US's digital divide 'is going to kill people' as Covid-19 exposes inequalities

The COVID-19 crisis is exposing how the cracks in the US’s creaking digital infrastructure are potentially putting lives at risk, exclusive research shows. With most of the country on lockdown and millions relying on the internet for work, healthcare, education and shopping, research by M-Lab, an open source project which monitors global internet performance, showed that internet service slowed across the country after the lockdown. “This is going to kill people,” said Sascha Meinrath, a professor at Penn State University and co-founder of M-Lab. After looking at the internet connection speeds for individual IP addresses, M-Lab found that more than 50% of customers in 325 US counties stopped getting internet download speeds that met the government definition of broadband between the final two weeks of Feb and the final two weeks of March. The drop in connectivity is affecting both rural and urban areas with populations already underserved by the medical system or racked with poverty.

In Congress, the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) included $2 billion for schools and libraries to help keep people connected in a draft version of an economic stimulus bill responding to coronavirus, but it was scrubbed out of the final legislation. Instead, $200 million is being directed to telehealth initiatives and $125 million to distance learning. Benton Senior Fellow and Public Advocate Gigi Sohn said this was far from enough money to meet the broadband needs of people during the coronavirus outbreak. “Congress didn’t take it seriously,” said Sohn. “It’s a shame it’s taken a pandemic for people to realize if you don’t have internet access you’re cut off from participation in society.”