In this report, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance examines some Tribal Nations’ critiques about the Federal Communications Commission’s troubled Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).
Native Nations and Federal Telecom Policy Failures: Lessons from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund situates RDOF’s program design in the longer-term context of the FCC’s policies on Tribal nations, especially with regard to Tribal consultation and consent. Drawing on interviews and public records, it highlights the practical and fundamental concerns raised by some Tribes about the program, and considers the long-term reverberations it continues to have on broadband funding for Tribes.
The Federal Communications Commission’s approach to broadband funding has long invited tension between providers and some Tribes. With RDOF, the FCC specifically “decline[d] to extend a Tribal-specific preference to Tribal entities or to require a nontribal entity to ‘prove an established partnership’ prior to the auction,” in line with its longer-term approach to deployment on Tribal lands. Even as other federal agencies have moved towards more robust Tribal consent policies, the FCC has not followed suit. Its approach continues to fall well short of a protocol for “free, prior and informed consent of Tribes for projects on Tribal lands” demanded by many Tribes and Tribal broadband advocacy groups.
As Tribes work in record numbers to close the significant digital divide across Indian Country, they need good policy that facilitates self-determined and sustainable solutions. This report finds that RDOF, on the contrary, became yet another lesson in the dangers of investing significant sums of federal money into new Internet networks on Tribal lands without regard to local knowledge or priorities. Tribal governments were made to spend their own time and resources to fix broken processes. Looking ahead at the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, the report is heartened by Tribal consent policies adopted by BEAD. However, it reveals that many states are making it easy for RDOF to wrongly disqualify Tribal lands for BEAD eligibility. Tribes may have to invest yet more resources to ensure a fair shake.
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