Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School

As inventions go, the Internet stacks up with the best of them: the lightbulb, automobile, maybe even fire. However, it’s time for policymakers to look carefully at how its swift transformation of society has affected freedom. Today’s disconcerting answer is that it breaks some essential tools for a civilized society. Furthermore, it equips people with “superpowers” that further rob individuals of their agency. Regulation focused on data privacy and misinformation misses this larger societal threat; public authorities must attend to civilizing the Web.

Digital inequities allow the digital divide to thrive in the most under-resourced communities. Proof of inequity rarely surfaces in isolation and has a compound effect by multiplying the impact of disadvantage. This research was designed to explore three primary questions. First, is there a predominant race and socioeconomic class of the populations most frequently impacted by the digital divide? Second, does the digital divide impose a collective cost that is shared with digitally disadvantaged and connected households? Third, should investing in digital equity be a national priority?

This Black History Month, it is impossible to ignore how economic disparities that have tormented Black and Brown Americans for centuries have also invited digital inequities into the most impoverished communities. Broadband funding is not enough. It is time for transformational broadband policies that support economic resilience in every household. At a time when the labor of Black and Brown Americans was still being used to build wealth from which they were systematically excluded, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was at the center of a movement to welcome all Americans into the U.S. economy.