The FCC Says It Is All About Closing the Digital Divide. How Is It Doing?

The Federal Communications Commission's top priority is closing the digital divide. In its latest inquiry into broadband deployment, the FCC asks how successful its efforts have been. Congress requires the FCC to determine each year if broadband is reaching all Americans in a timely fashion. For the past three years, the FCC's Republican majority, relying on its faulty data, has concluded that broadband is being deployed to all Americans on a reasonable and timely basis. Will it do so again? Benton collects news on universal broadband every day for our Headlines newsletter. During the COVID-19 national emergency, we've featured article after article about how stay-at-home orders have impacted people. For people with robust residential broadband service, lockdowns may have been somewhat bearable. For people without reliable broadband, the pandemic has been devastating. We quickly review what we've been reading over the last six months, in hopes we get a sense of how close we are to ensuring that affordable broadband reaches everyone in America. Without accurate broadband data, perhaps a survey of reporting from communities across the country can help us answer the question.