Diversity

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Deputy Secretary Don Graves hosted Latino elected officials, leaders, and stakeholder organizations to solicit their input on Commerce initiatives that will assist in promoting inclusive economic growth for Latino communities. In 2022, the Department of Commerce released its first-ever Equity Action Plan that addresses the importance of building an economy that empowers all people, especially in underserved communities. The 

On August 21, 2023, the Minnesota Office of Broadband Development released its Draft Digital Opportunity Plan for public comment. According to the plan, Minnesota's vision for digital equity is a future where digital equity connects all Minnesota residents to opportunities, options, and each other. The Office of Broadband Development created this plan following extensive stakeholder engagement and digital equity data collection.

The Chairs of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, Congressional Black Caucus, and Congressional Hispanic Caucus wrote to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to urge quick action to replenish one of the Biden-Harris Administration’s signature initiatives – the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP)—created in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The Biden-Harris Administration has consistently led on internet access and affordability issues and has done more to close the digital divide than its predecessors.

If you Google the question “Is the Internet killing local languages and cultures,” you will receive a lot of results that suggest the answer is yes. But if you look at them a bit more closely, you will see that the most dire warnings tend to be from 2010 to 2017. More recent results often take the opposite stance—that technology actually helps preserve local languages. Advances in machine translation are clearly part of this shift in opinion. But there are also important economic, geopolitical, and cultural forces at work. Languages have always evolved as if in a marketplace.

Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) and Representative Doris Matsui (D-CA) reintroduced their Algorithmic Justice and Online Platform Transparency Act. Specifically, the Algorithmic Justice and Online Platform Transparency Act would:

The recommendations in this report focus on the Federal Communications Commission's Community Equity and Diversity Council's mission of “advancing equity in the provision of access to digital communication services and products for all people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, location, sex or disability.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel circulated a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to her colleagues to initiate a proceeding to understand challenges related to distribution and supply in the video market, especially as it relates to independent programming. If adopted, this Notice of Proposed Rulemaking would initiate a new proceeding to seek comment on the current state of the marketplace for diverse and independent programming.

In July 2013, activists first used the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to spark conversation about racism, violence and the criminal justice system following George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Ten years later, Black Lives Matter stands as a model of a new generation of social movements intrinsically linked to social media.

[The National Telecommunications and Information Administration] just announced the amounts each state and territory will receive from the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. That includes $813 million for Tennessee to build future-proof networks to connect everyone in the state. Our task is simple, but it’s monumental: we are going to bridge the digital divide. For good. But we cannot reach that goal without industry stepping up.