Jessica Dine

In a time when broadband affordability still plays a major role in the digital divide, the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) meets an obvious need. Roughly two years into the program, around 23 million households are enrolled for discounted broadband and a one-time device subsidy. We should be able to consider this case closed: We now have a strong, effective mechanism for closing the affordability gap. Indeed, ACP enjoys bipartisan support, and its virtues are extolled by industry and consumer advocates alike.

Policymakers inundated with self-serving arguments for specific spectrum allocation need ways to evaluate which actually advance the public interest. By focusing on the goal of productive spectrum use, one can differentiate between reasoning that would enhance productivity and that which would only advance private interests.

In the third decade of the 21st century, getting online is no longer optional, and providing financial assistance to US households that can’t afford broadband should be as much a given as food stamps. More broadly, from a macro perspective, high rates of broadband use benefit society and the economy; and from a micro perspective, those least likely to be online are those who would in many ways benefit most from it. In both cases, broadband policy should prioritize connecting remaining offline households in order to achieve universal connectivity.

Digital inclusion efforts need to target the reasons people remain offline, and at this point, the digital divide is more of a problem of adoption than deployment. Successful digital inclusion efforts have a few key things in common: They are flexible and individualized, adhere to consistent high-level standards, and share best practices to minimize waste while adapting programs to meet local needs. Digital inclusion efforts include any of the various attempts to get people online.

With the rapid rise of wireless technology, the demand for access to the spectrum has increased in recent years. However, there are critical and interrelated gaps and failures in the process and policies used for efficiently allocating the spectrum in the US. Key takeaways from an analysis on this issue include the following:

The federal government’s use of spectrum dates back to the beginning when radio frequencies were used to communicate—and so does the policy question of how to apportion spectrum access between government and private uses. The federal government has important missions that require the use of the electromagnetic spectrum. But federal spectrum lacks market discipline and profit motives, so it does not tend toward efficient use. Six proposals to improve upon this include the following:

It turns out there are two digital divides in America. The first one is the familiar divide between those who have Internet subscriptions and those who don’t. Everyone agrees this is a persistent concern, with about 10 percent of the public lacking subscriptions at the last count.

Opponents of the current private-sector-provided broadband system have long engaged in a campaign to convince people that US broadband is deficient. Critics malign the quality of US broadband networks by claiming the speeds are too slow. But the question of speed is deceptively complex since there is general confusion over what constitutes “fast” broadband.

Policymakers in the US and other nations have begun to consider, and in some cases implement, policies that seek to get edge companies—those who produce and send content to end users over the Internet—to pay a larger share of the cost to build and maintain Internet service providers’ (ISPs’) broadband network infrastructure.

Comparisons between US and European broadband prices abound, but their respective markets are built on such entirely different cost structures as to make any comparison between the two meaningless without accounting for the differences in necessary expenditures. A longstanding narrative that US broadband prices are exorbitantly higher than their European peers’ buttresses claims of European superiority and calls for similar unbundling requirements and regulated competition in the U.S telecom industry.