“Complete farce”: State lawmaker says US threatened to block broadband funding.
    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      6 days ago

      That $15 plan was supposed to not have a data cap (for presidential plans, hence broadband)

    • who@feddit.orgOPEnglish
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      6 days ago

      That’s a mobile phone plan with 5GB/month of data, not a broadband internet service in any reasonable sense.

  • greenfire@lemmings.worldEnglish
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    6 days ago

    …in new guidance from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the agency said it prohibits states “from explicitly or implicitly setting the LCSO [low-cost service option] rate a subgrantee must offer.” NTIA officials also made it clear that, even if California obtained the funding, ISPs could exempt themselves from the proposed low-cost broadband bill simply by applying for BEAD funding, Boerner told us. She said the NTIA’s new guidance is a “complete farce,” since ISPs are getting public money to build infrastructure and won’t have to commit to offering low-income plans at specific rates.

    ”All they would have to do to get exempted from AB 353 [the $15 broadband bill] would be to apply to the BEAD program," she said. “Doesn’t matter if their application was valid, appropriate, granted, or they got public money at the end of the day and built the projects—the mere application for the BEAD program would exempt them from 353, if it didn’t jeopardize from $1.86 billion to begin with. And that was a tradeoff I was unwilling to make.”

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      How many “public finding for broadband rollout” rug pulls is that, now? Five? Six?

  • WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
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    6 days ago

    While Trump is obviously the prime mover of the ludicrously obvious wholesale destruction of the US, more and more I don’t really blame him. At heart, he’s really just a thin-skinned ball of insecurity with the emotional development of a toddler driven by primal instincts to attack everything that he considers a threat, which is pretty much anything and everything.

    I think more all the time that the lion’s share of the blame for all of this is more legitimately placed on the thousands and thousands of people who all have access to authority with which they could stand up to him, and who are just too craven and cowardly (or complicit) to actually do it.