In a September 10, 2021, Public Notice, the FCC's Office of Managing Director announced that the Universal Service Fund (USF) contribution factor for the fourth quarter of this year will be 29.1 percent, a slight drop from the third quarter's 31.8 percent but still untenably high.
Free State Foundation President Randolph May has described this fee, which is imposed upon consumers' steadily declining use of "telecommunications services" (think: landline phones) but not "information services" (that is, the Internet), as a regressive tax that "negatively impacts low income subscribers who can least afford to pay it more than higher income subscribers who can."
In a May 2021 Newsweek op-ed, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr made a compelling case that "[w]e should start requiring Big Tech to pay its fair share." Shortly thereafter, in "Congress May Invest Billions in Broadband: It Should Reform the Universal Service Fund Too," Justin (Gus) Hurwitz, a member of the Free State Foundation's Board of Academic Advisors, agreed that "we should discuss, as Commissioner Carr rightly suggests, who should pay for" USF-related projects.
And as I noted in a July post to the FSF Blog, Republican Senators Roger Wicker (MS), Shelley Moore Capito (WV), and Todd Young (IN) have introduced the Funding Affordable Internet with Reliable (FAIR) Contributions Act, legislation that would direct the FCC to consider the viability of Commissioner Carr's proposal.
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