As the broadband stimulus bill was being hashed out, you’ll recall it was stripped of some very lucrative, carrier-lobbied-for tax credits that would have given companies like Verizon billions for doing absolutely nothing differently – after the credits were exposed by the NY Times. With no cash giveaways, fears that taking funds could lead to additional regulations and restrictions requiring that ISPs use the money on under-served areas, last summer found the biggest ISPs saying no thanks to $7.2 billion in stimulus funds. Thousands of companies who actually want to deploy to rural markets wound up applying instead.

Ever since the first round however, the mega-carriers have been lobbying the government to have the restrictions on how they can spend the (your) money removed. Specifically, carriers wanted language removed that required fund recipients to adhere to neutral network principles, and they didn’t want to be restricted to using the funds for rural and/or under-served markets only. Judging from Qwest’s comments to the Denver Business Journal, they’ve been successful in getting those provisions removed. Qwest’s Colorado president seems to indicate that Qwest will apply for the second round of funding:

“The good news is that they seem to have heard us in Washington, D.C.” said Chuck Ward, Qwest’s Colorado president. “It almost gets us able to apply.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture s Rural Utilities Service and Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) adjusted rules for the nearly $3 billion second round of broadband stimulus grants. “We’ll see – we’ve put everybody back to work and dusted off the analysis we did for the first round,” Ward said.

Of course what Ward means by “we’ll see,” is that his lawyers are still digging through the language of the new round of funding, and if Qwest sees anything at all that requires them to actually do anything, they probably won’t apply. History is full of giant corporations that prefer their taxpayer funds with absolutely no accountability, and that is essentially what the biggest ISPs want if they’re going to apply for these funds.

You might recall that Qwest insisted that just $1 billion dollars from taxpayers would help them deploy regular DSL service to 95% of the company’s current footprint. One question is whether a company like Qwest deserves a taxpayer subsidy to deploy service to under-served areas, given the fact that Qwest has a bit of a history with skimping on network upgrades, yet has spent millions of dollars fighting under-served communities’ efforts to wire themselves with broadband. Most notably Qwest spent millions trying to derail municipal fiber efforts in Utah, suing to stop Utopia from using state utility poles, while claiming that municipal fiber to the home service caused “long term harm to consumers“.

Not exactly a bailout, but if these huge carriers can get tax money and not do anything differently, it sounds a lot like AIG to me.

Link to the original article…