Op-Ed

The Universal Service Fund (USF) is currently on an unsustainable financial path, funded by a regressive surcharge on a shrinking base of telephone customers. If it isn’t fixed, and fixed quickly, the fund won’t be able to meet its mandate and fulfill its connectivity promise – not just to the next generation, but to the current one. So how do we fix USF? 

MetroNet continues to prove that collaboration is the key to successful fiber optic deployment in over 100 communities across 9 states. Most recently, the cities of Fayetteville and Greenville (NC) announced MetroNet’s intention to construct a fiber optic network providing high-speed internet, television, and phone in their cities with a combined investment by the company of $110 million. How does that happen? 

Policymakers and other stakeholders are becoming more aware of the hazards of assuming everyone has online access. Many are interested in understanding the places where online access may be lower than the norm and the population groups that may have limited or no access to the internet. Recent work I have done sheds light on some of these issues.

Lack of student connectivity at home may seem like a recent problem borne of the digital age. But it has historical antecedents in the movement to ensure all students have access to textbooks that they can use both in school and at home. It should, therefore, be viewed as part of a broader dialogue about what is required for an adequate and equitable education.

As incoming Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, I’m making the case that broadband needs to be at the center of any infrastructure or relief package Congress passes in 2021. It is not dreaming too big to demand, right now: Every community should be connected to the twenty-first century shipping lane and communications pipeline—the Internet.

The Biden Administration’s goals of restoring a functional federal government, driving economic recovery, and “building back better” lend themselves to a new strategy for universalizing broadband, with a three-pronged approach to directly address each of the barriers I have described that have stalled universal access. First, any significant plan for investing in infrastructure must include sufficient funding in the form of grants and loans for both initial capital investment and ongoing operations and maintenance of universal, future-proofed broadband networks. Second, the Administration s

Universal broadband is the 21^st century equivalent of electrification, foundational to equity and economic prosperity in urban and rural communities alike.

Digital literacy is the key component of democratizing the internet. A digitally-literate person has the technical skills to navigate the internet. A digitally-literate person is also media literate, with the ability to critically evaluate the content received and consumed online. Unless we train ourselves, and particularly our children, how to understand and use the internet, it can never realize its vast potential to serve the common good. We must be a digitally literate people. We are not that now. We need to be a digitally literate and media literate people.

People of color and low-income communities have been disproportionately harmed by both the COVID-19 virus and the economic recession.

COVID19 has opened our eyes to a new possibility.  Give people a choice of where to live – one that does not depend on where they make their living – and they vote with their feet for lower density, more green space and, most of all, for affordable costs. It has become clear that the celebrated “magnet cities” are threatened by their own success.  They are dangerously overcrowded.  They are vastly over-priced for all but the most over-paid.  That’s why San Francisco and Manhattan have only half the number of children per household as the US metropolitan average, while suburbs and e