Gov. Andrew Cuomo discusses his rural broadband initiative in New York.

Despite repeated assurances that 98% of New Yorkers now have access to high-speed internet, rural New Yorkers from the state’s border with Massachusetts to farm country outside of Niagara Falls don’t believe it. Now New York’s Comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, is auditing the half-billion dollar program to determine where the money went and where broadband service is now available.

A source told WGRZ-TV in Buffalo that an audit of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s “Broadband for All” program was initiated by the Comptroller’s office back in March 2020 after rural residents and the lawmakers that represent them began complaining the program never delivered on its commitments. WGRZ Reporter Nate Benson notes that what may have started as a routine audit may now be under additional scrutiny because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many New Yorkers online for work and learning from home.

The broadband program, introduced with great fanfare by the governor in 2015, promised that every New Yorker that wanted high speed internet (at least 25 Mbps in rural areas, 100 Mbps in urban communities) would have access by the end of 2018. The governor claimed the state earmarked $500 million — mostly proceeds from legal settlements with large New York City banks accused of criminal activity surrounding the Great Recession — towards the program, with dollar for dollar matching from companies awarded grants to expand internet access in specific areas.

Benson noted that publicly available data on the N.Y. Broadband Program Office website found a significant shortfall in private investment dollars, with only four out of 53 internet service providers awarded grants matching or exceeding the amounts they received from the state broadband fund. In short, they accepted generous subsidies without being equally generous with their own money.

DiNapoli

The program used a reverse auction approach to award state broadband funding. Phone, cable, and wireless providers bid to serve one or more of the 256,000 “census blocks” the state identified as lacking access to high-speed internet. Most companies chose the most densely populated census blocks next to their existing service areas, assuring higher profits while the state paid a significant amount of the construction costs. In the end, 76,000 census blocks in very rural, sparsely populated areas least likely to get broadband service attracted no bids at all. To achieve the state’s vaunted “98% served,” officials signed a contract with a satellite internet provider to service the remaining 30% of rural New Yorkers left behind, despite the fact satellite internet providers had a reputation for not meeting subscriber expectations and rarely guaranteed consistent minimum broadband speeds of 25 Mbps. Hughes Satellite provides the service, but our readers using the service warn it comes with a stingy data cap inadequate for today’s average household usage. Speeds are wildly inconsistent as well, often way below 25 Mbps.

Even with satellite internet as an option, New Yorkers continue to tell Stop the Cap! they are still without access, including satellite, even in communities just a few miles outside of major cities like Albany, the state capital. The true scope of the problem became apparent last spring as the coronavirus pandemic emerged, forcing employers to send workers home and schools switched to online learning.

Westerlo, N.Y.

The Berne Knox Westerlo School District, located in the hill towns of Albany County, quickly realized there was a wide gap between the state’s “98% covered” claim and reality.

“We had about 28-30% of our student population without internet access or with very poor internet access.” Superintendent Dr. Timothy Mundell told WRGB News. The district tried stop-gap measures like parking Wi-Fi enabled school buses around the district and handing out Wi-Fi hotspot devices, which proved to work unevenly. Mundell says the only real solution to this problem is ubiquitous fiber to the home internet access, and that is a long way off.

“It concerns me because every day we’re without, my students have the potential of falling behind their peers down in the suburbs and the urban areas,” Mundell said. “So this is a real equity issue for us and we want to make sure rural areas get served.”

Two Republican lawmakers from Western New York also introduced a bill this year to repeal a 2019 state tax on optical fiber cable projects. Senators George Borrello and Pam Helming believe the tax will discourage fiber optic buildouts, especially in higher cost rural areas.

“The reality is that broadband is no longer a luxury this is a basic infrastructure need just like water sewer electric and roads, and without it we’re not going to be able to expand.” Sen. Borrello said.

Dundee, N.Y.

But the biggest proponent of the law’s repeal, Verizon Communications, is also one of the telecommunications companies showing the least interest in expanding its fiber internet service in rural New York. Verizon is fighting the tax so it can save money on expanding its mobile 4G and 5G wireless networks, which are connected with fiber optic cables, not because it wants to expand FiOS fiber to the home service.

Meanwhile, New Yorkers without broadband remain stuck.

“It’s all a lot of empty promises with no sign of service,” Katy tells Stop the Cap! from her home near Dundee, in the Finger Lakes region of the state. “I’ve lived here since the days when the only phone line you could get was a party line shared with four other homes and I still have my rotary dial phone New York Telephone installed in 1965. These companies don’t want me to forget I am living in the past.”

Katy lives about 500 feet from the nearest address able to subscribe to Charter Spectrum and was quoted $9,000 to extend cable to her home, set far back from the main road. Verizon has never offered DSL in her neighborhood, because she is located too far away from the central office. Her property is set in a small forest, so satellite internet is not a possibility either.

“I can watch two channels over the air from Syracuse with my outdoor antenna, but that is all. I guess I prefer reading anyway,” she tells us.

WGRZ in Buffalo reports the New York State’s Comptroller’s Office is auditing Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Broadband for All program, which guaranteed 98% of New Yorkers high-speed internet. (3:06)

Pai’s parting gift

Fearing the potential of Joe Biden replacing Donald Trump as president in next month’s election, Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai will ram through a final vote to kill net neutrality while Republicans still have a majority on the Commission.

At the final commissioners’ meeting on Oct. 27, just days before the U.S. election, Pai intends to take up net neutrality once again, primarily to deal with a demand by the D.C. Court of Appeals to address outstanding issues that came up when Republicans rescinded net neutrality rules that were put in place by the FCC under the Obama Administration. To drive the final stake into the heart of a free and open internet, Pai plans to quickly dismiss three issues of concern to the Court:

• how net neutrality impacts public safety;
• if it affected how the FCC deals with pole attachment regulation;
• if it hurts the FCC Lifeline program’s ability to offer broadband to low-income Americans.

In Pai’s view, these are basically non-issues of concern and he intends to bring the matter before the Commission for a widely predicted party-line vote affirming the death of net neutrality policies under the Trump Administration.

Pai took to Medium.com to write a smug and condescending editorial about why the pro-corporate deregulation policies he and his Republican colleagues have supported over the last four years have made American broadband great again. He called net neutrality supporters a bunch of “Washington politicians, far-left special-interest groups, Hollywood stars, and Silicon Valley tech giants.” He blasted the media for “scaring the American people” about what would happen after Trump’s FCC killed the open internet order. He also claimed defeating net neutrality would lead to a renaissance of new investment in broadband.

In fact, many broadband providers elected to curtail investment even before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. Charter, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon have all reduced investment in residential wired broadband services, in part because of a lack of competitive marketplace. Pai, a former lawyer for Verizon, has spent the last four years making life very comfortable for the country’s largest internet service providers. He eliminated mandated competition in set-top boxes, did nothing to stop data caps, eliminated net neutrality protections, and helped enact new rules allowing mobile providers to place future cell towers and other equipment in places that have never been acceptable before.

Most broadband providers today only compete on price for new customers. Once those promotions expire, customers face punishing bills. Internet pricing drew renewed scrutiny during the early days of the pandemic when schools and employers moved to at-home study and work. Many found internet pricing of $70+ a month unaffordable, while other suburban and exurban employees discovered they could not get suitably fast internet service at any price.

Pai’s tenure as chairman has been four years of smug arrogance and a complete disinterest in the input of consumers. Millions have told the FCC to leave net neutrality policies in place. Pai and his Republican colleagues ignored them. The Republican commissioners have delivered speeches at some of the most partisan right-wing groups imaginable, but won’t respond to ordinary Americans looking for actual evidence of competition and consumer protection. For much of this year, Pai’s two Republican colleagues have spent much of their time on Twitter pursuing their own agendas. Commissioner O’Rielly has made closing down low power community pirate radio stations his obsession. At least that is covered under the FCC’s mandate. Commissioner Carr has spent his time on Twitter complaining about people being mean to President Trump on social media, his obsession with China and freedom of speech, and his suspicions about the World Health Organization (WHO).

This final attempt to destroy net neutrality just before the election is the ultimate insult, one that Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel fumed about:

“This is crazy. The internet should be open and available for all. That’s what net neutrality is about. It’s why people from across this country rose up to voice their frustration and anger with the Federal Communications Commission when it decided to ignore their wishes and roll back net neutrality. Now the courts have asked us for a do-over. But instead of taking this opportunity to right what this agency got wrong, we are going to double down on our mistake.”

“The FCC is going to make it easier for broadband companies to block websites, slow speeds, and dictate what we can do and where we can go online. It’s insane that this is happening now, during a pandemic when we rely on internet access for so much of day-to-day life. It’s also cruel that this is our priority when this crisis has exposed just how vast our digital divide is and how much more work we have to do for broadband to reach 100% of us—no matter who we are or where we live.”

Frontier is the dominant phone company in West Virginia.

The West Virginia Public Service Commission has ordered Frontier Communications to make significant improvements in its aging copper wire telephone network after a comprehensive investigation found the company’s landline phone service and broadband to be lacking.

The order comes two years after the state began investigating the phone company and six months after a service audit was completed. In the last year, 1,342 complaints about poor service were filed with the state’s Public Service Commission.

“Frontier customers in this state remain plagued with service problems even as the customer base – and the corresponding revenue – declines. The Focused Management Audit was designed to find the underlying service quality problems, and possible solutions, in the hopes of placing Frontier on a better path,” the report concluded.

Over the past two years, Frontier gradually implemented some of the recommendations made by the state, particularly a more robust tree-trimming program to pre-emptively reduce tree-related outages and an automated system that can detect service issues and outages before customers call to complain. But Frontier’s larger problem is its lack of investment in network upgrades, particularly related to replacing old copper wire infrastructure with fiber optics. The study identified the 25 worst exchanges in the state most plagued by service outages and complaints and demanded that Frontier rehabilitate or upgrade those areas to improve service. But the company has refused the Commission’s request to deploy fiber optic connections to every cross-box in the state, which connects Frontier’s network to neighborhood phone lines. Such an upgrade would dramatically reduce Frontier’s reliance on copper wiring and improve phone and internet service.

Frontier rejected the idea as “unfeasible,” claiming it would cost $100 million to complete fiber connections to each of Frontier’s 3,255 existing cross box locations. If the company moved to digital phone service across those fiber lines, the cost would rise to $200 million, according to Frontier, adding it would have no choice but to pass these costs onto customers in the state.

“Given the exorbitant expense associated with such a comprehensive endeavor, the cost of voice service would consequently increase to unsustainable levels,” the company claimed.

Yet earlier this spring, at the height of the pandemic and after declaring bankruptcy, Frontier paid out $38 million in retention bonuses to its top executives, urging the same people who presided over the company as it went bankrupt to remain on the payroll at least until the bankruptcy was discharged.

The state was given an early warning about Frontier’s decreasing performance in July 2019 after an auditing firm found the company financially troubled and had cut back dramatically on ongoing maintenance spending. The auditor also reported Frontier was likely losing customers fast and would soon feel the financial pressure of lost revenue. Just as bad, the auditor reported Frontier’s ability to stay ahead of its service problems could be compromised further by the likely retirement of more than half of the company’s most experienced service technicians in the next five years.

The auditor correctly predicted Frontier’s financial health. The company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April and is reorganizing. The company claims it will exit bankruptcy in much better financial shape, with much of its debt discharged or renegotiated by creditors. In turn, Frontier has promised to boost investment in network fiber upgrades, but has not been specific about what areas it will target. A hearing to discuss some of these matters is scheduled for Oct. 28.

Even with Frontier’s imminent exit from bankruptcy, West Virginia officials remain concerned about the phone company’s commitments and whether the new management will continue to honor earlier agreements with state officials.

Barr

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump met with nine Republican attorneys general on Wednesday to discuss the fate of a legal immunity for internet companies after the Justice Department unveiled a legislative proposal aimed at reforming the same law.

Trump met with state attorneys general from Texas, Arizona, Utah, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Missouri and West Virginia.

The White House said they discussed how the attorneys general can utilize existing legal recourses at the state level – in an effort to weaken the law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet companies from liability over content posted by users.

After the meeting, Trump told reporters he expects to come to a conclusion on the issue of technology platforms within a short period. It was not immediately clear what conclusion he was referring to.

He also said his administration is watching the performance of tech platforms in the run-up to the Nov. 3 presidential election.

“In recent years, a small group of powerful technology platforms have tightened their grip over commerce and communications in America,” Trump said. “Every year countless Americans are banned, blacklisted and silenced through arbitrary or malicious enforcement of ever-shifting rules,” he added.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Justice Department unveiled a legislative proposal that seeks to reform Section 230. It followed through on Trump’s bid earlier this year to crack down on tech giants after Twitter Inc placed warning labels on Trump tweets, saying they have included potentially misleading information about mail-in voting.

The Justice Department’s bill would need congressional approval and is not likely to see action until next year at the earliest. There are several pieces of legislation doing the rounds in Congress that seek to curb the same immunity. It was not immediately clear whether the Justice Department will support any single piece of legislation that has already been proposed.

Any such bill would have to win the support of the Republicans who control the Senate and the Democrats who control the House of Representatives in order to become law. Such legislation’s future would be further complicated if the Democrats regain control of the Senate or win the White House.

The Justice Department proposal primarily states that when internet companies “willfully distribute illegal material or moderate content in bad faith, Section 230 should not shield them from the consequences of their actions.”

It proposes a series of reforms to ensure internet companies are transparent about their decisions when removing content and when they should be held responsible for speech they modify. It also revises existing definitions of Section 230 with more concrete language that offers more guidance to users and courts.

It also incentivizes online platforms to address illicit content and pushes for more clarity on federal civil enforcement actions.

Attorney General William Barr said in a statement the administration was urging “Congress to make these necessary reforms to Section 230 and begin to hold online platforms accountable both when they unlawfully censor speech and when they knowingly facilitate egregious criminal activity online.”

In June, the Justice Department proposed that Congress take up legislation to curb this immunity. This was after Trump in May signed an executive order that seeks new regulatory oversight of tech firms’ content moderation decisions and backed legislation to scrap or weaken Section 230.

Trump in May also directed the Commerce Department to file a petition asking the Federal Communications Commission to limit protections under Section 230. The petition is still pending.

The Internet Association – a group representing major internet companies including Facebook, Amazon.com, and Google, said the Justice Department’s proposal would severely limit people’s ability to express themselves and have a safe experience online.

The group’s deputy general counsel, Elizabeth Banker, said moderation efforts that remove misinformation, platform manipulation and cyberbullying would all result in lawsuits under this proposal.

Reporting by David Shepardson and Nandita Bose in Washington; Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, Diane Bartz and Eric Beech in Washington and Ayanti Bera in Bengaluru; editing by Patrick Graham, Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis

Simington

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump, pressing for new social media regulations, plans to nominate a senior administration official to be a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the White House said on Tuesday.

The nomination of Nathan Simington, a senior adviser at the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), comes after the White House abruptly announced in early August it was withdrawing the nomination of Republican FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly to serve another term.

Trump issued an executive order in May requiring the NTIA to petition the FCC asking the commission to impose new regulations on social media moderation practices after Twitter Inc warned readers to fact-check his posts about unsubstantiated allegations of fraud in mail-in voting.

Simington helped draft the May executive order, the Washington Post reported.

By contrast, O’Rielly expressed skepticism about whether the FCC had authority to issue new regulations covering social media companies. In July, he said the “the First Amendment protects us from limits on speech imposed by the government – not private actors – and we should all reject demands, in the name of the First Amendment, for private actors to curate or publish speech in a certain way.”

O’Rielly, who has not commented on the White House withdrawal of his name, congratulated Simington Tuesday in a Twitter post on his nomination “and offer best wishes for a smooth confirmation process and successful term.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai opened NTIA’s petition to public comment. The comment period expires this week. He has declined to comment on its merits.

A group representing major internet companies including Facebook Inc and Amazon.com Inc urged the FCC to reject the petition, saying the effort “is misguided, lacks grounding in law, and poses serious public policy concerns.”

NTIA asked the FCC to limit protections for social media companies under Section 230, a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that shields social media companies from liability for content posted by their users and allows them to remove lawful but objectionable posts.

Reporting by David Shepardson and Eric Beech; Editing by Peter Cooney and Christopher Cushing