Community Anchor Institutions

The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition released its 2020 Policy Roadmap, outlining the path forward for community anchor institution (CAI) broadband. Schools, libraries, healthcare providers, and other CAIs rely on high-quality broadband to provide essential services to their communities. It is imperative that policymakers, industry, and anchor institutions collaborate to connect all CAIs to affordable, gigabit broadband – a key step in closing the digital divide. The SHLB Coalition will pursue the following policy priorities in 2020:

Facebook and MCNC, the non-profit operator of the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN) are “co-investing” to build a high-speed fiber network interconnecting the rural North Carolina communities of Dobson and Forest City. The latter community is home to a huge data center owned by Facebook. MCNC provides backbone connectivity throughout large portions of North Carolina, including areas where it’s difficult to make a business case for fiber deployment.

Public technology is one of a library’s most important services, according to Peterborough (NH) Town Library director Corinne Chronopoulos. “If I had to pick five things that we offered, that would be number one,” she said. The region’s libraries serve a vital role in an area that has inconsistent access to internet at home. Chronopoulos knows that the library is the sole source of internet for many of her patrons.

In communities where too many people have no access to broadband infrastructure, investing in connections to community anchor institutions is an intermediate step that can pay huge public dividends. Imperial County, located in the sparsely populated desert region of southeastern California, is an exciting example. When relying on a single telecommunications provider and its outdated technology, Imperial County school districts, higher-education institutions, and government agencies had limited access to broadband infrastructure.

As is often the case in other areas of public concern, regulatory volatility coupled with the glacial pace of legal development has created obstacles for libraries seeking to fulfill their missions. Two key challenges for libraries are (1) their ability to access (and provide access to) quality, affordable broadband, and (2) their ability to expand the traditional library practice of owning and lending out physical works into the digital world. Policymakers must pursue sensible broadband and copyright policies to help libraries further their service to the public interest.

The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 along party lines Aug 1 to change long-standing guidelines related to cable franchising fees. The modifications detrimentally affect one of educational media’s great unsung heroes, Public, Educational and Government access television and radio stations nationwide. The effects of the FCC’s decision will go beyond PEG stations. The new rules, which will take effect in Sept, will allow cable companies to assign market values to benefits and charge the amount back to local communities in most cases.

A healthy public sphere needs a healthy public media. We’ve built the equivalent for television and radio. Now it’s time to do it for the Internet. The simplest way to proceed is to tax major technology companies to pay for better content.  A billion-dollar federal funding infusion to upgrade public media would be a start — perhaps paid for by a “journalism tax” on the largest tech platforms, as has been proposed in Britain.

Income is the largest determinant of whether or not someone has access. Only 67 percent of households with less than $25,000 in income have access to a computer, and only 51.7 percent of them have access to internet. In comparison, households making between $50,000 and $99,999 had 93.9 percent of households with a computer and 86.2 percent with internet access. Income can determine whether a community needs to rely on the library for internet access. Rural communities with more low-income people have less home internet access.

Dear Chairman Pai,