In an earlier post about Verizon’s sale of rural assets to Frontier, I highlighted a sad reality about rural broadband. Despite the rhetoric, large Internet service providers have a single focus: How can they make consumers pay as much as possible, while they themselves spend as little as possible?

While this is the goal of most businesses, the ISPs’ business model is also built on hypocrisy, as they tell the FCC again and again that they care about rural broadband while ignoring would-be subscribers.

In an attempt to double (triple?) down on their hypocrisy, Verizon sent comments to the FCC a few weeks ago dissenting from a broadband study done by the Berkman Center at Harvard.

In Verizon’s comments, the company presented its solution to the lack of broadband in rural areas:

The solution, as Verizon has explained, is to target subsidies where needed for the deployment of broadband facilities in these areas directly. That is what other countries have done to deliver broadband to all of their citizens, and it is one of the steps the Commission should take as well.

WHAT?! The government (i.e., you and I) should pay to bring these unserved areas broadband because Verizon has decided it would rather make $8.6 billion by selling them off without building broadband? Oh, hell no.

Translation: Verizon is telling the FCC that the economics aren't right in rural areas and that the government needs to subsidize them, while simultaneously saying that the new owner has every intention of building out broadband to nearly all of the newly acquired areas. All the while Verizon plans to make billions on the deal.

Good grief, Verizon, have you no shame?