Ivonne Santiago Lopez

The Ajit Pai-led Federal Communications Commission failed to include very important data about the status of broadband availability in the US territories affected by these 2017 disasters in 2019’s Broadband Deployment Report. The FCC specifically said it chose not to report on data from disaster-stricken areas “so that such damage does not artificially deflate progress in deployment and that we can continue to track progress in rehabilitating such networks.” However, the choice not to include disaster-stricken areas is indeed that -- a choice.