I’ve written extensively that U.S. broadband is slow, spotty, and expensive thanks to regulatory capture and regional monopoly power. Republicans have propped up this broken status quo at every opportunity, routinely working to undermine state and federal consumer protection, while letting companies like AT&T and Comcast quite literally write terrible state and federal telecom law.
So it’s a bit ironic that the GOP effort to cultivate votes in swing states using an Elon Musk PAC app is running into problems due to substandard, slow broadband access in those same states.
The Guardian notes that the Trump campaign and the Elon Musk-backed America PAC use a management app called Campaign Sidekick to confirm that door to door canvassers are actually reaching “low information” voters in swing states. But the app keeps crashing because it requires bandwidth that a lot of these local areas simply don’t have:
“The Campaign Sidekick app effectively forces canvassers who have less than 40mbps of internet – sufficient to stream 4K video – to use “offline walkbooks” which have no geo-tracking feature and do not always upload after a route is completed, the people said.
As a result, the Trump campaign and America Pac then have little way to know whether canvassers are actually knocking on doors or whether they are cheating – for instance, by “speed-running” routes where they literally throw campaign materials at doors as they drive past.”
So for one, that the app requires 40 Mbps in rural swing states to track canvasser movement means it’s a badly designed app. There are ways to do this using location movement data or lower resolution video that shouldn’t be anywhere near this bandwidth-intensive.
But here’s where I also remind you that Republicans are directly responsible for America’s sluggish, shitty, expensive, slow broadband access in the first place.
The GOP voted against the COVID relief and broadband infrastructure bills that were intended to bring affordable broadband to most of these areas (though they lie and take credit for among misinformed constituents anyway). And they’ve also opposed efforts to require that giant telecom monopolies ensure that networks built with taxpayer money are actually affordable.
The GOP is also currently helping the telecom industry dismantle what’s left of the FCC’s consumer protection authority under the pretense this would somehow magically result in “free market innovation.” Lack of corporate oversight results in companies like AT&T, Comcast, or Verizon seeing little to no real world accountability for monopolistic behavior, harming broadband speeds, availability, and pricing.
The Trump arm of the GOP also just killed a popular program that was helping to provide affordable broadband access to low-income voters across these states. Republicans also routinely rubber stamp competition-eroding telecom mergers resulting in less price competition and spottier access.
Not that I expect local voters to make any of these connections (in large part because local and national journalism isn’t all that interested in telling them the truth), but it’s ironic the Trump GOP ground game is being inconvenienced by their own telecom policies. That’s probably as close as they’ve ever gotten to actually owning the real-world impact their shitty policies routinely have on their own constituents.