FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices
120 comments
·July 21, 2025bubblethink
izacus
Why do you feel the need to be the devils advocate? What do you get from defending this crap?
x-complexity
> Why do you feel the need to be the devils advocate? What do you get from defending this crap?
To prevent this level of monopolar partisanship.
Is this action a net-negative for ISP subscribers (i.e. everyone)? Yes.
However, this doesn't give any leeway at all in ignoring the past failures of the other side when it comes to this space either. The only (legally advisable) path left is vocal advocacy for its restoration. Doesn't matter who it is, only that this goal is to be achieved.
---
Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
vjvjvjvjghv
Seems they really want to revert everything that made the US a world leader.
- Reduce science
- Reduce collected data
- Reduce immigration
- Reduce infrastructure
- Reduce adoption of EVs
wnevets
If an adversarial nation had control of the white house would anyone be able to tell the difference
smt88
I think an adversarial nation would reduce military activity far more than the current regime has.
That might be the only difference, though.
AngryData
I don't think so if they are a nuclear armed nation. If the end result of a nuclear armed conflict is mutual destruction and collapse, the only path towards dominance is economic. And in a pure economic fight a massive overpowered military is just an economic anchor.
mattgrice
It depends what adversary I guess. It seems like several middle eastern countries of very different religious bent are quite happy with our military activity. Though they are not usually named as adversaries they certainly are by any rational metric.
Mistletoe
If you reduce all those other things you don’t need to reduce their military. You already won, without a battle or any casualties on your side. The decay and rot from the inside will take care of the rest.
giantg2
What did EVs make us a leader in? If I remember right, other countries have much higher adoption.
aaomidi
Technically Tesla was the first major company globally starting a trend. Aka leading.
JumpCrisscross
> Technically Tesla was the first major company globally starting a trend
And China’s dominance in LFP is based on its acquisition of A123’s IP out of bankruptcy [1].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130131031501/http://www.reuter...
GoblinSlayer
That's pioneer.
stingraycharles
Yeah agreed, Tesla showed the world it was possible, but they seem to be failing to maintain their leadership position.
giantg2
By that definition, we haven't been leading for years since the Chinese are cranking them out much faster than Tesla.
What if we want to be a world leader in satellite internet coverage? Is that a goal you support? Because that's part of what these changes are about.
null
gigatexal
This is the Manchurian candidate movie all over again except it’s not China it’s Russia who planted Trump in office and then neutered him.
This whole project 2025 garbage is a coup run by weird Christian nationalists.
Anything good about America and its government is over. Any goodwill we gained is gone.
gigatexal
What a win for the Telcos. What a loss for all of America. If only municipal broadband/fiber was given the chance to grow there’d be real competition.
jonhohle
Telcos were given billions to expand and improve broadband for decades and never did it. If the FCC has scrapped the goal are they also scrapping the handouts? If so, it’s long overdue.
tzs
Wow. The article notes:
> Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans.
Carr says that when looking into whether that is being satisfied the FCC should not consider affordability because section 706 does not contain the word "affordability".
But it also does not contain any words for any of the things he does want the FCC to consider. All it says is "reasonable and timely".
I bet if you polled consumers and asked what they would think it means if they were informed some commercial service or product was available to them on a reasonable basis an overwhelming majority would include in their answer that it means it is available to them at a price they find affordable.
lenerdenator
As with everything involving this administration, the behavior will continue until an effective negative stimulus is introduced.
Bluestein
"Beatings will continue until morale improves".-
lenerdenator
That's the problem, though; no one's applying any negative stimulus at all.
timewizard
"That's the problem, though; I don't actually like democracy."
puppycodes
thanks government we love slow and expensive.
anonymars
"we" = "we the people": sarcasm
"we" = the corporations: "yes, quite right"
sigh
CesareBorgia
This seems to be good for Starlink at the expense of the fiber providers?
conradev
Yeah, a regulatory goal that can be met by FiOS today but will take Starlink billions to get there does not seem like the correct way to allocate federal funds.
Brendan Carr's has critiqued federal broadband spending: too much spent on rebuilding existing networks to be faster, not enough going towards new build out. This is because upgrading wealthy customers' internet leads to increased profit, and there is less money in serving the underserved. Several states have tried fighting the telecom companies on what they've delivered and I think the worst case was a slap on the wrist.
Starlink and 5G are likely increasing broadband coverage far faster than fiber, which is a big goal of federal broadband spending.
garciasn
Rural fiber at my lake home went from $35/mo for 100/100 to $89.95 this year. On a 12mo contract.
Starlink got my business after VZW forced their 5G boxes to use 5G and not allow forced LTE usage. 5G is unusable there with 60-100/0.03. I force my phone to use LTE and all is well but 5G just does not work.
I hate giving Elon money but it’s the only affordable month-to-month option now.
kemotep
Where do you live? Because Starlink is double my current internet plan for half the bandwidth and at least 10x in latency.
I am not seeing a plan on Starlink’s website that is lower than $120 a month for unlimited data.
I live in rural Ohio.
garciasn
It depends where you live what you get. I was able to get $80/mo Residential Lite service which should top out at 150 but I routinely see 400+ mbit down. Latency is around 20-25ms on average for me.
My lake home is in Central MN.
wmf
The new FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is very pro-Starlink. Honestly Starlink is the best rural Internet access in the short term but any government subsidies going into Starlink are not going into fiber which has higher speed long term.
pwarner
Yeah drawing the right line on what's rural is probably key.
tacticus
Yeah cause they're not going to have to compete with real bandwidth availability.
given the new shiny one (that hasn't launched) is topping out at 1Tb of downlink (with half of it going to backhaul) and the current units are 80 Gb/s
greyface-
It's good for incumbent terrestrial cable companies, too.
ivape
- They removed WSJ from the White House press pool because of the Epstein story
- Elon is still stoking the Epstein stuff on Twitter as we speak
It’s not good for Starlink for that reason. We are inside the belly of fascism, so your question reads like someone oblivious, with all due respect.
giantg2
I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users. The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber. I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options. If we really want to target overall coverage and affordability, then this does make sense.
Edit: why disagree?
baby_souffle
> I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users
640K was "perfectly fine" for most people, too.
100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users. The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world and settling for 2010's version of "fast" in 2025 is ... not how we're going to get better.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas
Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...
ericmay
> Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...
Well they voted for it, so I'll stick to my fiber in my big city and they can fend for themselves and pay $90/month for 10 up 1 down or whatever while I pay $40 for 1 gig....
With the snide remarks aside, why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
I'm sympathetic to a goal of "have really, really fast Internet service" but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
baby_souffle
> Well they voted for it
Not all of us.
> why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher. SL May have a slight edge going vast distances since the speed of light is faster in a vacuum compared to glass but for 99.999% of residential ISP needs, fiber-to-the-home is going to offer a more robust pipe that fits more and with less latency.
> but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
Almost certainly. Regardless, any better solution necessarily exists only in a world where 100/20 isn't "cutting edge" 30 years after it became technically possible.
userbinator
100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users.
What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?
Larrikin
2 younger kids streaming a movie, one parent listening to a podcast in the shower, one parent streaming a YouTube cooking video while making dinner, and an older kid playing any game would completely saturate the network. That is assuming nobody has a phone that is also connected to the network
Also its ridiculous to think that is excessive in any way. Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit. Instead of watching a flat 4k movie, render a full 4k scene in AR.
vjvjvjvjghv
Work from home? Copy large files?
Dylan16807
> The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users.
100/20 is fine for one person. But gigabit isn't very hard to achieve and is a far better goal speed for entire households. Gigabit is also a lot more convenient any time a big download is involved.
> The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber.
Coax can do it.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options.
Shouldn't fiber be a bit easier to run than coax? If you're going to run one data wire to a new area, it should be fiber. And if you can run power you can run data too.
maccam94
If you're laying a communications cable, you should just do fiber. It can carry any type of traffic at high data rates, and you can upgrade the speed over time by just replacing the optics at the ends rather than having to replace the whole cable. Fiber plans are only expensive if your service level is expensive, or if you have to pay to get the line run to your building
vjvjvjvjghv
A country that wants technological leadership needs to aim higher. It needs to do more than the absolute minimum.
_--__--__
FYI to all commenters: the current FCC chair was nominated by Trump>Biden>Trump and unanimously confirmed by the Senate all 3 times.
Cornbilly
Also, FYI to all commenters: The FCC board is required to have no more than 3 members from a single political party on the board of 5.
xeonmc
Are there any similar requirements for the Supreme Court?
ivape
When it’s all said and done, Americans will have to find the courage to admit the Judicial branch was an utter failure. That whole thing was supposed to be immune to political coercion. I say it will take courage because it got rammed into our heads that God made the constitution, and that it’s infallible. It’s a massive failure through and through.
The founding fathers did not protect the branches from each other nearly enough, and certainly did not give the people an end-run mechanism to bypass and fix it.
RedShift1
From what I can tell senate confirmation means nothing. They ask a bunch of questions to grill them but the answers do not matter, they get confirmed anyway so it's all show to me.
tzs
You can't really read anything into that.
As has already been noted by law there can be no more than 3 commissioners from the same party.
Traditionally when a commissioner's term expired and they were from the party that did not control the Presidency the President would ask the other party's Senate leadership who to nominate and would nominate that person.
Also traditionally the Senators of the President's party would vote to approve that nominee.
Biden followed this tradition, as did the Senate Democrats.
wat10000
This is highly misleading. He was nominated to the commission by both Trump and Biden. He was nominated as chair by Trump this year.
Niksko
FYI to all commenters, take 5 seconds to google Brendan Carr and you will see how much of a partisan, anti-free-speech hack he is. The man wears a gold Trump head pin on his lapel ffs.
etchalon
So odd that the FCC would suddenly revert all these rules which were designed to advocate for consumers. Wonder what changed recently?
paul7986
Republicans are always pro-business first consumers whatever!
downrightmike
Previously and recently, we've had to fight tooth and nail to make any progress on this and then others like Ajit Pai just flagrantly fake support for destruction of net neutrality.
tbrownaw
Well there was that one court ruling that said agencies have to stick to what Congress actually authorized them to do rather than having free reign to reinterpret their own authorizations however they want.
vlovich123
Assuming you’re referring to Chevron/Loper, I fail to see the relevance to this case.
Also, it’s important to remember that Chevron wasn’t “however they want” or to “reinterpret their own authorizations”. It was a doctrine that if the agency (staffed by domain experts responsible for resolving the ambiguity) had a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguity in the law, even if the court thought it had a better opinion, it had to defer to the agency that Congress created and left it up to congress to resolve that ambiguity if they felt the agency did so incorrectly.
tbrownaw
> It was a doctrine that if the agency (staffed by domain experts responsible for resolving the ambiguity)
This is not an accurate description of what agencies are meant to be experts in.
Their expertise is meant to be in how best to act within their bounds. Which is distinct from deciding what those bounds are.
tzs
If you are thinking of the ruling overturning the Chevron doctrine, that's not what it said. What it said is that courts do not have to defer to the agency's interpretation of an ambiguous statute. The court can make and use apply its own interpretation.
Under Chevron courts were to defer to agency interpretations if the statute was ambiguous and the agency's interpretation was reasonable.
tbrownaw
Here is an article that (1) lambasts the 2023 Sackett ruling that a swampy back yard is actually not a navigable waterway; and (2) says that that decision teed up the 2024 Loper decision that got all the headlines: https://minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/6R... , section starting at the page numbered 2863.
idiotsecant
That's a pretty reductionist take. Here's what I think is a more reasonable one. If I told you your job was to keep the house clean, but made you come back to me for permission to pick up socks, but told you that absolutely didn't give you permission to pick up shoes, waited 8 months to reply to your request for permission to vacuum, denied you authority to decide what pieces of paper are trash and which are important, and also told you that it wasn't your job to get large muddy dogs out of the house you might think I wasn't serious about having an effectively cleaned house.
And then it turned out that the muddy dog just bought me a new yacht.
null
To be the devil's advocate, the previous admin also squandered a lot of broadband money away in a pattern that seems common to all Democratic infra projects. See https://reason.com/2024/06/27/why-has-joe-bidens-42-billion-... . Neither party is good at this. The FCC broadband map and the b/w labels (previous admin) are nice though.