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Today's Topics:
1. FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal .. and scrap analysis of
prices (Stephen Loosley)
2. OT: How do you encapsulate the justification of laissez
faire? (Roger Clarke)
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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2025 21:14:33 +0930
From: Stephen Loosley <[email protected]>
To: "link" <[email protected]>
Subject: [LINK] FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal .. and scrap
analysis of prices
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices
FCC goes easy on ISPs
Analysis of broadband affordability deemed "extraneous" by FCC chair.
By Jon Brodkin ? Jul 22, 2025 5:49 AM
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/fcc-to-eliminate-gigabit-speed-goal-and-scrap-analysis-of-broadband-prices/
The Federal Communications Commission is ditching Biden-era standards for
measuring progress toward the goal of universal broadband deployment.
The changes will make it easier for the FCC to give the broadband industry a
passing grade in an annual progress report.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's proposal would give the industry a thumbs-up even
if it falls short of 100 percent deployment, eliminate a long-term goal of
gigabit broadband speeds, and abandon a new effort to track the affordability
of broadband.
Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether
broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all
Americans. If the answer is no, the US law says the FCC must "take immediate
action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to
infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the
telecommunications market."
Generally, Democratic-led commissions have found that the industry isn't doing
enough to make broadband universally available, while Republican-led
commissions have found the opposite. Democratic-led commissions have also
periodically increased the speeds used to determine whether advanced
telecommunications capabilities are widely available, while Republican-led
commissioners have kept the speed standards the same.
No focus on broadband affordability
Carr's proposal, which was released on Thursday and is scheduled for a vote on
August 7, criticized the previous administration's approach. Carr intends to
focus the next FCC inquiry on the statute's "is being deployed" phrase rather
than looking at whether broadband has already been deployed. Carr's proposal
said:
To further realign our section 706 inquiry with the statute's plain language,
we intend to focus our inquiry on whether advanced telecommunications
capability "is being deployed," rather than whether it already has been
deployed, as was the focus of the 2024 Report.
We believe that the prior Report's binary interpretation of the threshold for
issuing a passing or failing grade in the ultimate section 706 finding
effectively read the "reasonable and timely" language out of the statute. That
interpretation seemingly found anything short of 100% was insufficient to
warrant a passing grade and thus disregarded Congress's use of the present
progressive tense in "is being deployed."
Moreover, we believe that assessing the progress at which advanced
telecommunications capability is being deployed would provide far more?and more
helpful?information to Congress and the public than an overly simplistic
inquiry into whether or not 100% of Americans already have access to such
capability.
Carr also doesn't want the FCC to investigate "extraneous" matters such as
whether broadband is cheap enough to be affordable.
"The Commission in the 2024 Report departed from the way that the section 706
inquiry had historically been conducted by for the first time reading several
extraneous universal service criteria into the section 706 statutory inquiry
based upon its interpretation of Congressional intent. We propose to reorient
the section 706 inquiry back to the plain language of the statute and eliminate
this expansion," the Carr proposal says.
A footnote indicating which extraneous material will be removed said the 2024
report "for the first time incorporated the universal service goals of
deployment, adoption, affordability, availability, and equitable access to
broadband throughout the United States as the metrics for conducting the
section 706 inquiry." Carr objected to the use of words like "affordability"
and "adoption" when the 2024 report was released, saying, "those terms appear
nowhere in Section 706."
The Carr FCC's proposal points to a Supreme Court ruling that limited the
ability of federal agencies to interpret ambiguous laws. Given that ruling, "we
believe it is most prudent to strictly adhere to the statutory text," the
proposal said.
The Biden-era FCC didn't get very far in analyzing broadband prices. Former
Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, who led the FCC under Biden, wanted to expand
the commission's use of pricing data. An FCC inquiry in September 2024 sought
comment on how the FCC could add more pricing data to its annual analysis,
noting that the March 2024 report lacked "granular price information,
especially for rural areas, limited the analysis to overall patterns of
affordability."
Scrapping long-term gigabit goal
The most recent Section 706 report, released in March 2024 after a 3?2 vote,
also raised the FCC's Internet speed benchmark to 100Mbps download speeds and
20Mbps upload speeds. The previous benchmark of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps
upstream had been in place for nine years.
Under then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC additionally set a
"long-term speed goal" of 1Gbps download speeds with 500Mbps upload speeds.
Carr's proposal would abolish that long-term goal.
"As part of our return to following the plain language of section 706, we
propose to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,000/500Mbps
established in the 2024 Report," Carr's plan said. "Not only is a long-term
goal not mentioned in section 706, but maintaining such a goal risks skewing
the market by unnecessarily potentially picking technological winners and
losers."
Fiber networks can already meet a 1,000/500Mbps standard, and the Biden
administration generally prioritized fiber when it came to distributing grants
to Internet providers. The Trump administration changed grant-giving procedures
to distribute more funds to non-fiber providers such as Elon Musk's Starlink
satellite network.
Carr's proposal alleged that the 1,000/500Mbps long-term goal would "appear to
violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral
manner," as it "may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as
satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds."
100/20Mbps standard appears to survive
When the 100/20Mbps standard was adopted last year, Carr alleged that "the
100/20Mbps requirement appears to be part and parcel of the Commission's
broader attempt to circumvent the statutory requirement of technological
neutrality." It appears the Carr FCC will nonetheless stick with 100/20Mbps for
measuring availability of fixed broadband. But his plan would seek comment on
that approach, suggesting a possibility that it could be changed.
"We propose to again focus our service availability discussion on fixed
broadband at speeds of 100/20Mbps and seek comment on this proposal," the plan
said.
If any regulatory changes are spurred by Carr's deployment inquiry, they would
likely be to eliminate regulations instead of adding them. Carr has been
pushing a "Delete, Delete, Delete" initiative to eliminate rules that he
considers unnecessary, and his proposal asks for comment on broadband
regulations that could be removed.
"Are there currently any regulatory barriers impeding broadband deployment,
investment, expansion, competition, and technological innovation that the
Commission should consider eliminating?" the call for comment asks.
Jon Brodkin Senior IT Reporter
Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry,
Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs,
court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.
--
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2025 07:46:59 +1000
From: Roger Clarke <[email protected]>
To: link <[email protected]>
Subject: [LINK] OT: How do you encapsulate the justification of
laissez faire?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
"Unfortunately, I think ?No bad person should ever benefit from our
success? is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on"
Nicked from here:
https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-dario-amodei-gulf-state-leaked-memo/
The compulsory accompanying image has a gorgeous background.
In case you can't see the linked content, the image is at:
http://rogerclarke.com/II/Dario-Explains-Need-Gulf-Money-Business-2194823537.jpg
--
Roger Clarke mailto:[email protected]
T: +61 2 6288 6916 http://www.xamax.com.au http://www.rogerclarke.com
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Visiting Professorial Fellow UNSW Law & Justice
Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University
------------------------------
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