Patty Judge, a former Democratic lieutenant governor and state agriculture secretary in Iowa, said the FCC’s plan to reclassify internet access as a common carrier and impose net neutrality regulations will hurt, not help, the effort to close the rural digital divide.
She made that case in reply comments to the Federal Communications Commission (the deadline is Wednesday, January 17), a copy of which was supplied by Focus on Rural America, a self-described progressive advocacy group that Judge co-founded.
Judge spoke out strongly in support of letting internet service providers “get the job done” of closing the digital divide, a task she called “daunting at best and near impossible at worst.”
“Apart from driving away private investment and adding regulatory burdens to an already complex buildout process,” she said, sounding more like a cable lobbyist than a former Democratic state official, “the FCC’s proposal will simply result in — as two former Obama Administration Solicitors General put it — ‘a massive waste of resources for the government, industry, and the public, as well as the lost opportunity to pursue more pressing policy goals such as deploying robust broadband service to all Americans.’ ”
Those former solicitors general, Donald B. Verrilli Jr. and Ian Heath Gershengorn, are even higher-profile Democrats who weighed in strongly against common-carrier reclassification in their own comments back in September.
Judge told the FCC that while “disparities in connectivity across the nation continue to grow more stark between rural and urban communities” and the agency’s proposed new rules against blocking, throttling and anticompetitive paid prioritization are a “misguided effort that takes attention away from our collective goal: achieving universal connectivity, especially for unserved, rural areas that have been cut off from digital opportunities for far too long.”
While she praised the FCC for efforts to close the digital divide, particularly getting last-mile connections to rural communities, Judge said that “significant internet regulatory changes masked under an ‘open internet’ title only pull us further away from reaching a fully connected rural America.”
