The Senate is right: Broadband is infrastructure. Now it’s time to make history.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill, which moved forward in the Senate over the weekend, puts it well: “Access to affordable, reliable, high-speech broadband is essential to full participation in modern life in the United States.” This finding seems so obvious now that it is easy to forget the controversy it provoked pre-pandemic. Senators are right to take this opportunity to bridge a divide that will become only more dangerous as society becomes more digital. The infrastructure debate hinged in its early stages on a not-so-simple question: What is infrastructure, anyway? Legislators are right to agree that broadband counts. After all, Americans don’t get to work on roads, rails and bridges when work is remote. The ability of negotiators to settle on a number as big as the $65 billion in today’s draft legislation is itself impressive. Even more encouraging is the manner in which that $65 billion will be allocated: not only toward creating the connections to make broadband theoretically available to those currently unserved, but also toward making it affordable. These have always been the twin pillars of broadband policy, yet it wasn’t clear until now that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were willing to embrace both.