Terry often writes about how the plan failed to deliver pretty much everything it promised, and very few folks in telecom policy circles seem particularly bothered by that fact.

U.S. telecom policymakers just keep trudging forward, as if we hadn't already promised to fix this problem several times over, despite the fact none of the 2010 plan's primary goals were actually met:

Goal No. 1: At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second. (Nope)

Goal No. 2: The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation. (not even close).

Goal No. 3: Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose. (the pandemic brutally showcased how this absolutely isn't true. In fact, Techdirt ran an entire conference on the subject)

Goal No. 4: Every American community should have affordable access to at least 1 gigabit per second broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals, and government buildings. (again, COVID showed how far we actually were from this goal)

Goal No. 5: To ensure the safety of the American people, every first responder should have access to a nationwide, wireless, interoperable broadband public safety network. (We did finally start building FirstNet, though it's incomplete and been plagued by delays. Also, remember when Verizon Wireless throttled those California firefighters as they were battling record wildfires and tried to upsell them to more expensive plans?)

Goal No. 6: To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption. (never happened at any consistent scale).

We're now poised to spend another $42 billion on broadband despite not having accurately fixed our inaccurate broadband maps. The FCC also just announced another $1 billion investment into rural broadband, without acknowledging this was a problem that was supposed to be fixed years ago...if the 10 year plan in the Broadband Plan had worked as designed, none of this spending would have been necessary, as these shortcomings would have been resolved...

The failure of the National Broadband Plan is more than a digital divide issue, the plan included provisions for a consumer centric digital privacy mechanism that were discarded with the rest of the plan.


To be clear, our new $42 billion broadband plan absolutely will be helpful in driving needed broadband funds to a lot of areas. But it's fairly clear it was crafted without truly reckoning with the failures of past policies. And it once again doesn't target the real cause of spotty, shitty U.S. broadband: monopolization and corruption. The latter (corruption) is a Sisyphean task to be sure. But tackling U.S. competition shouldn't be this hard. Hundreds of towns, cities, co-ops, and utilities are doing it every day, though lending them a hand was one of the first lobbying casualties in the broadband infrastructure bill (again, corruption).

If U.S. policymakers really want to fix U.S. broadband, it starts with clearly acknowledging and calling out regional monopolization (something neither party has much interest in doing for fear of upsetting politically powerful campaign contributors tethered to our intelligence gathering). It involves shaking off lobbying influence, and ending the 30 year tendency of letting monopolistic giants like AT&T and Comcast literally write state and federal telecom policy. And it most certainly involves actually acknowledging the failures of the past so we don't doom ourselves to repeating them in perpetuity.

In the course of his chronicle, Mr. Elder traces how Calhoun’s thinking continues to influence American society today and shows how academic scholarship has moved ever closer to accepting Calhoun’s once shocking ideas about the role of slavery in American history.

In writings published after his death, Calhoun said more about one particular concession he had begun to consider: a constitutional amendment that would transform the executive branch by giving each region of the country its own president and, thus, its own veto. In such a way, he believed, the U.S. would achieve the true aim of constitutional government: rule not by the numerical majority, which he believed would always result in one group wielding power to the detriment of another, but by the “concurrent majority,” an arrangement that would require the consent of all groups.

That Calhoun had the protection of slaveholders in mind has not stopped his theory from resurfacing in other contexts, as Mr. Elder tells us, from power-sharing proposals in post-apartheid South Africa to the peace process in Northern Ireland. In what Mr. Elder calls the “most fascinating twist,” traces of Calhoun’s arguments have even appeared in proposals for “exactly the opposite of what he wanted”—that is, special protections for racial minorities.

Attempts to make Calhoun fit neatly into our current politics miss the message of this much-needed biography. Calhoun “belongs at the center of the stories we tell about our past,” Mr. Elder writes. Ironically, Calhoun predicted that, if North and South ever split apart over slavery—as they did a decade after his death—future generations would tell a different story of our past, beginning with what he considered a disastrous error: the decision by Jefferson to include the words “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence. Those words, as Lincoln would say, laid a foundation for slavery’s demise and marked the beginning of a country dedicated to principles more noble than we sometimes remember today.

Last year, the Federal Communications Commission estimated that 21.3 million Americans lacked broadband access in 2019 and a new report now estimates the actual number is twice as high. The research comes from BroadbandNow, a company that helps consumers find out if high-speed internet is available where they live. They manually checked availability at more than 11,000 addresses using FCC Form 477 data and they estimate that the true number of unconnected people actually stands at 42.8 million.

The primary reason for the disparity between the reports is a flaw in FCC Form 477 reporting, according to BroadbandNow. The company states that if an ISP offers service to at least one household in a census block, then the Federal Communications Commission counts that entire block as being covered by that provider. Manually checking internet availability for each address therefore results in a more accurate estimation of broadband connections.

The report highlights the U.S. states where the most people remain unserved by speedy internet. Texas comes first with an estimated total of 4.17 million disconnected people while California and Arizona come second and third with 2.35 and 1.84 million respectively. Unsurprisingly, smaller states tend to have a higher connection rate and the lowest numbers of people lacking broadband access were recorded in Rhode Island and Connecticut.