Research

Community networks risk failure when they attempt to emulate models from elsewhere without engaging the community in the process and making appropriate adaptations. These ‘build it and they will come’ models rarely work over the long term. This research project explored claims from residents of a low-income neighbourhood in the “North End” of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada, that inadequate and unaffordable Internet connectivity limits their access to critical communication tools, resources, and information.

The United States has the highest level of maternal mortality of any industrialized country.  And deaths from pregnancy-related causes strike women of color and those who live in rural communities especially hard.  This is a crisis.  It requires everyone to identify how they can help because so many studies show that most pregnancy-related deaths are preventable.... We used authority under the Data Mapping to Save Moms’ Lives Act to update the agency’s Mapping Broadband Health in America platform to include maternal health data.

The Affordable Connectivity Program, or ACP, enrolled more Americans than any previous broadband affordability program in the United States. Despite that success, the ACP faced substantial criticism from conservative members of Congress who saw it as giving away taxpayer dollars to many households that don’t actually need help affording their internet bill. The question going forward is not if the government will subsidize broadband service for Americans, but how. This paper attempts to inform that debate by examining four specific critiques of the ACP:

As broadband expansion efforts in the U.S. continue with historic investments, consumer demand for residential broadband services is of first-order importance. Several past broadband willingness to pay studies estimate the value of broadband to be low, compared to the current national average cost of internet subscriptions being around $65 per month.

A new Pew Research Center analysis of the accounts Americans follow on TikTok highlights the centrality of internet-native content creators, prominent influencers and traditional celebrities on the popular short-form video platform.

Affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband is considered a necessity in the U.S.

The Indian telecommunication market witnessed a distortion in 2016 due to a late-entrant firm's disruptive market entry with deep-discounted pricing; however, Internet penetration marked a considerable increase. Using nationally representative cross-sectional data from the post-market disruption period and an instrumental variable strategy for identification, we estimate the impact of the Internet on the uptake of maternal and child healthcare services. We find that the Internet improves the uptake of antenatal care, institutional delivery, postnatal care, and modern contraceptive use.

In this study, we explore the dynamics of consumer choices in the Polish telecommunications market, focusing on preferences and valuations for home fixed, home mobile, and purely mobile Internet connections. Key attributes such as speed, latency, data limits, and cost are examined. Central to our research is the investigation of how the integration of 5G technology might influence demand elasticity.

During the Trump Administration, the Federal Trade Commission ordered nine of the largest social media and video streaming services—Amazon, Facebook (which is now Meta), YouTube, Twitter (now known as X), Snap, ByteDance (which owns TikTok), Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp—to provide data on how they collect, use, and present personal information, their advertising and user engagement practices, and how their practices affect children and teens.

Congressional failure to pass comprehensive federal data privacy legislation means the vast majority of people in the United States lack protection. This inaction has left an opening for state legislatures to enact their own privacy laws, and, as of now, 19 states have some form of comprehensive data privacy laws on the books. However, many of these states’ laws lack critical protections, including preventing discriminatory uses of data. The imperative to protect privacy is great.