Kristian Stout on Democrats’ broadband infrastructure bill
Communications Daily – ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout was quoted by Communications Daily in a story about congressional Democrats’ planned broadband infrastructure legislation. You can read full story (behind a subscriber firewall) here.
HR-3684 definitely “came out better than I feared” it would given “some of the rumors of what was potentially going to be included” in its broadband section, said International Center for Law & Economics Innovation Policy Director Kristian Stout. “It’s not a best-case scenario” or “a worst-case scenario. It’s somewhere in the middle.” Lawmakers are “starting to move in the right direction on figuring out how to get people who genuinely don’t have an internet connection or something very substandard” connected, he said. The big problem is the NTIA grants program puts too much priority on ensuring recipients provide capacity for 100/20 Mbps service because that’s effectively “reordering the queue of who gets connected, and the people who are hardest hit get pushed back to the end again.”