Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

On March 31, the National Urban League released the Lewis Latimer Plan for Digital Equity and Inclusion, a collaborative work aimed at addressing the digital divide. If you have the time, follow the link above and give the full report a read. If not, here's the executive summary.

On March 31, President Joe Biden traveled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to unveil his American Jobs Plan, and what he touts as a once-in-a-generation investment to rebuild the country's infrastructure. The plan calls for investing $100 billion to ensure everyone in America has access to high-speed broadband infrastructure.

What constitutes a lifeline in 2021? Is it a phone? A smartphone? A fixed-location broadband connection? Or some combination of all these services?

To help schools and libraries provide devices and internet connectivity to students, school staff, and library patrons during the pandemic, Congress established a $7.171 billion Emergency Connectivity Fund as part of the recently enacted American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. Now the Federal Communications Commission must craft rules to distribute the new funds to eligible schools and libraries for the purchase of eligible equipment and advanced telecommunications and information services for use by students, school staff, and library patrons at locations other than a school or library.

Policymakers and other stakeholders are becoming more aware of the hazards of assuming everyone has online access. Many are interested in understanding the places where online access may be lower than the norm and the population groups that may have limited or no access to the internet. Recent work I have done sheds light on some of these issues.

On March 11, President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, the latest effort to address the continued impact of COVID-19 on the economy, public health, state and local governments, individuals, and businesses.

Universal broadband is the 21^st century equivalent of electrification, foundational to equity and economic prosperity in urban and rural communities alike.

Digital literacy is the key component of democratizing the internet. A digitally-literate person has the technical skills to navigate the internet. A digitally-literate person is also media literate, with the ability to critically evaluate the content received and consumed online. Unless we train ourselves, and particularly our children, how to understand and use the internet, it can never realize its vast potential to serve the common good. We must be a digitally literate people. We are not that now. We need to be a digitally literate and media literate people.

On March 10, the US House of Representatives passed the American Rescue Plan, a coronavirus relief package that includes more than $7 billion in funding for the E-Rate program to support emergency broadband connectivity and devices for schools and libraries and their students, staff, and patrons.

COVID19 has opened our eyes to a new possibility.  Give people a choice of where to live – one that does not depend on where they make their living – and they vote with their feet for lower density, more green space and, most of all, for affordable costs. It has become clear that the celebrated “magnet cities” are threatened by their own success.  They are dangerously overcrowded.  They are vastly over-priced for all but the most over-paid.  That’s why San Francisco and Manhattan have only half the number of children per household as the US metropolitan average, while suburbs and e