Biden’s ‘Internet for All’ squeezes small bidders and boosts private equity

I’ve spent my entire life fighting for justice. Fighting to ensure that Americans from any background, of any color or creed, have the opportunity to fight for their very own American Dream.

The Biden presidency has furthered that goal, investing in programs that have lowered the cost of healthcare and prescription drugs, brought more jobs and better pay for hard-working families and helped provide opportunities for Americans across the country to succeed. And since the invention of the internet, no administration has focused more on ensuring that every kid, in every community, has access to a technology that opens doors to a brighter future and provides critical educational tools to every community.

That opportunity has come as part of President Biden’s Internet for All initiative through the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, a generational investment in extending reliable, affordable high-speed internet to unserved and underserved communities across the country.

The Biden administration has recognized that lack of access to broadband is an urgent problem that requires urgent solutions. Some reports estimate that students lost out on almost 35 percent of learning during the pandemic. Consistent lack of access to the internet for educational purposes could be causing even greater damage, and every moment without these resources leaves our children, many of them Black and brown, even further behind. 

It is that urgency that has sparked my growing concern that the implementation of BEAD by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the agency located within the Department of Commerce that is tasked with overseeing the program, may run directly counter to President Biden and Congress’s high hopes for BEAD. 

For example, NTIA’s “letter of credit” requirement, which would require BEAD bidders to have vast resources already in the bank before receiving a grant award, threatens to crowd out all but the best-capitalized incumbent firms. While NTIA has relaxed these restrictions somewhat in response to fierce advocacy, BEAD bidders will still need to maintain significant cash reserves to access grant funding. A vague “middle-class affordability” requirement may cause experienced broadband providers to bow out of broadband funding opportunities entirely — in direct opposition to Congress’s explicit prohibition on broadband rate regulation in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. 

Moreover, the “Build America, Buy America” mandate for many of the physical materials required for this unprecedented buildout, including scarce fiber-optic cables, could raise costs, especially for smaller companies that aren’t able to buy in the same quantity as larger, better-capitalized firms.

These burdensome requirements are not meeting the urgent and equitable outcomes President Biden has laid forth in his broadband agenda. In fact, they are paving the road for the intrusion of unscrupulous private equity firms seeking government subsidies to turn a quick profit. 

Firms with a history of taking a wrecking ball to America’s lower- and middle-class. Firms that have bought swaths of homes across the country, making home ownership nearly impossible for hard-working Americans. Firms that have bought factories, fired staff and cut good-paying union jobs. Firms that have consolidated health care systems across the country, raising prices as they slash access to care. And now many of these private equity firms are looking to move into broadband and get large slices of the Biden administration’s historic investment in achieving digital equity.

For President Biden’s Internet for All dream to become a reality, we must ensure that onerous requirements do not crowd out competition for broadband dollars. If the only bidders remaining after these requirements are greedy and unscrupulous private equity firms, we should be very skeptical of their capacity to control access to the internet.

Rev. Al Sharpton is an internationally recognized civil rights leader and the founder and president of the National Action Network (NAN). Sharpton anchors “Politics Nation” on MSNBC and hosts the nationally syndicated radio shows “Keepin’ It Real” and “The Hour of Power.”