Promise, Perils and the Big Switch Ahead for AI and BEAD

Today, government officials have new strategic decisions to make just as momentous as the ones the intersection of policy and technology dumped in our Federal Communications Commission laps back in the early 1990’s. As we look out on a future in which more and more of our economic and civic activity involves online communications, we should not forget there is an urgent and critical task: eliminating the digital divide. Just as restricting home ownership in the 1930’s still causes negative reverberations for us today, so too, if restrictions on digital access and utilization, whatever their cause, were allowed to continue, it will weaken our economy and society for generations to come. This has been clear at least since 2010 when the National Broadband Plan found that “The cost of this digital exclusion is large and growing.” Congress put this understanding into law when, in the 2021 infrastructure bill, it wrote that “a broadband connection and digital literacy are increasingly critical to how individuals participate in the society, economy, and civic institutions of the United States; and access health care and essential services, obtain education, and build careers.” And it provided funds to build networks everywhere and to assure that all could afford the service. It is a great thing, and a necessary thing, to understand the divide and commit resources to address it. It is another, however, to effectively execute in solving the problem.