The Federal Communications Commission is ditching Biden-era standards for measuring progress toward the goal of universal broadband deployment. The changes will make it easier for the FCC to give the broadband industry a passing grade in an annual progress report. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's proposal would give the industry a thumbs-up even if it falls short of 100 percent deployment, eliminate a long-term goal of gigabit broadband speeds, and abandon a new effort to track the affordability of broadband. Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans. If the answer is no, the US law says the FCC must "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market." Generally, Democratic-led commissions have found that the industry isn't doing enough to make broadband universally available, while Republican-led commissions have found the opposite. Democratic-led commissions have also periodically increased the speeds used to determine whether advanced telecommunications capabilities are widely available, while Republican-led commissioners have kept the speed standards the same. No focus on broadband affordability Carr's proposal, which was released on Thursday and is scheduled for a vote on August 7, criticized the previous administration's approach. Carr intends to focus the next FCC inquiry on the statute's "is being deployed" phrase rather than looking at whether broadband has already been deployed. Carr's proposal said: To further realign our section 706 inquiry with the statute's plain language, we intend to focus our inquiry on whether advanced telecommunications capability "is being deployed," rather than whether it already has been deployed, as was the focus of the 2024 Report. We believe that the prior Report's binary interpretation of the threshold for issuing a passing or failing grade in the ultimate section 706 finding effectively read the "reasonable and timely" language out of the statute. That interpretation seemingly found anything short of 100% was insufficient to warrant a passing grade and thus disregarded Congress's use of the present progressive tense in "is being deployed." Moreover, we believe that assessing the progress at which advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed would provide far more—and more helpful—information to Congress and the public than an overly simplistic inquiry into whether or not 100% of Americans already have access to such capability. Carr also doesn't want the FCC to investigate "extraneous" matters such as whether broadband is cheap enough to be affordable.