Twenty-three million families in the U.S. will have bigger internet bills starting in May. That’s because a federal broadband subsidy program they’re enrolled in is nearly out of money. Dozens of people joined Biden administration officials, advocates and Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) at a Washington public library to make a last-ditch plea to extend the Affordable Connectivity Program, a subsidy created by Congress and touted by President Joe Biden as part of his push to bring internet access to every U.S. household. The program, which is set to expire at the end of May, helps people with limited means pay their broadband bills. Assistance will be slashed starting in May, when enrolled households will only receive partial credits toward their internet bills. Barring any Congressional action to infuse the Affordable Connectivity Program with more cash, the subsidies will end completely at the end of the month. Welch and other lawmakers from both political parties introduced legislation earlier this year to extend the program through the end of the year with $7 billion. The White House has pushed for an extension but it has not happened so far. 

Since 2021, struggling Americans have made ends meet with the help of a popular federal benefit known as the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which covers home internet service. But in just a few weeks their internet bills could skyrocket by hundreds of dollars a year. That’s because the ACP is running out of funds—and Congress shows no signs it will approve more. Policy experts have described the situation as a fast-approaching economic crisis and a major step backward for closing the digital divide between internet haves and have-nots. The collapse of the ACP will affect nearly 60 million individual Americans, going by Census Bureau population estimates. The program is heavily used by Americans over age 50, military veterans and low-income working families nationwide, according to Federal Communications Commission data. Many ACP subscribers have told CNN they are irate at Congress for letting them down and, through inaction, taking away a basic, essential utility. 

ECFiber customers in danger of losing a $30 monthly credit on their bill as the federal Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) expires will receive a one-month extension directly from ECFiber. The decision was made by the executive committee in hopes that the ACP program funding will be replenished by congressional action in the coming weeks. “We can move quickly because we are a small community-oriented ISP,” said committee member Irv Thomae, who chaired ECFiber for many years, “but we cannot provide this support on our own for very long.” ECFiber has also been enhancing the ACP benefit by providing a private $20 monthly credit through its internal affordability fund, which previously had been the source of donations totaling $270,000 to the now-inactive Equal Access to Broadband, Inc., a nonprofit that ECFiber leadership created to develop affordability programs prior to the advent of the ACP. The full governing board of ECFiber had previously voted to continue the $20 subsidy for the remainder of 2024.

President Biden’s Investing in America agenda is making once-in-a-generation investments in America’s infrastructure and our clean energy future that are creating good-paying and union jobs, establishing and growing new industries in the United States, tackling the climate crisis, and helping lower costs for families. To deploy these investments, the Biden-Harris Administration has taken aggressive action to accelerate project permitting and environmental reviews. The Administration has developed and is currently executing a Permitting Action Plan; secured $1 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act to improve permitting; passed important reforms in the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act that made commonsense changes to the environmental review process, including setting deadlines for completion of reviews and making documents more readable by limiting their length; and took a number of administrative actions to simplify and accelerate the permitting process. By taking these actions, the Administration is ensuring that industry can move forward with key investments and projects, including building out clean energy and transmission, while also being responsible stewards of the environment and protecting communities.

Accelerating construction of high-speed internet projects. In March, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation extended a process for faster historic preservation reviews for communications infrastructure projects on federal lands to all such projects both on and off federal lands. This action will shorten historic preservation reviews from over a year to less than three months. In addition, in April, the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) established and adopted a total of 36 new categorical exclusions that will unlock faster reviews for projects that do not have significant environmental effects. NTIA also developed and released a permitting and environmental mapping tool to help grant recipients and others deploying infrastructure for high-speed Internet service to identify permit requirements and avoid potential environmental impacts. In addition, also in April, the Department of the Interior issued a final rule to streamline approvals of broadband projects on Bureau of Land Management managed lands. Other projects are moving forward, such as DMCI Broadband. In October 2022 the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded $6 million—through Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act—to DMCI broadband in Michigan to be used to deploy a fiber-to-the-premises network to connect 2,899 people, 94 farms, 56 businesses, and four educational facilities to high-speed internet in Branch and Hillsdale counties in Michigan. After being awarded funding in 2022, the environmental review and approval took less than two months.

 There are several important changes to the broadband industry that came out of our collective pandemic experience.

• Many millions of people suddenly cared about upload speeds,
• The main impact for ISPs of having customers working from home is that it created a lot of customers who are intolerant of broadband outages, and
• There was so much press about poor rural broadband that I think this was the first time that a lot of urban and suburban people realized that rural folks don’t have the same broadband.

[Benton has been tracking Coronavirus and Connectivity since 2020. See https://www.benton.org/coronavirusandconnectivity]

Connect Humanity, a non-profit impact investor, is collaborating with Microsoft to support high-speed internet access and adoption in underserved Appalachian communities. Connect Humanity’s IDEA Fund (Investing in Digital Equity Appalachia) plans to invest in community-focused internet service providers which are best placed to meet the digital needs of residents and businesses in Appalachia’s unserved areas. Connect Humanity aims to convene a diverse group of capital partners including Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), banks, impact investors, and foundations to meet this need through IDEA. Microsoft has committed “first loss” capital as a credit enhancement in IDEA Fund. Connect Humanity intends to use this blended capital approach to offer financing at affordable rates and flexible terms that enable ISPs to build in high-cost and/or low-income areas on a sustainable basis.

We write to request that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigate several automobile manufacturers — Toyota, Nissan, Subaru, Volkswagen, BMW, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, and Kia — for deceiving their customers by falsely claiming to require a warrant or court order before turning over customer location data to government agencies. Recent investigations by our offices confirmed that only some of the car companies are honoring this commitment. Other companies revealed they turn over Americans’ location data to the government with a mere subpoena, which does not require a judge’s review and approval. Our investigations found that five car companies put their customers’ privacy first by requiring a warrant for location data, absent an emergency or customer consent: GM, Honda, Ford, Tesla and Stellantis. In contrast, Toyota, Nissan, Subaru, Volkswagen, BMW, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, and Kia all confirmed that they will disclose location data to U.S. government agencies in response to subpoenas, which do not require a judge’s approval. 

This paper studies the impact of the introduction of fiber broadband in North Carolina, through the lens of student achievement. Campbell links granular data on new fiber construction and advertised download speeds with administrative test score data and local labor market data. Exploiting variation in fiber availability at the census block group level, Campbell implements a difference-in-differences design and find modest effects on educational outcomes, roughly equivalent to lowering class sizes by one student. Campbell shows fiber increases local employment and search intensity for supplementary educational materials. Last, Campbell shows that increased competition from fiber providers drives quality improvements in other available technology.

[This paper won a 2022 TPRC Charles Benton Early Career Scholar Award]

Reps. Mike Kelly (R-PA), Mike Thompson (D-CA), and Adrian Smith (R-NE)  introduced H.R. 8151, bipartisan legislation that would permanently expand the list of practitioners eligible who provide telehealth services to include qualified physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech language pathologists, and audiologists. Currently, these practitioners do not have permanent authorization to deliver electronic or virtual care to their patients. Families have come to rely on telehealth since the COVID-19 pandemic. Congress must act to preserve these authorities so that families, particularly in rural and underserved areas, have equal access to world-class health care. 

The ACCESS BROADBAND Act requires the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Office of Internet Connectivity and Growth (OICG) to submit to relevant congressional committees and publish on its website an annual report that contains a description of OICG’s work for the previous year and the number of U.S. residents connected to broadband through federal broadband support programs and the Universal Service Fund Program.  The OICG Annual Report describes the work of OICG, fulfilling the statutory requirement of the ACCESS BROADBAND Act. The 2023 OICG Annual Report provides an overview of the work accomplished by OICG across its initiatives over the prior calendar year as it administers the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 federal broadband grant programs. This is the third report prepared under the requirements of the ACCESS BROADBAND Act. The ACCESS BROADBAND Act also mandates that OICG report on “how many residents of the United States were provided broadband by which universal service mechanism or which Federal broadband support program,” and include an “estimate of the economic impact of such broadband deployment efforts on local economies, including any effect on small businesses or jobs.” NTIA’s forthcoming Federal Broadband Funding Report fulfills the remaining ACCESS BROADBAND Act requirements.