How ISPs Are Failing Americans

Look at the latest poll results, and you might think the Internet is over. Done. We've had enough of it. According to the latest Pew home broadband study, 67 percent of Americans have high-speed broadband at home, down from 70 percent in 2013. While the Internet is critical to modern American life, learning, and politics, access to the fastest and best Internet services has actually begun to recede.

This isn't a back-to-Internet-basics movement. People without broadband are missing it. Between 2010 and 2015, the percentage of people without broadband who said they're at a major disadvantage for finding out about job opportunities, accessing government services, getting health information, or keeping up with the news jumped, often by double digits.

Smartphones are helping to fill the gap, but they aren't a panacea. Mobile Internet is generally a complementary service, not a replacement for home broadband. That's because many websites needed for interacting with the government, doing schoolwork, or obtaining health care still don't work well on mobile. Smartphone broadband is also both expensive, and often tightly data-capped.

My daughter's school, for instance, uses a homework website called IXL. Trying to log into that on a smartphone is an infuriating exercise in zooming, panning, and scrolling; trying to actually do work on it is a complete ergonomic nightmare. So only 12 percent of people without home broadband say a "smartphone does the job."

The problem is that broadband in America is just too expensive. Thirty-three percent cite the cost of the monthly subscription, and 10 percent say a home PC costs too much. The FCC says American home broadband prices are relatively low on a global scale, but the global OECD organization vehemently disagrees, marking the U.S. as the second most expensive country it surveyed for broadband packages with speeds of 10Mbps and above.

It's hard to find historical broadband price data, but I found an FCC survey showing an average monthly broadband bill of $40.68 in 2010. By 2014, according to a survey by the New America Foundation, prices for speeds of 15Mbps or higher were above that level. It's not a perfect comparison, but it shows that broadband prices generally aren't going down. Speeds are going up, but prices aren't going down.

The broadband providers typically offer low-cost plans, but they're often highly restricted. Comcast's $10/month "Internet Essentials," as well as a proposed low-income service from Charter, requires that you have a child who's eligible to participate in the national school lunch program. So, young adults, couples, and the elderly are all out. AT&T is pledging a $10/month connection for people eligible to participate in the government's SNAP food-assistance program.

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Even if you're income-eligible for one of these "poor doors to the Net," though, that doesn't mean you'll be able to use them. Income-restricted services like this usually involve a stack of paperwork, and can't help people who are in insecure housing, or simply hustling too hard at their minimum-wage jobs to be able to find out about the poorly promoted services and figure out how to sign up for them.

Pew diagnoses the problem here pretty simply: average American household incomes are "stagnant." The Wall Street Journal goes further to say that median household incomes are declining, while we see the prices of essential goods like housing, health care, college educations, and home broadband are not. While we rejoice in cheap "luxuries" like $198 Vizio TVs and increasingly cheap Android phones, the major fixed costs we need to stay housed, healthy, and employed seem to be totally resistant to downward trends.

If that doesn't change, we're going to see more rebellions like the one in the North Carolina town that refused solar energy because they didn't see where the jobs and income were in it for them. What are we going to do about it?