Read an article today, it's worth paying attention to:
Ajit Pai loses in court—FCC can’t kill broadband subsidy in Tribal areas - Ars TechnicaI bring this to your attention because the outcome of this is very important. I am glad the US Court of Appeals has blocked the FCC decision to drastically alter Lifeline services, but am unsure how long that may last and how far up the flag pole this gets run. If you like affordable phone service
at all, you need to understand why this stay is a good thing, and know about the FCC's Lifeline services plans and what's coming along with the collateral damage if they push this through anyway.
This will impact far more than just Lifeline customers. Many of the MVNOs in this country have to scrap it out for survival with a not insignificant Lifeline user base on their own rolls, and Ajit Pai is ramrodding these plans through because, "limiting the use of subsidies to buy service from resellers will encourage carriers to build their own networks." Similar has increasingly happened with independent and smaller ISPs providing expanded Lifeline. The reality is this will damage the wholesale reseller telecoms industry in this country across the board, and one has to wonder how these miracle networks Pai boasts about will be built when the phone pole owners refuse competition access (see Google Fiber in Nashville against AT&T and Comcast, for example), many municipalities support wired communications monopolies and duopolies, and most of the useful wireless spectrum in this country is already owned by
five, sorry, soon to be
four mega corporations (only if you count USCC as sufficiently large enough to even qualify as a national mobile network).
It's also hanging the poor out to dry. AT&T dropped all their Lifeline customers off on wholesalers and MVNOs last year, now the FCC is trying to push out wholesale providers for Lifeline customers, despite the fact that it's the resellers who are now the only ones providing reasonably priced monthly service packages in the first place. And let's not even get started with the fact that this is for the most part over a less than $10 monthly subsidy that barely covers much service in the first place when it may be your
only source of communications available... and this is a service that currently supports over 12 million subscribers.
This disgusts me. We've made it illegal in this country for people to live in ramshackle huts without electricity, doubly so with children involved if you want to send them to public school or lose them to CPS. We've made it impossible for minimum wage workers to work without having phone access. Then we treat them like they're spoiled because they (by necessity) have refrigerators, stoves and cellphones and juggling between bills just trying to stay afloat...
You want to know one of the biggest reasons that contributed to why I couldn't keep doing the guide and shut down the website? This. This right here. The heartlessness, the cruelty, and the corruption in the modern US telecom industry. Don't think you're immune because you're not living hand to mouth. Your impoverished neighbors are the canaries in your societal coal mine, and it's policies just like these that are getting pushed through all layers of government right now.
It breaks my heart, no matter how much I saw it coming. Any society that so devalues human life for the sake of such personal greed cannot practice true justice. Greed ruins lives. I mourn with poor, the broken hearted, the sick, the orphans, the immigrants, and the marginalized of this land. My hope is neither here or now, but frankly it's hard living through it all the same.