The digital divide in Illinois remains wide and deep. At least 2.9 million individuals in 1.3 million households (roughly 28 percent) do not have a subscription to high-speed internet. This gap is driven by gaps in infrastructure availability, affordability of subscriptions or devices, and/or limited digital skills. The state of Illinois is committed to changing this picture. Digital equity requires affordable broadband. Today, most affordable subscription costs in Illinois range from $25 to $50, depending on the plan. In the statewide resident phone survey, 17 percent of respondents said they found it difficult to afford their internet bill, and 14 percent experienced disrupted service because they had difficulty paying. About 29 percent were categorized as “subscription-vulnerable” meaning—they have lost service because of difficulty paying broadband bills, find it very difficult to afford service, or live at or near the poverty line. Individuals in Illinois with an annual household income under $30,000 have a much harder time paying for internet services—67 percent of surveyed individuals in this group find it difficult to pay for service, versus 17 percent of the general population. They are 15 percent more likely to experience service interruption due to difficulty in paying, and 40 percent more likely to be subscription vulnerable. The state's strategy for expanding access to affordable plans relied heavily on the Federal Communications Commission's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which ran out of money earlier this year. Illinois had hoped to address affordability and improve broadband adoption by increasing enrollment in ACP. Illinois' plan for just over $1 billion in Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program funding sets a vision for an Illinois with state-driven broadband ubiquity—and lasting broadband equity. Illinois seeks to ensure universal access to high-speed broadband that is affordable, reliable, and fully scalable for residences, businesses, and community anchor institutions across Illinois.

Minnesota is undertaking a multibillion investment to expand reliable high-speed internet access to hundreds of thousands of homes, businesses, farms, schools, and other community institutions. However, these investments are occurring as construction employers are experiencing acute labor shortages. Only a small minority of Minnesota’ taxpayer-funded broadband projects pay prevailing wages, which data shows leads to less hiring of local businesses, lower wages for construction workers, and lower levels of workforce productivity. Minnesota may consider expanding prevailing wage coverage on broadband projects to help combat skilled labor shortages and improve transparency and accountability for taxpayers. Expanding prevailing wage coverage to more broadband projects would likely bolster economic and workforce outcomes on these projects and ensure that they are built safely, on-time, and within budget by Minnesota-based contractors who employ skilled local workers.

For the past couple of years, unrelenting change has come fast. New education technologies seem to flow out in an unstoppable stream. These often have consequences, from an increase in cheating on assignments enabled by prose-spewing chatbots, to experiments that bring AI into classrooms as teaching assistants or even as students. For some teachers and school leaders, it can feel like an onslaught. Some educators connect AI to broader changes that they perceive have been harmful to students, says Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. But in this ever-shifting stream of change, Lake is among those who believe new technology can be steered in a way that navigates schools to a more promising channel for reducing disparities in education in the U.S. However, if that’s going to happen, it’s imperative that education leaders start pushing AI to transform teaching and learning in ways that are beneficial, particularly for low-income and historically disadvantaged students, observers like Lake argue. If artificial intelligence doesn’t help solve disparities, advocates worry, it will worsen them.

In June 2024, more than 20 years of music journalism disappeared when the MTV News archives were taken offline. This, and other online data wipeouts (like the accidental deletion of MySpace in 2016) have archivists alarm bells ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. There is more stuff being created now than at any time in history—but  our data is more fragile than ever. Over the past two decades, the Internet Archive has amassed a gigantic library of material scraped from around the web. Its Wayback Machine, which lets users rewind to see how certain websites looked at any point in time, has more than 800 billion web pages stored and captures a further 650 million each day. It’s a Sisyphean task. As a society, we’re creating so much new stuff that we must always delete more things than we did the year before, says Jack Cushman, director at Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab, where he helps libraries and technologists learn from one another. We “have to figure out what gets saved and what doesn’t,” he says. “And how do we decide?”