Nicol Turner Lee

The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) was established to address one of the contributing factors to the US digital divide—monthly affordability of services. The initial $14 billion that once sounded like a generous investment toward these concerns is now expected to run out. After a year of predictions that high enrollments would lead to this moment, Congress has finally started to take notice.

In the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Congress tasked the Federal Communications Commission to “take steps to ensure that all people of the United States benefit from equal access to broadband internet access within the service area of a provider of such service.” In the statute, the term “equal access” refers to “equal opportunity to subscribe to an offered service that provides comparable speeds, capacities, latency, and other quality of service metrics in a given area, for comparable terms and conditions.” In principle, Congress’s directive is straightforward and reasonable cons

With a White House and Senate under Democratic control, passing sweeping legislation may be a challenge for House Republicans, but it’s likely that they will apply pressure on the current and forthcoming tech policy goals of the Biden-Harris administration. Despite Republicans’ concerns with the current administration’s spending, closing the digital divide should be an area of opportunity for bipartisan action, especially since many Republicans have constituents in severely underserved rural areas.

The United States has long struggled with a health care system that is both expensive and often inaccessible when it comes to providing certain populations with equitable care. The White House and Congress acted quickly to transition patients to telehealth during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the future adoption and use of telehealth will depend on how the U.S. health care system addresses coverage and reimbursement, medical licensure, and service modalities.

Even with Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funds, the federal government will once again fail to address digital disparities without a clear definition of the problems being solved and a lack of substantive feedback from local stakeholders who understand the conditions of their communities. Part of this failure rests on the reliance of policymakers on regulatory guidance from communications policies drafted before the cont

As the conditions of students without home broadband access or a device mirror the broad systemic inequalities of the US, Congress must do more than offer piecemeal funding to connect K-12 students to the internet.

California’s 2018 net neutrality law, SB-822, recently went into effect and concerns have been already raised about the legality of “zero-rating,” the practice by which commercial arrangements and unilateral decisions by network operators are exempted from consumer pricing. Under California’s net neutrality law, zero-rating and sponsored data programs violate the new law because certain content cannot be excluded from consumer data caps, or usage-based pricing. Turner Lee offers the following recommendations to state and federal leaders:

Leveraging high-speed broadband access, I present several ideas for ensuring all K-12 students can learn during a time of in-person schooling shutdowns and other uncertainties: transform vacant local establishments into classrooms and provide technology access through unused business equipment; enable Wi-Fi in federally assisted housing or in parked school buses; reconfigure digital parking lots into digital parks; and utilize local organizations to help solve local digital access challenges.

Every K-12 school must have a 21st-century remote access plan to complement the CDC guidance and  Congress must direct the necessary funding for bringing broadband access to all public schools in the next coronavirus stimulus bill.

On April 10, Apple and Google announced their response to the call for digital contact tracing, which would involve subscribers voluntarily downloading an app. While it is seemingly clear that widespread contact tracing and surveillance can help identify coronavirus cases and possible hot spots for new and recurring infections, several questions remain. The first one is related to the security and anonymity of one’s personal data.