Kevin Taglang

House Commerce Committee  Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) said, "With the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill today, we are modernizing our crumbling infrastructure, revitalizing our economy, and combating the worsening climate crisis.... the infrastructure bill’s sweeping investments in broadband access, affordability, and adoption will help us close the digital divide. Every community – regardless of zip code – needs and deserves access to reliable, affordable, high-speed internet, and with today’s action we take a giant step toward making that a reality.

One aim of the new Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is to ensure that every American has access to reliable high-speed internet service. Here we begin a multi-part series looking at the major broadband-related provisions of the legislation. First up: over $42 billion for broadband deployment grants to the states. We look at why new broadband maps are so critical to these efforts, what the grants can be used for, the process for states to receive the support, and a timeline moving forward. The U.S.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will not just build broadband networks, it aims to ensure that every American can use reliable high-speed internet service. The Digital Equity Act of 2021 allocates $2.75 billion to the states for digital inclusion planning and the implementation of those plans. Key definitions of digital equity, digital inclusion, and covered populations are included in the new Digital Equity Act. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act also created the State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program and the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program.

Provisions of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provide a new funding mechanism to improve middle-mile infrastructure and make it easier to deliver broadband in currently unserved and underserved areas. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will create a program that makes grants on a technology-neutral, competitive basis to eligible entities for the construction, improvement, or acquisition of middle-mile infrastructure.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act not only provides the means to make broadband service more available by funding deployment of broadband middle-mile and last-mile networks, it also aims to make the service provided more affordable so more people can subscribe and use it.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Congress has allocated many billions of dollars to states, territories and Tribal lands to extend the reach of broadband, including over $42 billion in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. In February 2021, a bipartisan group of senators (1) introduced the Telecommunications Skilled Workforce Act, legislation to address the shortage of trained workers necessary to fill jobs in the telecommunications industry in communities throughout the country.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will facilitate more work to improve broadband service on Tribal lands.

For many, the digital divide is the gap between who has access to broadband infrastructure or who does not. But a truer definition is the gap between who's actually using our most powerful communications tools and who is not. Using this broader measure and examining use around the world, we see that women are being left offline. And this gender gap costs everyone.

We might be tempted to remember this as Mark and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. A series of damaging articles in the Wall Street Journal, a whistleblower testifying before Congress, and a massive outage of the platform. But Facebook's problems date back much farther than this week. The ramifications could last long into the future—and impact much more than the social media giant.