areas while money is sapped from areas needing support most, Powell said. There's also danger of investing in inexperienced network builders, he said, citing numerous companies that are forming to get in on the broadband infrastructure market. He warned of the potential of policymakers "going off topic." "This isn't a time to introduce other broadband policies and experiments" that could disincentivize carriers from participating, he said.
Revisiting net neutrality by the FCC would be "a massive distraction" from more pressing issues of broadband infrastructure and curtailing the excessive power in the hands of Big Tech, Powell said. He said there has been no evidence since the 2017 rollback of the FCC's net neutrality rules of any patterns or practices of ISPs blocking or interfering with content. "The real gatekeepers" in the internet ecosystem are Big Tech edge providers, Powell said. Due to their "OPEC-like control over a lot of data that shapes our lives," there can't be an intellectually honest conversation about blocking and throttling that ignores Big Tech, he said.
If the FCC does again take up net neutrality rules, they will "be dead before they're born" because there's no political consensus and any such rules would die with the next party control shift at the commission, he said. A stable compromise crafted by Congress doesn't seem in the cards anytime soon due to partisanship and a focus on the mid-term elections, he said. But congressional action on social media platforms seems inevitable, he said.
The FCC "has been willing to listen" to cable industry requests about modernizing rules, Powell said, citing its 2019 cable local franchise authority. Asked about the long-dormant proceeding that would reclassify some types of over-the-top services as MVPDs, Powell said the law doesn't seem to allow it. Some broadcasters want to see it resurrected (see 2204220049), but there hasn't been a lot of chatter about the idea, he said.
Media Institute President Richard Kaplar said his organization hopes to have an in-person event in June.