Adoption

Even as businesses in Pittsburgh (PA) compete to commercialize artificial intelligence and give machines the human quality of “learning,” just a three-hour drive away people struggle with dial-up connections — if there are internet connections at all. More than 24 million Americans — 800,000 in Pennsylvania and mostly in rural areas — lack an internet connection that meets a federal minimum standard for speed. The result is a yawning divide in commerce, education and medicine that’s splitting America into the digital haves and have-nots.

How do you Google a question you do not know the specific vocabulary to phrase? How do you sort through all the answers that come up, and avoid the ads that provide false or misleading information? Many people that we work with do not find high-quality, web-based resources to be accessible, even though the resources are technically available. While accessibility is near impossible without availability, availability without accessibility is perhaps even more disappointing.

When Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai decided to do away with the widely popular “network neutrality” rules that governed the Internet, his justification was that the regulations were slowing deployment. But a new analysis by the Center for Public Integrity plus other factors cited by industry experts show that reasoning to be shallow at best and ridiculous at worst.

Using data from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS), released in September 2017 by the US Census Bureau, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance ranked all 185 US cities with more than 50,000 households by the total percentage of each city’s households lacking fixed broadband internet subscriptions. Note that this data is not an indication of the availability of home broadband service, but rather of the extent to which households are actually connected to it.

The digital divide is showing signs of giving way as more Americans from all walks of life connect to the Internet. Several historically disadvantaged groups showed significant increases in online adoption, according to initial results from NTIA’s most recent survey on Internet use conducted by the US Census Bureau.

During my tenure at the Commission, many of our nation's most prominent broadband Internet service providers (ISPs) have created or participated in programs that promised to lower affordability barriers that prevent low-income communities from bridging digital divides. Over the past several years, some have offered stand-alone broadband service offerings at discounted rates for those families that meet certain criteria. Unfortunately, it is difficult for us to measure the success of those programs due to a lack of publicly available data.

[Commentary] Maps that accurately illustrate broadband coverage are needed to help direct both public and private sector efforts to areas without sufficient access.

[Press release] The Federal Communications Commission is working to promote the benefits of broadband service among older Americans. Many older Americans remain on the sidelines of the digital revolution, lagging far behind the generations that have followed. Why the lag? An important factor is that seniors have not been a typical target demographic for early adoption and the lion’s share of product marketing remains focused on younger Americans.

[Speech] I believe that the networks that we rely on should be totally free of discrimination, and should reflect our greatest democratic ideals. I believe that our networks are more valuable to all of us when they connect all of us. I believe that public resources should be deployed primarily on behalf of the public. I believe that we have a moral obligation to serve the unserved and close existing gaps, while allowing existing prosperity to continue, so long as it does not cause undue disadvantage to anyone else.

Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY) led 47 Members of Congress in writing to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai urging the commission to preserve the Lifeline program. Lifeline is a federal assistance program under the FCC that provides communications services to low-income consumers. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, nearly 20 percent of Puerto Rico’s population has relied on Lifeline for essential telecommunications services.