Post

Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart over-simplify and caricature the restrictions on this $42.5 billion broadband grant program to falsely paint the whole thing as an irredeemable waste. But they fail to mention a lot of important stuff because they didn't actually understand what they were talking about...

(BEAD) has many of these restrictions because they were trying to avoid all the fraud, scandals, and problems in an earlier FCC program mismanaged by Trump (RDOF), where ISPs (and elon musk) took tons of taxpayer money for deployments they couldn't finish (Klein doesn't mention this)

it also...took extra time because states and feds basically had to completely remap broadband access because our broadband maps, for decades, have been shit. You don't want to throw $42.5 billion in taxpayer dollars at a problem you haven't measured accurately. That would be...bad.

Worst part is I'm sure someone would retort this by saying "well, force the ISPs to share their internal data" but having seen some of the internal datasets, they were probably just as outdated.