FCC To Unveil National Broadband Plan To Congress Soon

In the eyes of many, it is a move long overdue: the Federal Communication Commission will be debuting a plan to regulate and expand the internet to meet the need of its highly expanding user base.  Dubbed as FCC’s “National Broadband Plan”, it is to be proposed to Congress this Tuesday.

This is a big deal in the US, where telecommunications are one of the biggest bastions of corporatism and deregulation, and American broadband has remained stagnant for the last decade, as Europe and Asia races ahead.  The goal of it is stated on Broadband.gov, a new site dedicated towards this effort:

“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) was signed into law on February 17, 2009. The Broadband Initiatives funded in the Act are intended to accelerate broadband deployment across the United States. The Recovery Act authorizes the FCC to create a National Broadband Plan, that ‘shall seek to ensure that all people of the United States have access to broadband capability and shall establish benchmarks for meeting that goal.’”

Broadband.gov also put up a speed test to check the current quality of people’s broadband connections.  However, whether any of this will be to much avail is up to question.  The telecommunications lobby in Washington is enormous, and it is unlikely that telecom titans like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast will respond favorably to having their industry regulated.

Via Gizmodo