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Broadband inequality threatens internet diversity

As FCC members debate the commission's role in controlling broadband providers, a former chair raises concern that broadband inequality will destroy internet…

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Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has advocated for a free and open internet. 

In Philadelphia and around the country, broadband accessibility remains limited to low-income communities, especially African American and Latino families. Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said that if the divide continues to prevent internet diversity, it would be a, "tragedy of history."

Programs like Comcast's Internet Essentials intend to bridge the digital divide and provide affordable internet to low-income families, but have been accessed by just 9 percent of the families eligible in Philadelphia. Many more individuals who do not meet the program's requirements can neither enroll nor afford the full-price of services, which start at around $30 a month, plus equipment rental fees. 

At this year's Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC) summit on broadband and social justice, former and current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairs came together to address some of the barriers to broadband accessibility, especially a recent court ruling that dissolved the commission's control over monitoring providers' services. 

"The great revolution in the internet is how it empowers individuals to both consume and create," current FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said at the session. "To do so requires an accessible and open internet, and we will fight to preserve that capability."

However, former Chairman and FCC critic Michael Copps argued that the commission has failed to encourage an open internet during his time there and recently.  

"The fact remains that we don't have a single Black-owned, full-power commercial television station in the United States of America," Copps said.

In an open letter to journalists earlier this year, Copps apologized for the FCC's relaxed oversight of media conglomerates and revealed that the commission often encouraged the growing conglomeration of the broadband industry, most recently in a planned merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable

"That's the essence of capitalism, that's the essence of entrepreneurship—to strive for market control, to strive for gatekeeping power," Copps said during the MMTC panel. "We have to have some oversight [...] when these companies form du-opolies or virtual monopolies."

Quartz recently reported that nearly one in three Americans have no choice when it comes to internet providers, leaving companies to charge higher fees without competition. Two in three Americans have just two or fewer broadband providers to choose between, often falling into a similar price range that is higher than in other countries with similar cost of living. 

"It would be the tragedy of history to take a technology as open and transformative and opportunity-creating as broadband and to let it go down that same road of consolidation and gatekeeping," Copps argued, "That road of not reflecting America's diversity."

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