Blair Levin

As businesses and governments race to make sense of the impacts of new, powerful AI systems, governments around the world are jostling to take the lead on regulation. Business leaders should be focused on who is likely to win this race, more so than the questions of how or even when AI will be regulated.

Today, government officials have new strategic decisions to make just as momentous as the ones the intersection of policy and technology dumped in our Federal Communications Commission laps back in the early 1990’s. As we look out on a future in which more and more of our economic and civic activity involves online communications, we should not forget there is an urgent and critical task: eliminating the digital divide.

In his most recent State of the Union address, President Joe Biden highlighted the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program for connecting unserved and underserved locations to broadband. However, in the same address, President Biden went on to declare that “when we do these projects, we’re going to buy American...I’m also announcing new standards to require all construction materials used in federal infrastructure projects to be made in America.” The problem is that the country can close the rural digital divide in the next few years, or it can enforce a strict

History always renders a powerful and positive verdict for any group that understands that there are some things that cannot be allowed to divide a nation. And then acts to close that divide. I don’t want claim that the achieving universal broadband connectivity has the same moral imperative as ending slavery or drastically reducing poverty. But it is no small thing. And sometimes things that are not front-page news, overtime have enormous impacts.

The North Star of communications policy should be to make services faster, better, and cheaper for all. Yet, next year, about 50 million Americans could find that their access to the core communications service of our time—broadband—has become slower, worse, and more expensive, with many even likely to be disconnected. That shift would constitute the biggest step any country has ever taken to widen, rather than close, its digital divide. The reason for the potential debacle?

The Federal Communications Commission is an important institution. It oversees a huge input to our information economy: Spectrum. Fortunately, three decades ago, we developed a method for allocating spectrum that has garnered bipartisan praise, been copied around the world, underlaid two Nobel prizes, and is arguably the most successful communications policy innovation ever. Unfortunately, Congress can’t decide how to reauthorize that auction authority. Congressional dysfunction? Alas, not weird. The stakes are high: billions in investment capital, 10x more in economic impact.

In 2023, broadband policy debates will center on how states expend tens of billions of dollars to deploy broadband networks in unserved and underserved areas, most through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. But that will not be the most consequential broadband deployment of the year.

The digital divide was first recognized in the mid-1990s. Three decades later, due in part to long-standing economic inequity and the economics of broadband, it remains an impediment to inclusive economic growth, particularly in Black American communities. There are five steps that state and local leaders and broadband stakeholders could take to expand broadband access and promote digital equity and inclusion in Black communities:

Through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), every state will receive at least $100 million to start via the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. Allocation of this much federal money to states for a specific objective without a long-standing local department or agency in place to ensure the funds are deployed wisely is rare. Many states do not have a dedicated broadband team. If they do, it is often staffed by just a few people who are tucked inside another agency or staffed by a third party.

Unlike roads, bridges, ports, water systems, and transit, broadband was the only infrastructure Congress funded in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that had not been subject to multiple prior bipartisan spending efforts. One can dismiss this difference on the grounds that the physical nature of broadband is similar enough to projects in prior infrastructure legislation that including it was not a great leap. Still, unlike transportation and water systems, broadband is primarily funded by private capital.