Friday, May 17, 2024
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Sen Klobuchar Reintroduces Bill to Promote Competition and Improve Antitrust Enforcement
A National Strategy to Close the Digital Divide?
Digital and Educational Equity: How States Plan to Partner with Educational Institutions
Digital Equity
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Broadband Infrastructure
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Net Neutrality
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Education
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Telehealth
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Platforms/Social Media
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AI
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Antitrust
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Devices
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Digital Equity
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On May 15, 2024, the House of Representatives passed the National Telecommunications and Information Administration Reauthorization Act of 2024 (H.R. 4510). Tucked in the 100-page bill is a call for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's (NTIA) Office of Internet Connectivity and Growth to develop and submit to Congress a national strategy to close the digital divide. Here is a quick look at what Congress is asking for.
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The Affordability Connectivity Program, a federal program that helped lower-income households pay their Internet bills and connect to the Internet, fully expires at the end of May, but Rep Kathy Manning (D-NC) is calling for it to continue. Rep Manning enlisted Guilford County and Rockingham County schools superintendents and State Senator Michael Garrett (D-27), to help make the case. Rockingham County Superintendent John Stover said the school district invested effort and dollars, alongside other partners, toward expanding infrastructure for families to access the Internet in the county. "I really hope that the Affordable Connectivity Program is not one of those programs that gets cut off at the knees, and I'm really worried about it," he said. "The worst thing we could do is have all that infrastructure in place and then, at the most crucial time, cut it for our families."
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Some $100 billion in U.S. broadband investment will be spent in rural areas before the end of the decade to close the digital divide. Yet industry leaders warn that a middle mile gap will remain if we aren’t careful. The National Telecommunication and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Middle Mile Program has made 39 awards amounting to around $980 million since it was announced in summer 2023. The total project costs were almost twice that, at about $1.8 billion. But industry leaders have long cautioned that the program likely isn’t enough on its own. If the middle mile goes ignored, the industry won’t be able to connect “all of the new last mile connections that we are planning on building in the coming four years,” said Sachin Gupta, director of Government Business and Economic Development at Centranet. Building last fiber mile networks and leaving rural markets lacking the middle mile is akin to having beautiful roads in your rural town without any real connection to the highway, he added. “We will still have a digital divide of capacity in these areas.”
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The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) provides $42.45 billion in grant funding to states via the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program (BEAD). IIJA also underscores that any state receiving these funds may not exclude local governments from applying to use these funds to build their own broadband networks. Yet, 17 states have laws that do exactly this. With tens of billions of dollars about to be disbursed, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)—the government agency tasked with overseeing BEAD—continues to ignore a looming legal quandary that could mire the program in lawsuits. This legal paradox is not subtle. The IIJA is quite explicit: states may not exclude local governments from eligibility for BEAD funding. NTIA has ignored this looming problem for more than two years but is now out of time. And if NTIA does not reconcile this grant eligibility issue, it will be guilty of allocating billions of dollars in federal funding in violation of federal statute.
[Christopher Ali is the Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications and Professor of Telecommunications in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. David Elliot Berman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Media, Inequality & Change Center at the University of Pennsylvania studying media policy and journalism. Sydney L. Forde is a PhD candidate in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. Her work focuses on the political economy of communications and media industries, media policy, and critical theory. Sascha Meinrath is the Palmer Chair in Telecommunications in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University and the director of X-Lab. Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy and Co-Director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.]
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As the Federal Communications Commission reinstates Title II regulation, the definition of broadband defines what is and isn’t directly regulated. In the Order that reinstated Title II regulation, the FCC notes that it continues “to define 'broadband Internet access service' as a mass-market retail service by wire or radio that provides the capability to transmit data to and receive data from all or substantially all Internet endpoints, including any capabilities that are incidental to and enable the operation of the communications service, but excluding dial-up Internet access service.” It’s a short definition, but it raises some interesting regulatory questions. I think that from a practical perspective the FCC’s definition is out of touch of the market when looking at broadband sold to small and medium businesses. The FCC definition assumes that most businesses are buying a mass-market product at a standard range of speeds and prices. That’s not my experience in looking at real business broadband. The same is true for schools and libraries. What is most interesting about the definition of broadband is that anything that doesn’t fit neatly under the definition of broadband is not directly regulated by the FCC.
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Digital equity cannot be fully realized without the participation of educational institutions, including K-12 public schools, community colleges, historically black and other minority serving colleges and universities, and extension programs. Many state digital equity plans embrace education and potential collaborations with educational institutions. All states acknowledge that digital equity is critical to education. All learners need access to connected devices, software, and the internet—as well as to trained educators to help them navigate those tools. But some states go further than others in efforts to collaborate and partner with educational institutions. States’ approaches to the role of educational institutions in digital inclusion work generally fall into three categories:
- The state acknowledges that a lack of digital equity impedes educational quality and attainment.
- The state plans to collaborate with educational institutions, primarily for device distribution.
- The state plans to partner with educational institutions in order to achieve digital equity, both in terms of access/affordability and in terms of teaching digital skills.
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Elon Musk’s ongoing war against the Brazilian judiciary is more than just another high-profile feud between arguably the world’s most prolific right-wing troll (who also happens to be one of its richest men) and the liberal governments that vex him. By going after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes after he ordered numerous right-wing accounts removed from X in that country, Musk has turned a debate over Brazilian censorship into a global conservative cause celebre. He’s also, perhaps unintentionally, giving a voice to one of the great unspoken transformations in the global politics of tech. World governments have taken their first tenuous steps into a new, fraught role: “the mods.” That is, the moderators: The people responsible on forums and social media platforms for policing speech online, banning users, removing posts and generally reducing conflict in digital arenas. This puts governments squarely into a decades-old online power struggle that has been brewing since before the “internet” per se existed—and the shape and persistence of that fight should give them pause about what exactly they’re getting into here.
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Brightspeed launched a high-speed internet service that it hopes to reach 160,000 homes and small businesses in Johnson City, Elizabethton, Kingsport, and other surrounding communities in Tennessee. Brightspeed, which is headquartered in Charlotte (NC), is currently the nation’s fourth-largest fiber broadband builder. The company is looking to fill a need in a market where one in 10 Tennessee residents do not have access to high-speed internet. Brightspeed was one of the recipients of $162.7 million in state broadband grants that were announced by Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN) and the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development in April 2024. That money is being used to expand broadband in another part of Tennessee that is serviced by Brightspeed. Brightspeed plans to serve 41,500 locations in Johnson City, where it currently has service available to 25,500 homes and businesses.
Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org), Grace Tepper (grace AT benton DOT org), and Zoe Walker (zwalker AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.
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