Earlier this month, Comcast Xfinity, the nation's largest cable and residential Internet provider, expanded its 1.2TB broadband cap to 12 more cities. This comes after it was expanded to parts of the Northeast this past November.

Update: The Washington Post reports that as of February 3, Comcast has suspended data caps in more than a dozen northeastern states after Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro expressed concern about economically struggling families working and learning online. These states include CT, DE, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, VA, VT, WV, District of Columbia, and parts of NC and OH.

Twitter users have been posting screenshots of the reduced Internet availability, with warnings from Comcast that they are approaching the limit. Comcast is kind enough to waive the data overage for one month per year, but otherwise charges an additional $10 (up to $100) for every 50 GB used. You can also upgrade to a truly unlimited plan for an additional $30.

But as Americans continue to be squeezed by the Covid-19 pandemic, Internet access is shifting from casual browsing and browsing to a necessity. Work has been pushed to the home office. Schools have been relegated to the kitchen counter. Government bailouts are fleeting, and families must earn every dollar they can. Clearly, Comcast's brazen exploitation of the American consumer in the midst of a pandemic is the height of business immorality.

Comcast is able to exploit Americans during this particularly vulnerable time because of its longstanding power consolidation. Comcast is a natural monopoly. It did not build itself into a monopoly by buying out or bullying its competitors. Instead, its overwhelming capital strength allowed it to absorb very high network infrastructure development costs that other companies could hardly afford. Still, development alone was not enough to maintain Comcast's dominance in the states in which it operates. Rather, it has also entered into agreements with local governments to ensure market dominance.

According to Dr. Rajshree Agarwal of the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, this strategy dates back to AT&T's monopoly on landline telephones throughout most of the 20th century.

In an article in Forbes magazine, Dr. Agarwal writes According to economic law, competition drives down consumer prices and raises quality." But AT&T executives have successfully worked the opposite."

Essentially, AT&T was able to convince local regulators that it was counterintuitive to allow multiple companies to install landlines. Why should a second company come along and dig up the road and lay a new line when the work has already been done?"

The company's "new line was not only a new line, but also a new line that would be installed in the same area.

Such local lobbying allowed the few companies that could afford to lay the lines to carve up the locality and secure control. The result is an oligopoly, where a few operators dominate the market and make it impossible for others to enter.

Some local governments are trying to fight back against the big telecommunications companies by making the Internet a public utility. Called municipal broadband, cities like Ammon, Idaho, and Monticello, Minnesota, offer fiber Internet access for as little as $1.88 per month. However, this is for a basic 15 Mbps plan. Still, gigabit Internet is still affordable, ranging from $10 to $40. In comparison, Comcast's Gigabit Internet costs $90 to $140.

This low-cost competition has understandably been met with intense lobbying from Comcast. Even more surprisingly, state governments have sided with ISPs, making it difficult for municipalities to maintain Internet. In New Braunfels, Texas, it is illegal under state law for municipalities to build broadband. Instead, the town has had to use a hybrid model where it must partner with an ISP.

The extent to which Comcast is reaching out to the government remains unclear. Comcast argued that disclosing the full extent of its lobbying activities would "cause unnecessary expense and divert management's attention from its core business activities." This was in response to an inquiry from Friends Fiduciary, a nonprofit investment management group that, along with other investors, owns more than 1 million shares of Comcast stock.

Essentially, Comcast believed that it had disclosed legally sufficient information and that further disclosure would not be a good use of its time. The problem is that while disclosure at the federal level is strict, it is much more lax at the local level, where Comcast makes many of its moves.

Comcast might argue that lobbying is necessary to protect its interests. Bandwidth is not unlimited, and with Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube all pushing 4K streams, the amount of throughput required has increased dramatically; Netflix's 4K streaming consumes 7 gigabytes in an hour.

Games are also becoming burdensome and heavy; the update for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is 33 GB. With the update, the game has ballooned to over 250 GB.

Comcast's data cap has drawn the ire and eyebrows of local authorities. Last year, when the pandemic began, Comcast decided to remove data caps for all customers for two months. Peak traffic increased 32%, but it was "within the capabilities of our network and we will continue to provide the speeds and support the capacity our customers need to work, learn, and connect from home," the company reaffirmed on its website.

Massachusetts Congressman Andy X. Vargas joined 69 other members of Congress in sending a letter urging Comcast not to install data caps. The letter argued that Comcast's premise that data caps would affect only a small percentage of customers was incorrect. In the last few years, it said, data usage has increased dramatically, exceeding the 1.2 TB threshold by a factor of five.

The letter further stated that "ongoing research indicates that an increasing number of consumers are exceeding these arbitrary limits, forcing them to pay unreasonable over-the-limit fees or subscribe to expensive unlimited plans."

Comcast delayed the rollout of data caps in Massachusetts in response to a bill introduced by Congressman Vargas.

There remain several cities where Comcast has not deployed data caps. These are areas that face strong competition from Verizon FiOS.

The Internet remains a necessary prop for Americans who want to stay connected to friends and family. CEO Brian Roberts needs to eliminate these arbitrary data caps. It is the right thing to do.