Taking the "universal" out of "universal service"

Well, it's official: today the FCC voted to toss WiFi hotspot lending and school bus WiFi out of the E-Rate program.

I have to say, the Commission has a point. I'm no lawyer, but my reading of the law  is pretty clear: Congress authorized service to "schools and classrooms" and "libraries," and you have to stretch pretty hard to make that include school buses or student/patron homes.

But it's a shame. School bus WiFi is very useful in rural areas, where the bus rides are long. And it's not such a huge stretch to treat school buses as annexes to schools. Just treat them like any swing space, where students are only present for part of the day. Maybe we just need school districts to start calling their buses "mobile classrooms" and getting them funded that way. I don't see anything in the law that defines what a classroom has to be.

Hotspot lending really contributed to the overall goal of universal service. The hotspots provided Internet access to households without Internet service. Perhaps the E-Rate is an odd choice to bring Internet to those households (looking at you, Lifeline), but it worked. And it had local control on decisions over who needed a hotspot, which is much more accurate than having a national organization make those decisions.

More disturbing was the process that the Commission used to reach their decision. There was no comment period, so they couldn't hear what the public thought of these two programs. I don't like decisions made with no public input.

And the sudden change will catch schools and libraries flat-footed: many have signed multi-year contracts that anticipated E-Rate funding. Now the E-Rate funding is gone, so the cost of those contracts will skyrocket. The Commission should have had a more orderly (and slower) transition.

It makes me worry about the Delete!Delete!Delete! initiative, where decisions are being similarly made with no public input. That's been fine so far, since the Commission has only been trimming outdated rules about telegraphs, pay phones, rabbit ears, etc. But now I fear that the FCC may decide to remove meaningful rules without public comment. 

Cultural side note: How many people under 40 know what "rabbit ears" means in this context? "Telegraph" is even more outdated, but most people have heard the word used. And while people under 30 have probably never seen a pay phone in the wild, they'll at least have heard of them. But "rabbit ears"? I'll bet that piece of jargon is a mystery to the young. (And yes, if you're in your 30s, you count as young in my book.)