Wednesday, May 5, 2021
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Here's how you can apply to the FCC for the $50 discount on your broadband bill
The internet is excluding Asian-Americans who don’t speak English
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You may be eligible for a $50 monthly coronavirus pandemic discount on your home broadband bill starting May 12. The Emergency Broadband Benefit Program was included as part of the roughly $900 billion COVID-19 relief package passed by Congress in December 2020 and signed by President Trump. It set aside $3.2 billion for the Federal Communications Commission to cover the program. You qualify for the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) if you currently qualify for the Lifeline program, the program that helps low-income Americans purchase broadband access. You also qualify if you are on Medicaid or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Any household with income at or below 135% of the federal poverty guidelines is eligible, as are those in the free and reduced-price school lunch program and school breakfast program. Also eligible, those who had a substantial loss of income since Feb. 29, 2020 – and are at or below $99,000 for single filers and $198,000 for joint filers.
To sign up, you can visit the Get Emergency Broadband site for more information how to get the benefit. It will soon also have a search function to find providers near you. It will also tell you what documents you need to prove your eligibility such as a tax return, Social Security statement of benefits, and a furlough notice, for instance. Online and printable applications will be available on the Get Emergency Broadband site. Some providers such as Q-Link are already signing up consumers. Recipients of the benefit do not get the money directly. Your provider gets the funds to cover the discount directly from the EBB.
By one estimate, three million students nationwide, roughly the school-age population of Florida, stopped going to classes, virtual or in person, after the pandemic began. A disproportionate number of those disengaged students are lower-income Black, Latino, and Native American children who have struggled to keep up in classrooms that are partly or fully remote, for reasons ranging from poor internet service to needing to support their families by working or caring for siblings. Many are homeless or English language learners. Others whose parents work outside the home have struggled in the absence of adult supervision. Studies of how much learning American students have lost in the past year are underway, but the preliminary reports are mostly grim. Even one of the more optimistic surveys found significant losses in math, with a doubling of the proportion of students described as “sliders,” because they had moved down in their rankings compared with a typical year. Another national study, from the assessment company Curriculum Associates, found a decline of up to 16 percent in the number of elementary school students performing at grade level in math, and up to 10 percent in the number of students performing at grade level in reading.
The web itself is built on an English-first architecture, and most of the big social media platforms that host public discourse in the United States put English first too. And as technologies become proxies for civic spaces in the United States, the primacy of English has been magnified. For Asian-Americans, the move to digital means that access to democratic institutions—everything from voting registration to local news—is impeded by linguistic barriers.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic began towards the tail end of the first quarter of 2020. The impact was immediate and has forever changed bandwidth usage patterns. As 2020 came to an end, subscribers, on average, were consuming close to one half of a terabyte (TB) of data, up 40% from 2019. The pandemic impact is even more pronounced with the growth in upstream bandwidth. OpenVault predicts that by December 2021, the average broadband consumption per household will be around 600-650 gigabytes -- that's more than six times the average broadband consumption level since 2015.
The wireless industry is beginning to wind down 2G and 3G networks in an effort to repurpose that spectrum for ultra-fast 5G. But lawmakers and public interest groups are increasingly concerned that shutting down those old networks could leave millions of people who still rely on them without service, particularly in rural areas. And there’s new pressure for the Federal Communications Commission to intervene. The Public Interest Spectrum Coalition -- which includes Public Knowledge, the Rural Wireless Association, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, and other groups -- in a letter urged the FCC to mediate an ongoing dispute between T-Mobile and Dish over T-Mobile’s impending shutdown of its 3G CDMA network. Dish says that it relies on that network to provide voice and text services for millions of wireless customers. This fight between Dish and T-Mobile is “only the first dispute to come before the Commission as a consequence of the ongoing efforts by carriers to sunset their 2G and 3G networks,” the coalition wrote. A group of 13 senators recently pressed telecom companies over how they’re ensuring they don’t hurt elderly and rural populations in the transition to 5G. “Consumers that are struggling financially or have no other mobile wireless options need adequate information and support so they do not suffer additional hardships as companies begin to shut down these legacy services,” they wrote. Telecom companies are pushing ahead quickly. Most of the companies have set timelines for sunsetting the 2G and 3G networks beginning in 2022, and there’s certain to be more questions about the best way to go about it over the next year.
Facebook's newly formed Oversight Board—a group of 20 lawyers, professors and other independent experts who consider appeals to decisions made by the company—has been charged with interpreting Facebook’s numerous detailed rules governing everything from the depiction of graffiti to swearing at newsworthy figures. The board’s most closely watched decision is expected May 5—whether Facebook appropriately applied its rules when it booted former President Donald Trump indefinitely from the platform. Lawmakers have repeatedly grilled Mark Zuckerberg about the issue, prompting the CEO to repeat his mantra that nobody would ever think such delicate work should be handled by a private company. Still, the challenge remains: how best to police a platform that every day sees billions of posts, comments and photos.
The upcoming sale of Yahoo and AOL to a private equity firm for $5 billion represents a massive media markdown. At their dotcom bubble peaks, Yahoo and AOL were valued at more than $125 billion and $200 billion, respectively, or $193 billion and $318 billion in 2021 dollars. AOL made one giant mistake. It famously bought Time Warner for $182 billion in cash and stock in 2000, saddling the company with debt just before the dotcom bubble burst and the rise of broadband made AOL's dial-up services virtually obsolete. While the deal may have helped AOL survive parts of the crash, the failure to execute on a vision for the combined company during a time of economic turmoil ultimately left AOL with unmanageable losses. Yahoo spent years making lots of smaller bad deals. It spent nearly $10 billion in 1999 buying GeoCities and Broadcast.com, both of which the company eventually shut down. It spent $1.1 billion on Tumblr in 2013, and sold it for less than $3 million in 2019. It sold half of its 40% stake in Alibaba for $7.6 billion in 2012, two years before Alibaba went public for 5 times more. It rejected a $44.6 billion takeover offer from Microsoft in 2008, only to sell to Verizon for 10% of that value less than ten years later. Verizon's media assets still pull in massive amounts of traffic, and Apollo sees an opportunity to juice more money out of Yahoo and AOL's brands by investing in their ad tech. Sources say Apollo is interested in working with a casino sportsbook to license the Yahoo Sports brand.
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) and Robbie McBeath (rmcbeath AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.
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