Assessing Broadband Affordability Initiatives

Reducing the broadband affordability gap is an important and noble goal. Unfortunately, it is far from clear whether Lifeline, the federal program tasked with getting low-income households online, actually addresses this problem. For over a decade, academics, government watchdogs, and independent auditors have criticized the Federal Communications Commission’s inability or unwillingness to measure the program’s effectiveness—while private studies suggest much of this spending may be misdirected toward families at no risk of losing internet access. The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) represents a significant expansion of the benefits available under Lifeline. But at the ACP’s core, one finds the same fundamental flaw that fatally infects Lifeline: It gives a monthly subsidy to a wide range of recipients based on income or participation in other federal programs, on the unproven assumption that these payments will improve broadband adoption rates among low-income families. Like Lifeline, ACP’s proponents have not studied the relevant population to determine the drivers of low-income non-adoption. Given that well over 70 percent of ACP-eligible households already subscribe to broadband service, giving $30 per month to such a wide swath of recipients makes it likely that significant sums of money will be wasted on households that are not at risk of canceling their broadband service. With careful study and some minor legislative tweaks to the existing statute, ACP could avoid duplicating the efficiency and effectiveness problems that have long plagued the Lifeline program.

• First, policymakers should adopt a data-driven approach to subsidy distribution. Rather than simply offering an arbitrary amount in assistance to anyone who qualifies for other forms of government assistance, the FCC should identify and survey low-income households that currently lack broadband, to identify these families’ characteristics and ascertain the barriers to adoption.
• With the results of this study, the agency then could design eligibility criteria that target low-income non-adopters in particular, rather than continuing Lifeline’s scattershot program of aiding all low-income households broadly.
• Finally, with a better-tailored ACP program to help close the low-income broadband gap, Congress should shutter the Lifeline program.