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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

If broadband was a real marketplace, companies could step in and service areas ignored by Big Telecom even if they might be slightly less profitable than rich areas. But as I'm quite sure everyone here knows, it's not.

"Here in reality, U.S. broadband is […] a failed market, dominated by a handful of politically powerful regional mono/duopolies, who hoover up untold billions in taxpayer subsidies for networks they routinely fail to fully deploy. All protected by layers upon layers of state and federal corruption policymakers like to pretend doesn’t exist."

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Even if you are right, the solution is not to mandate racial discrimination.

As for the subsidies, the way they work is, roughly, the government offers you a certain amount of money to build an area, and if you don't, they either give you an extension or fine you or take the money back or some mixture of the three. There's also been reverse auction type approaches, where the government takes bids for people to build out to an area and awards the subsidy to the lowest bidder. It's not like the government just cuts AT&T a $10 billion check and says go forth and build broadband where you see fit. If you have a problem with how the subsidies work, then redesign them.

FWIW, the article doesn't mention race at all, and the paper you linked to mentions race as one of several factors, the leading factor apparently being income level.

>the paper you linked to mentions race as one of several factors, the leading factor apparently being income level

That's not a "paper", it's the final rule that the FCC adopted. And it applies to race, ethnicity, religion, and income level equally.

Requiring that a utility provide equal service to everyone within a reasonable standard of feasibility is not racial discrimination.

>Requiring that a utility provide equal service to everyone within a reasonable standard of feasibility is not racial discrimination.

That's right, but that's not what the rule says. The rule says that if your business decision, totally unbeknownst to you, has a disparate impact on a particular racial/ethnic/religious/income group, then you're in violation.

> totally unbeknownst to you

If you have enough data to reliably identify your most profitable neighborhoods, I guarantee that data tells you something about their demographics. Any ignorance of disparate impacts, whether on racial lines or wealth or anything else, is willful.

Mandating every business decision is made with a racialized lens is a path to rebuilding systemic racism, not a means to end it.

The FCC rule mentions several attributes, race being only one:

> The rules define “digital discrimination of access” as “Policies or practices, not justified by genuine issues of technical or economic feasibility, that (1) differentially impact consumers’ access to broadband internet access service based on their income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion or national origin, or (2) are intended to have such differential impact.” As the law requires, the FCC will consider arguments that legitimate business impediments preclude equal access to broadband service in particular communities.

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-398477A1.txt

I doubt people would have the same reaction if they realized it was primarily about income and not race. But everyone loves to talk about race.

That's not how this works. It's not about income any more than it is about race. Racial disparate impact is enough for the FCC to fine you to oblivion. The fact that it's listed after "income" does not change that.

First, let's be real here: it's not a mandate that every business decision be made with a racialized lens. It's a mandate that business decisions consider their potential impact on systemically disenfranchised groups that we no longer wish to have systemically disenfranchised.

I think your claim that this is a path to rebuilding systemic racism and not a means to end it is a misunderstanding of the "systemic" aspect of systemic racism. Because it is systemic, the system itself will naturally reinforce the impact of the racism unless significant counter forces are applied against it.

The fact that a business making decisions to deploy resources geographically to maximize revenue (for services that ought to have nothing to do with race) might reasonably worry that they might unintentionally lead to an impact that has a discernible racial bias, is a demonstration of exactly this phenomena.

So no, you're not going to end it by making decisions ignoring systemic disenfranchisement. To end it, you are definitely going to have to be mindful of how the system might have impacts that reflect (and thereby amplify) the bias of the system, not the decision.

If Kroger and political parties can get that information, they can get it too. They probably already have it.

I don't see the problem with this kind of affirmative action, but reasonable people could vote out the US administration that supports this if it's important to them.

There is no reason that a large corporation can't pay for a disparate impact study before prior to decisions.

It sounds a bit to me like they're just trying to get a baseline level of coverage everywhere (none of this 400kbps, 2000ms ping nonsense you see in some poorer neighborhoods), and race is a decent way to gain the political traction necessary to make it happen.

The focus on race seems to be mostly coming from commenters here. The definition of digital discrimination in the rule reads "Policies or practices, not justified by genuine issues of technical or economic feasibility, that (1) differentially impact consumers’ access to broadband internet access service based on their income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion or national origin or (2) are intended to have such differential impact."

Racial discrimination and redlining correlating with poor access to broadband was a factor in the analysis, but they also looked at rural/urban access splits and income disparity related lack of access too.

I haven't read through the whole thing yet, it's very long, but the emphasis seems to be on forcing telecoms to build out access in areas that are historically underserved when the reason is they would make less money (different than 'at a loss') rather than serving an area with existing access that might present better margins.

> The focus on race seems to be mostly coming from commenters here.

The linked article starts by drawing comparisons to redlining in the very first paragraph.

The article uses the comparison, but the actual FCC rule and approach is not entirely race based as multiple commenters seem to be framing it.

I very much doubt that focusing on race will help the more rural areas.

The word "roughly" is doing some heavy lifting here.

There is a long history of telecoms getting subsidies under terms like what you say, failing to do what they are supposed to, not being punished for it (I suspect corruption from regulatory capture), and then pushing for more subsidies for the problem. Admittedly this comes with a certain amount of showy punishments and appropriate prostration of telecom execs. However that amounts to a slap on the wrist, and then business as usual.

Given that this cycle has been going on for decades, there is every reason to believe that this is just another round.

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