No fan of the FCC here and I think they are overstepping their authority BUT...if your electric company upped the voltage to 180 volts, because they wanted to force you to only buy compatible appliances from them...AND you couldn’t go anywhere else for your electricity (most people can’t go anywhere else for their Internet access or are technical enough to do so), wouldn’t the gov’t be helpful in making the electric company maintain 120 volts?
There’s no where in the country, that has phone lines, where you don’t have alternative internet access.
This “universal access” is nothing but another de facto reparations program.
The government wouldn’t be nearly as helpful as the fact that by doing this, the utility would be guaranteed to be bogged down in the cost of replacing many expensive components on their system as a result of the overvoltage. Not to mention that your lawyer would have a field day with them.
Fact is, the only reason a utility would do something so stupid would be because the government coerced them into doing so. Do you think that utilities WANT to buy wind-powered generation at 10X the cost of coal-fired generation? Do you think that utilities want to build their plants out in the middle of nowhere instead of near the load center which would make considerably more sense from an engineering and cost standpoint? Do you think that your local utility wants to continue providing power to a deadbeat all winter in spite of the fact that the deadbeat hasn’t paid a bill since September? In each of those cases, it is/was the government that caused them to do the wrong thing.
The same is happening with the FCC trying to take over the internet - the ISPs will be coerced into doing things that will cost you plenty as a subscriber, and will bring them no benefit. They will be burdened with a mountain of paperwork that they will need to process in order to be compliant with the latest regulatory fad. They will have to make you and I pay more so that some homeless deadbeat can have Wi-Fi in his favorite dumpster.