On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage, Alaska, sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There’s no furniture, and the wind blows through the broken windows. The last people to live there moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil. The cable was installed to connect the home to the Internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with Internet access that no one uses, and the money being wasted is yours. It comes from a fee added to nearly every American’s phone bill as part of an FCC subsidy program intended to bring fast, affordable Internet to remote towns. Once home to thousands of sailors and their families, the island emptied after the base closed in 1997. While the state estimated the population to be 77 last year, residents themselves put it at closer to 24 — meaning the federal Internet subsidy to the local telecom amounts to about $14,000 a year per person, and there’s zero indication that any of these people are actually benefiting from it. Residents get online through Starlink, the Elon Musk satellite service that arrived in 2023 without any subsidy from the FCC. People here say it’s up to 40 times faster and costs $90 to $140 per month, and yet the subsidies remain.
