It's The Corruption, Stupid

This week my colleague Sean Gonsalves and I wrote a feature for The Verge about how billionaires have hijacked billions of taxpayer dollars intended for better internet access, and instead shoveled that money into the pockets of openly technofascist billionaires in exchange for doing nothing differently. It's a real hoot; we explore how the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, included in the 2021 infrastructure bill, was a generational opportunity to improve internet access – especially for poor, minority, and long-neglected rural communities.Now it's mostly just a crony capitalist slush fund for terrible rich men. Last election season Republicans made a gargantuan stink about how the BEAD program was taking too long to provide access; resulting in a massive media cycle featuring folks like the New York Times' Ezra Klein lamenting how Democrats were drunk on regulation and had simply forgotten how to build stuff. (While Democrats have ample faults…