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>The fact these companies have received significant subsidies and have such little to show for it gives more reason to have regulations in place such as this. No regulations only work if companies aren't greedy profit-first motivated entities. Regulations are important for shaping and limiting the inherit greed that humanity as a collective has.
This is a really broad near-truism that doesn't engage with any of the particulars. The point is that the FCC is requiring you to practice discrimination/affirmative action with regards to your build-out (and other) decisions. You have to figure out where the minorities are and make a point of building out to them, and make less money as a result (how much less? they won't tell you. better hope you guess right). Let's say this law didn't exist and you were doing just that, but in favor of white people, contrary your profit interests. That would be a slam dunk racial discrimination case. But that's exactly what the FCC is requiring here, just with good feelings attached because it's in favor of minorities. This is affirmative action, which the Supreme Court has recently said is no longer legal in the United States.
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.
From the first paragraph of the linked article to this post:
> Groups like the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) have released studies on cities like Cleveland and Detroit, documenting how this discrimination lines up with 30s “redlining” efforts.
I am quite curious as to why TechDirt was able to find these, but a commission wasn't.
> Perhaps you're not familiar with the concept of disparate impact. And please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304973 for how this is not like other disparate impact standards in American law.
I am no legal scholar, but I have a vague idea of disparate impact. As far as I'm aware, you're correct. There really isn't a disparate impact standard for any private business. It's mostly for government entities (the one I'm mostly familiar with the is the Civil Rights Act and government election rules).
> The point is that the FCC is requiring you to practice discrimination/affirmative action with regards to your build out decisions. You have to figure out where the minorities are and build out to them, and make less money as a result (how much less? they won't tell you. better hope you guess right).
It's quite easy to find where the minorities are. The Census data is quite accessible. It like is not wholly complete given many minorities lack of trust of government officials, but it will give one a strong idea of where they reside.
I do agree with you that the FCC is reaching a bit here. I would be perfectly fine with strong requirements to any of the $56 billion subsidy dollars allocated have strong requirements about disparate impacts and affirmative action. And that applying it to ALL business decisions is almost certainly an overreach. But I do think that something needs to be done about the unintended consequences of profit-before-all-else behavior. And this likely is not it. I have a strong feeling given this current Supreme Courts hate of stare decisis, this decision may not live much longer.
I used to work for a mortgage company, disparate impact applied to us, and we had systems in place to help us study it.
Nothing I said implies it's hard. The problem is that the FCC is requiring you to base your decisions on race, ethnicity, and religion.
Pretending otherwise is tilting at windmills.
The FCC already operates the Affordability Connectivity Program, which subsidizes internet access for poorer households: if they want those households to have gigabit FTTH, they just need to open the taps further on that program.
The truth is probably more likely that households below 200% of the poverty wage won't choose to spend money on upgrading from 50Mb/s to 1Gb/s when they can spend that on food or improved housing or whatever.
I think telecom got 100 billion from Biden’s stimulus package. I agree it’s too much but shouldn’t the answer be to just not give billions to the telecom industry?
But there should have been strong requirements for the money they received. But the Biden administration was just printing money to keep our society from imploding at the time.