Phoenix Center

Explaining non-adoption for Internet service has led to a debate about whether non-adopters place a low value on Internet use or whether the price of connectivity is too high. Survey evidence consistently points to a lack of interest as more important than price, but a new report by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance claims that recent survey evidence points to price as the dominant cause. The conclusion is impermissible.

Recently a new study seeking to rebut the Federal Communications Commission’s conclusion on investment was made public. The author of the study is Christopher Hooton, Chief Economist of the Internet Association (a proponent of Title II regulation) and a scholar at George Washington University’s Institute of Public Policy. This new paper is not Hooton’s first attempt at an empirical analysis of investment and Net Neutrality, the first being an unskilled effort in 2017. In that work, Hooton fabricated large portions of his data and failed to understand what sort of investments he was studying

In an effort to expand the use of telecommunications services by low-income Americans, the Federal Communications Commission’s Lifeline program offers subsidies to qualifying low-income households. In recent years, the program has undergone significant reform and more modifications have been proposed.

Broadband availability data is collected from broadband providers at the census block level, which is the smallest geographic unit used by the Census Bureau for data tabulation. In collecting and reporting these data, it is assumed that if a single home in a census block has access to broadband (however defined), then every home in the census block has broadband.

The first statistical evidence on the effects on labor market outcomes of municipal broadband systems. Using data obtained from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, we apply the Difference-in-Differences estimator, augmented with Coarsened Exact Matching and the wild bootstrap, to quantify the economic impact, if any, of the county-wide government-owned network (“GON”) in Chattanooga (TN) on labor market outcomes. Across a variety of empirical models, we find no payoffs in the labor market from the city’s broadband investments.