Alaska telecommunications companies have taken about $4.6 billion in subsidies from the Federal Communications Commission over the past decade to help connect Alaskans to high-speed internet.
And yet, according to a recent story by Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reporter Kyle Hopkins, Alaska's land-based internet is among the slowest in the nation, and it's relatively expensive.
The subsidies come from a fee on every American's phone bill, sometimes called a "Universal Connectivity Charge."
So, given that we're all paying for the billions that've flowed to Alaska, Hopkins wanted to answer a specific question: What are we getting for all that money?
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kyle Hopkins: There's kind of a new gold rush that's been happening in Alaska right in front of us for a decade or two. You know, if you're a company that wants to make a lot of money, one way to do it is to sell internet, because there's a fire hose of federal money that's pointed at the state. So people, they get out their buckets and they start collecting that money. And it's for something that, at this point, is a necessity.
It wasn't cost-effective for companies to lay fiber optic cable lines out to a village, across a bunch of rivers and stuff, and so it had to be subsidized. The reporting that we're doing is exploring this idea of, OK, so 30 years ago this promise was made that all these billions of dollars that are flowing to Alaska, that they would be used to provide Alaskans with some decent internet. So how are we doing? And where did that money go? Who got that money?
Casey Grove: You found a guy who gets, from the federal government, a million-plus bucks a year to run a company that provides internet to a certain number of people north of Fairbanks. I just thought it was a really interesting story. It's how it's how your piece starts out, and I wondered, could you tell me about that in particular?
KH: A lot of us are familiar with GCI. That's the biggest telecom company in Alaska. They get the most of it, but there are a dozen other companies around Alaska that also get these subsidies. I'm just, looking at, OK, who owns the companies, and I think, in this case, I just googled the name of the owner, and the first thing that came up was a Department of Justice — like a federal U.S. Department of Justice — press release announcing that he had been convicted of tax evasion. And I thought, well, surely that's not the same person who's also on the board of directors for the Alaska Telecom Association, who the Alaska Telecom Association, when they went to the Legislature to argue that their industry is over regulated, held this guy up as their poster child.
CG: It's just an example, and, like you said, compared to like GCI, a smaller company, but there were some questions around how much money he was getting and how many homes were actually being serviced with internet through, what is it, Summit, I think is the name of the company?
KH: Yeah, the name of the company that we wrote about was Summit. But really it's not a story about a company that's breaking the rules, it's a story about the rules are kind of broken, right? Because he's not, you know, we talked to a former FCC official who said, "Look, if you get the subsidy, at least the way that it's written for Alaska companies, in this particular subsidy, that this particular company is getting the money for hooking up buildings to internet, whether or not anyone actually uses that internet or even wants it." It kind of doesn't matter, they're going to keep getting the money year after year.
We gave the example of Adak. There's a telecom in Adak. There's a lot of empty buildings on Adak, they're hooked up to internet. Nobody in them, but we all are still paying to subsidize that internet, and so the point of the story was this idea that this money is being spent in a way that, in 2026, raises a lot of questions about if this is the right way to be spending public money and getting people internet.
CG: If Alaska's gotten all that money, we must be getting pretty good internet, right? At a good price? Or no?
KH: Well, if you ask that question of the Telecom Association, they would say, "You know what, we've made a lot of progress." Compared to five years ago, Alaskans do have better internet, but by any benchmark, when you don't compare us just to ourselves, when you look at what the rest of the country has, we are dead last by pretty much every benchmark.
We're paying the most for the slowest internet. And that's the price of being an Alaskan, right? We don't get the same infrastructure as other places, but that doesn't excuse this idea that, like, "Let's just accept all this money and never look at how it's being spent."
