Dr George Ford

The Federal Communications Commission plans to adopt both a disparate treatment (intent) and disparate impact (effects) analysis to determine whether there is any discrimination of internet access.

With the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 providing sufficient funding to deploy broadband to nearly every household in the nation, the Digital Discrimination provisions contained in Section 60506 of the statute are a curiosity. Nonetheless, Congress directed the Federal Communications Commission to write rules implementing the statutory provision. The FCC recently released draft final rules implementing Section 60506 in anticipation of its November 2023 Open Meeting which adopt a somewhat standard disparate impact analysis.

In an effort to expand the use of telecommunications services by low-income Americans, the Federal Communications Commission’s Lifeline program offers subsidies to qualifying low-income households. In recent years, the program has undergone significant reform and more modifications have been proposed.

The first statistical evidence on the effects on labor market outcomes of municipal broadband systems. Using data obtained from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, we apply the Difference-in-Differences estimator, augmented with Coarsened Exact Matching and the wild bootstrap, to quantify the economic impact, if any, of the county-wide government-owned network (“GON”) in Chattanooga (TN) on labor market outcomes. Across a variety of empirical models, we find no payoffs in the labor market from the city’s broadband investments.

Looking at the Federal Communications Commission’s Form 477 data from 2015 and 2016, three empirical facts emerge: