New America

The record shows extensive opposition to the Federal Communications Commission’s 2017 Restoring Internet Freedom Order and the grave danger it poses to public safety and public health, particularly during the COVID-19 crisis. Public health and public safety officials detail in the record how both officials and the public writ large rely on mass-market retail broadband internet access services (BIAS).

Interoperability is a promising lever for regulators to use in their efforts to oversee and correct monopolistic abuses amongst the dominant online platforms. It has a unique ability to promote and incentivize competition—especially competition between platforms—and can also offer users greater privacy and better control over their personal data generally.

When schools across the country were forced to shutter abruptly last month, headlines plastered the news with urgent questions about remote teaching and learning in times of crisis. But what remains largely absent from media coverage, nationwide analyses, and research is home connectivity among teachers. Do all p+PreK-12 teachers have Internet access at home? Do they all have high-speed broadband that allows them to stream video and run Zoom classrooms, keeping up with the demands of schools and districts?

New America’s Open Technology Institute called on the Federal Communications Commission to use its existing authority and universal service budget to extend connectivity to students without broadband access to help facilitate remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the emergency request filing, OTI urges the FCC to act to empower schools and libraries to close the homework gap using the Universal Service Fund (USF) and E-Rate and Lifeline programs. 

The historic $2 trillion “economic rescue” bill includes key funding, which New America explains here, for a number of education initiatives ranging from early childhood to post-secondary. What it doesn’t include, noticeably, is a robust response for helping households gain better online access.

This report, the first in a two-part series, articulates the connection between surveillance-based business models and the health of democracy. Drawing from Ranking Digital Rights’s extensive research on corporate policies and digital rights, we examine two overarching types of algorithms, give examples of how these technologies are used both to propagate and prohibit different forms of online speech (including targeted ads), and show how they can cause or catalyze social harm, particularly in the context of the 2020 U.S. election.