New America

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.

New America's Open Technology Institute urged the Federal Communications Commission to abandon a cynical set of proposals that would weaken the Lifeline program and jeopardize consumer privacy.

Ten years ago, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s landmark speech on internet freedom elevated the promotion of a free and open global internet to a key US foreign policy priority. A decade later, online freedom across the world has declined steadily—including, recently, in America. The new decade represents an opportunity to reverse this trend.