One of the great triumphs of the internet and smart phone revolution has been how rapidly access to these communication technologies have spread to nearly every office building, home, and school in America.
Now it's 92%. Today 19 out of 20 households have home access to the internet on their smart phones.
Former congressman Chris Cox, who wrote the first bipartisan law in the 1990s to accelerate internet deployment, explains the successful strategy: "We achieved this rapid deployment by keeping internet regulation free and lawsuit free." Bill Clinton, who was the president at the time, deserves credit too.
Now the Biden Administration - which never saw an industry it didn't want to regulate and control - has deputized the Federal Communications Commission to police the internet.
The new law instructed the FCC to ensure that the billions in federal spending also "Facilitate equal access" to the Internet.
The FCC lawyers then chose a standard known as "Disparate impact," which means if they can find a minority neighborhood somewhere at any time that lacks the same internet access as a high-income area, they can slap the telecom companies with a lawsuit.
The FCC openly admits in its 235-page filing released in November that they could find "Little or no evidence" of "Intentional discrimination by industry participants." And they found no evidence that discrimination "Contributes to disparities in access to broadband internet service across the Nation."
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