NDIA to FCC: “Closing digital divide” means your annual broadband report should look at affordability, digital redlining

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) has called on the Federal Communications Commission to prove its commitment to “closing the digital divide” by adding home broadband affordability, the broadband adoption rates of low income households, and the digital redlining of urban neighborhoods to the issues covered by the agency’s upcoming 2019 Broadband Deployment Report. NDIA’s challenge was included in comments submitted recently by Executive Director Angela Siefer in response to an FCC Notice of Inquiry “Concerning Deployment of Advanced Telecommunications Capability to All Americans in a Reasonable and Timely Fashion”. 

Both 2018’s NOI and the 2018 Report, issued last March, include sections entitled “Commission Efforts to Close the Digital Divide”.  But neither the “Digital Divide” sections nor the documents as a whole have anything to say about the affordability of broadband access; about measuring (let alone increasing) broadband access for lower-income households; or about any other aspect of digital inclusion. And except for a passing reference to NDIA’s comments in the last NOI process, both documents are silent about the history of Internet service providers’ deliberate non-deployment policies (redlining) affecting millions of urban residents.