United States Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass) introduced a bill that would require that the FCC create a new National Broadband Plan by July 2021. This plan would lay out the national goals needed for broadband going forward and also provide an update on how the COVID-19 crisis has impacted Internet access. I am not a big fan of the concept of a national plan for many reasons.

Can’t Trust FCC Data. The FCC would base any analysis in a new plan on the same flawed data they are using for everything else related to broadband. At this point, the best description of the FCC’s broadband data is that it is a fairy tale—and not one with a happy ending.

Gives Politicians Talking Points rather than Action Plans. A national broadband plan gives every politician talking points to sound like they care about broadband—which is a far cry from an action plan to do something about broadband. When politicians don’t want to fix a problem, they study it.

Makes No Sense if Broadband is Unregulated. Why would the government create a plan for an industry over which the government has zero influence? The FCC has gifted the broadband industry with ‘light-touch regulation’ which is a code word for no regulation at all. The FCC canned Title II regulatory authority and handed the tiny remaining remnant of broadband regulation to the Federal Trade Commission—which is not a regulatory agency.

The Last National Broadband Plan was a Total Bust. There is no need for a National Broadband Plan if it doesn’t include a requirement that the FCC should try hard to tackle any recommendations made. Almost nothing from the last broadband plan came to pass—the FCC and the rest of the federal government stopped even paying lip service to the last plan within a year after it was published. Consider the primary goals of the last National Broadband Plan that were to have been implemented by 2019:

• At least 100 million homes should have affordable access to 100/50 Mbps broadband. Because the cable companies implemented DOCSIS standards in urban areas, more than 100 million people now have access to 100 Mbps download speeds. But only a tiny fraction of that number—homes with fiber, have access to the 50 Mbps upload speed goal. It’s also impossible to make a case that U.S. broadband is affordable—U.S. broadband prices are almost double the rates in Europe and the far East.
• The U.S. should lead the world in mobile innovation and have the fastest and most extensive wireless network of any nation. U.S. wireless broadband is far from the fastest in the world—our neighbor Canada is much closer to that goal than is the U.S. Everybody acknowledges that there are giant areas of rural America without good wireline broadband, but most people have no idea that cellular coverage is also miserable in a lot of rural America.
• Every American Community should have gigabit access to anchor institutions such as schools, libraries, and government buildings. We probably came the closest to meeting this goal, at least for schools, and over 90% of schools now have gigabit access. However, much of that gain came through poorly-aimed federal grants that paid a huge amount of money to bring fiber to anchor institutions while ignoring the neighborhoods around them—and in many cases, the fiber serving government buildings is legally blocked from being used to help anybody else.
• Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband and the means and the skills to subscribe. A decade after the last National Broadband Plan, there are still huge numbers of rural homes with no broadband, or with broadband that barely functions. Instead of finding broadband solutions for rural America, we have an FCC that congratulates itself each year for being on the right trajectory for solving the broadband gap.
• To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every America should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption. I can’t come up with anything other than a facepalm for this goal.

As hard as I try, I can’t think of even one reason why we should waste federal dollars to develop a new national broadband plan. Such a plan will have no teeth and will pass out of memory soon after it’s completed.