Dana Floberg

The nation’s largest prison and jail telecommunications corporation, Securus, effectively defaulted on more than a billion dollars of debt. After decades of preying on incarcerated people and their loved ones with exploitative call rates and other predatory practices that have driven millions of families into debt, Securus is being crushed under the weight of its own. In March 2024, the company’s creditors gave the corporation an eight-month extension to pay up, urging its sale to a new owner to stave off an otherwise imminent bankruptcy.

Free Press and Access Now filed reply comments with the Federal Communications Commission urging strong and rapid implementation of the Emergency Broadband Benefit program.

Free Press and Access Now filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission urging strong and rapid implementation of the Emergency Broadband Benefit program established by Congress in the latest pandemic relief package. The EBB program offers a monthly benefit of up to $50  to low-income families and those financially impacted by the COVID-19 emergency. The benefit would help cover the cost of any broadband plan offered by participating internet providers.

No amount of lying by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai will change this reality: The Trump FCC’s repeal of Net Neutrality protections and agency authority were wrong in 2017 and they’re still wrong today.

Before you solve a problem, you’ve got to be able to understand it. The Federal Communications Commission recently voted to deepen its understanding of the digital divide by making several improvements to its broadband maps, as required by the Broadband DATA Act. The agency’s goal is to ensure that its maps showing where broadband is and isn’t available are more accurate and more granular.

Public interest commenters, including public safety officials, overwhelmingly agreed with Free Press’s assessment that the Federal Communications Commission’s misguided repeal of Net Neutrality and its authority over broadband internet access service (“BIAS”) harms the Lifeline program, pole attachment regulation, and public safety. These commenters also overwhelmingly agreed that the best remedy for such harms would be for the Commission to once again correctly classify broadband as a Title II service protected by strong open internet rules.

Nationwide, approximately 22% of households don’t have home internet, including more than 4 million households with school-age children.

The digital divide means that a digital census raises new problems when it comes to counting correctly. Approximately 22 percent of households nationwide still don’t have home broadband, which means they’ll have a harder time responding to an online census. Even among those who have home broadband, people of color and low-income families are more likely to depend exclusively on mobile internet.

Free Press Action released its 2020 Right to Connect Voter Guide, an analysis of presidential candidates’ positions on vital media and technology policies. It analyzes the positions of nine Democratic and Republican presidential candidates polling at 3 percent or above in recent national polls. Sens Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) stand out for their proposals to invest billions to expand internet access and rein in steep broadband prices that keep low-income families and people of color offline.

At the outset of their recent Op-Ed, Blair Levin and Larry Downes reject federal policymakers’ singular focus on promoting rural broadband deployment, arguing that the digital divide is not merely a question of rural access. In fact, they rightly note that there are more disconnected folks in urban areas than in rural ones. Millions of disconnected people live where broadband is already deployed, but still don’t subscribe to it.