February 2016

The title of the Sesame Workshop report gets it exactly right: “Opportunity for All.” It reminds us that the struggle for digital equity is part of the struggle to uphold our most fundamental American values. We can do better. We must do better. One way we will do better is by retooling the Federal Communications Commission’s Lifeline program. A modernized Lifeline allows participants the opportunity to move to the other side of the digital divide, eventually erasing the line between Internet haves and have-nots. So the first principle of Lifeline reform is allowing the program to support both fixed and mobile broadband service.

Promoting adoption of broadband goes hand-in-hand with efforts to ensure access. The ConnectHome initiative is the laudable result. Moving forward, when we talk about digital equity, we need to remember that we’re talking a key part of the answer to many of our nation’s greatest challenges – issues like income inequality, job creation, economic growth, US competitiveness. The stakes couldn’t be much higher. That’s why the FCC won’t let our foot off the gas in our efforts to promote opportunity and prosperity through communications technology. And that’s why we all need to continue working together to expand the benefits of broadband to all Americans.

Drone strikes and labia surgery. On the surface, they don't appear to have much in common. But when people tried to post stories about these topics on Facebook, they were blocked. "The content you're trying to share includes a link that our security systems detected to be unsafe," read one notification. What gives? That's what nonprofit OnlineCensorship.org is trying to understand. "We decided that in order to bring more transparency, we'd need to collect the data ourselves," said Jillian York, cofounder of OnlineCensorship.org.

The site, which launched in its current form in November, aims to be a platform for reporting censorship on social media. People can submit screenshots of posts that they feel have been "erroneously or unjustly" removed from six of the most popular social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google+ and Flickr. As part of the submission -- which can be done anonymously -- users answer questions about their age and why they think the content was censored. Since November, there have been more than 200 submissions. Facebook, for example, prohibits nudity, hate speech or graphic images that glorify violence. It has also banned the private sale of guns and drugs. But a post about bullfighting? The company banned it -- then backpedaled. It also banned a post from a woman in Turkey critiquing Charlie Hebdo.

[Commentary] The federal budget process has great benefit for governing the $3 trillion in spending that agencies conduct each year. Through the budget process, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is able to develop resource allocations for thousands of government programs, work with congressional appropriations committees to enact them, and oversee performance. At the same time, the budget process is lengthy and complex and a hindrance to rapid innovation. For example, the budget agreement that Congress reached in December 2015 required agencies to propose new ideas starting in spring 2014, and spending on those priorities will likely not conclude until the fall of 2016. Any change within this two-year-plus time horizon comes within the context of priorities set at the beginning of the two-year cycle. This long term planning cycle has great benefit for capital investment.

At the same time, these processes limit any course correction since any rebalancing of investment priorities must often be accompanied by complex and lengthy reprogramming requests. Reforming the current rules that call for all development spending to be treated in the same way as operations spending would be a significant benefit for government IT innovation.

[Dan Chenok is executive director of the IBM Center for The Business of Government]