Benton Foundation

I am so honored today to present the second annual Charles Benton Digital Equity Champion Award. Charles’ life was a testament to the principle that real change is the result of sustained effort. He saw in communications a tool that can and should be employed to make communities better, to help people thrive, and to improve our democracy. He was a consistent champion for digital inclusion and the idea that every member of a community should have affordable access, and the required skills, to make use of the latest communications technologies. From MIT to the Ford Foundation; from Zero Divide to the City and County of San Francisco; from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Broadband USA to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Emy Tseng’s work embodies a “sustained commitment to digital inclusion programs, practices, and policy work.” Practitioner, policy leader, researcher, funder, program partner: these are the varied roles Emy has played. Her impact stretches from the San Francisco Bay area, throughout the United States, and to many countries abroad. Near and dear to my heart is Emy’s service to the nation through the Broadband Opportunities Technology Program.

May 18 the Federal Communications Commission voted 2–-1 to initiate a notice of proposed rulemaking pertaining to its Network Neutrality rules. We are concerned about the possible impact of this rulemaking on the Lifeline program’s support for broadband service. We care deeply about the Lifeline broadband program because it mitigates the affordability barrier to broadband services in our homes — which is particularly acute for low-income people and people of color — and because broadband access removes barriers to educational, emergency, and civil services and job opportunities. We strongly support the FCC's recent Lifeline modernization order, which added stand-alone broadband internet service to Lifeline. We urge the Commission to ensure that nothing in this rulemaking will harm, impair, or weaken the ability of the Lifeline program to help low-income families to afford broadband service so that they can take part in the modern economy. We also urge the Commission to avoid any shift in Lifeline resources or policy that distracts from the program's core goal of defraying the cost of communications services.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) announced that this year’s recipient of the Charles Benton Digital Equity Champion Award is Emy Tseng, a Senior Communications Program Specialist at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the US Department of Commerce. Since joining the NTIA in 2009, Tseng has worked to increase broadband access and adoption in underserved communities throughout the United States. From 2009 to 2014, she managed a portfolio of local government and K-12 education grants for the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. She was a major contributor to the Broadband Adoption Toolkit published by NTIA in 2013. She continues her work with NTIA’s BroadbandUSA program providing technical assistance to local and state governments that foster digital equity. Throughout her career, Tseng has demonstrated the ability to combine policy, practice, and data to create a holistic approach to digital inclusion. Before joining NTIA, Tseng served as the Digital Inclusion Director for the City of San Francisco, where she shaped one of the earliest local government digital inclusion programs and served on the first California State Broadband Task Force. Her work in San Francisco not only promoted computer ownership, digital skills, and Internet access, but also paid special attention to the needs of marginalized communities, showing that it is in the best interest of cities to bridge the digital divide. Tseng additionally served as a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where her work on “inclusive innovation” analyzed how vulnerable communities use, adapt, and shape technology to address their needs and goals.

In recent years, government agencies, private foundations, and community-based organizations have increasingly sought to understand how programs that promote digital inclusion lead to social and economic outcomes for individuals, programs, and communities. This push to measure outcomes has been driven, in part, by a larger trend to ensure that dollars are being used efficiently to improve lives rather than simply to deliver services. A new report, published by Benton Foundation, describes the challenges facing community-based organizations and other key stakeholders in using outcomes-based evaluation to measure the success of their digital inclusion programs and offers recommendations toward addressing these shared barriers. This new research builds off Dr. Colin Rhinesmith’s Digital Inclusion and Meaningful Broadband Adoption Initiatives, released in early 2016. That report identified the core offerings of digital inclusion organizations – from providing low-cost broadband, and the devices to connect to it, while helping new broadband adopters gain the skills they need to navigate the Internet and online services. In this national study of digital inclusion organizations, Dr. Rhinesmith also noted that most of the digital inclusion organizations that participated in this study did not have outcomes-based evaluation frameworks. However, all recognized the importance of having them. This finding led us to conduct this deeper research on the challenges surrounding outcomes-based evaluation. Twenty-some years ago community technology centers offered training and public access to computers (a few with Internet access). Today we have digital inclusion programs provided by community-based organizations, libraries, and local government. The purpose twenty years ago was not the technology but what one could do with it. The same is true today. The difference is that we are now trying to clearly define the outcomes of access and use of the technology. What we do with the technology and the outcomes will continue to evolve as the technology evolves.

During the same week that President Donald Trump fired the man in charge of the investigation into the Trump Administration’s ties to Russia, Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of local television stations in the United States, agreed to buy Tribune Media for $3.9 billion. Sinclair is set to acquire Tribune Media’s 42 stations and a prized asset, WGN America, a basic cable and satellite television channel. With the deal, Sinclair will reach more than 70 percent of American households with stations in many major markets, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The proposed deal was made possible by a deregulatory vote by the Federal Communications Commission last month. It seems as though the Trump Administration, by paving the way for increased media ownership consolidation, is granting this conservative-leaning station group owner greater influence over our civic discourse. This is a major development that could fly beneath the radar while our attention is drawn to the White House-induced crisis at the FBI.

[Commentary] Local governments are leading the way to implement innovative, forward-looking civic technology programs that narrow the digital divide and make cities more livable. But for all the impressive initiatives out there, many brilliant ideas never get off the ground for lack of resources. So last year, with support from the Democracy Fund and Benton Foundation, Next Century Cities launched the Charles Benton Next Generation Engagement Award. The competitive civic innovation prize invited cities to propose out-of-the-box solutions to local challenges. Last August, after an extensive review process, our team of expert judges – including Benton Foundation Executive Director Adrianne Furniss – chose three finalists: Austin (TX), Raleigh (NC), and Louisville (KY). Each received a seed grant to launch their local civic technology or digital inclusion program. Next Century Cities staff worked with the cities to put the grant to work and get their programs up and running.
[Todd O’Boyle is Deputy Director of Next Century Cities]

[Commentary] In the week since Federal Communications Commission Chairman Pai benton logoopened a new chapter in the ongoing network neutrality debate, the courts and Congress have confirmed that the ball is squarely in the FCC's court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected a request to further review the net neutrality rules it upheld in 2016, citing the Chairman’s upcoming Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) as the reason. In the legislative branch, Republican Senators introduced a bill that would nullify the FCC’s net neutrality rules and prevent any future action by the FCC. But Senate Democrats claim a bipartisan compromise is highly unlikely. For now, net neutrality's future is at the FCC.

Under the new Trump Administration, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moved quickly to take concrete steps to advance parts of Chairman Pai’s digital empowerment agenda to advance broadband across America. In February, the FCC voted to adopt rules for the upcoming Mobility Fund Phase II auction and the Connect America Fund Phase II auction. More recently, the Chairman established a Task Force to oversee the two auctions, signaling that these auctions are a priority for the agency. That’s progress – but the real question is – what needs to happen next to have successful auctions for these universal service subsidies? The Connect America Phase II auction will focus on two discrete areas of the country – 1) areas where the incumbent telephone company declined an earlier offer of universal service subsidies, and 2) areas that are deemed extremely costly to serve, based on a FCC-developed cost model. The nearly $200 million in annual funding over a ten-year term – almost $2 billion overall – is far below the amount calculated by the model to serve these areas using fiber technology, but support levels could be significantly lower to the extent winning bidders can leverage existing assets or deploy alternative technologies.

[Commentary] Stop me if you’ve heard this before. News leaked that the Federal Communications Commission Chairman will propose new network neutrality rules to ensure a free and open Internet. People freaked out. FCC Chairman outlines his plan for net neutrality. People freak out more. FCC Chairman releases full net neutrality proposal. All Hell breaks loose. Although there’s generally been bipartisan agreement that broadband subscribers deserve consumer protection, there’s never been political consensus on how to ensure those protections. For anyone scoring at home, here's how we arrived at where we are this week. And here's what to expect in the weeks ahead.

It is always a sad day when government regulators choose commercial interests over the public interest. When the FCC’s net neutrality rules were adopted in February 2015, the Benton Foundation proclaimed them “the greatest commitment ever made to preserve and protect an open and free Internet.” Today, FCC Chairman Pai and Commissioner O’Rielly celebrated their latest moves to favor large Internet service providers over the American values of access and equity, democracy and diversity, opportunity and innovation. The message I heard from the commissioners and other speakers: “No one is against net neutrality; we’re just against any rules to ensure it.” Chairman Pai’s plan is not what the American people want or are asking for. Americans want to employ any legal applications, content, devices, and services of their choosing on the broadband networks they rely on. Americans want the Internet to remain a platform for all consumers, content creators, and innovators, regardless of their ability to pay infrastructure owners special fees for special access. I am sure the American people will tell Chairman Pai and Commissioner O’Rielly what they want. I hope the commissioners will listen.