States have made significant strides toward improving the availability and affordability of broadband service in recent years. A key step in many of those efforts has been the development of formal, statewide broadband expansion plans, often at the behest of the state legislature or as a strategic component of the state’s broadband program, that use data and stakeholder input to identify and refine goals, recommend activities, and detail implementation strategies. In its 2020 report, “How States Are Expanding Broadband Access,” The Pew Charitable Trusts examined the importance of plans to the success of state broadband programs. Broadband plans have been essential in guiding states’ efforts to expand high-speed internet access. Since 2021, these plans have taken on a new level of importance because the federal government requires that states create broadband plans to qualify for billions of dollars for new grants through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). For this brief, Pew drew on its previous research and examples from existing state plans to identify the key elements of effective broadband plans. State broadband leaders, federal policymakers, advocates, researchers, and other stakeholders can use this information to support the development and review of state broadband plans.

[Anna Read is senior officer and Kathryn de Wit is project director at The Pew Charitable Trusts' Broadband Access Initiative.]

Our broadband policies always seem to lag the market. If and when the Federal Communications Commission seats the fifth Commissioner, it’s expected that the agency will raise the definition of broadband from 25/3 Mbps to 100/20 Mbps. That change will have big repercussions in the market because it will mean that anybody that can’t buy broadband speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps would not have broadband. There is a much easier way to define broadband. The cable companies have regularly increased the speeds of their minimum broadband products, and in my mind, when they do so, they set a new standard target for parity between rural and urban areas. Recently both Charter and Cable One increased the minimum speeds of basic broadband to 200 Mbps download. Charter is increasing speeds automatically with no rate changes. Cable One’s change seems like more of a quiet rate increase since it will charge customers $5 more per month to automatically move them from 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps. It’s ludicrous that there are still federal grants that award more money for serving areas with broadband speeds under 25/3 Mbps. If the real goal of the federal government is to have parity between rural and urban broadband speeds, then Charter and Cable One just provided us with a new definition of broadband. If somebody uses federal grant money to build a rural market with 100 Mbps download technology, it’s already out of parity in 2022, and it’s hard to imagine how far it will be out of parity by the time the grant-funded network is built and operational.

[Doug Dawson is President of CCG Consulting.]

Social media companies are often accused of anti-conservative bias, particularly in terms of which users they suspend. Here, we evaluate this possibility empirically. We begin with a survey of 4,900 Americans, which showed strong bipartisan support for social media companies taking actions against online misinformation. We then investigated potential political bias in suspension patterns and identified a set of 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020, and followed them through the six months after the U.S. 2020 election. During that period, while only 7.7% of the Democratic users were suspended, 35.6% of the Republican users were suspended. The Republican users, however, shared substantially more news from misinformation sites – as judged by either fact-checkers or politically balanced crowds – than the Democratic users. Critically, we found that users’ misinformation sharing was as predictive of suspension as was their political orientation. Thus, the observation that Republicans were more likely to be suspended than Democrats provides no support for the claim that Twitter showed political bias in its suspension practices. Instead, the observed asymmetry could be explained entirely by the tendency of Republicans to share more misinformation. While support for action against misinformation is bipartisan, the sharing of misinformation – at least at this historical moment – is heavily asymmetric across parties. As a result, our study shows that it is inappropriate to make inferences about political bias from asymmetries in suspension rates.