Analysis

Recently a new study seeking to rebut the Federal Communications Commission’s conclusion on investment was made public. The author of the study is Christopher Hooton, Chief Economist of the Internet Association (a proponent of Title II regulation) and a scholar at George Washington University’s Institute of Public Policy. This new paper is not Hooton’s first attempt at an empirical analysis of investment and Net Neutrality, the first being an unskilled effort in 2017. In that work, Hooton fabricated large portions of his data and failed to understand what sort of investments he was studying

NDIA reviews what the term smart communities entail and how local government leaders are cementing divides if they fail to include strategies for digital inclusion and digital equity in their smart community plans. While there is a common misconception that the digital divide is a rural problem, three-fourths of the twenty million American households who still lack home broadband or mobile data connections live in urbanized areas, not in remote rural regions; and they are very likely low-income. There is still an urban digital divide and smart communities could make it worse.

Broadband is emerging as a critical campaign issue for the US 2020 presidential election, and there’s good reason: nearly 60 million people in the US do not have broadband service at home. Despite this staggering fact, only four of the 14 presidential candidates we looked at have released fleshed-out policy proposals to expand broadband access (all of them democrats). On the Democratic side, broadband has become a central piece to many rural revitalization plans but as mentioned, only four candidates have released detailed broadband proposals.

At the outset of their recent Op-Ed, Blair Levin and Larry Downes reject federal policymakers’ singular focus on promoting rural broadband deployment, arguing that the digital divide is not merely a question of rural access. In fact, they rightly note that there are more disconnected folks in urban areas than in rural ones. Millions of disconnected people live where broadband is already deployed, but still don’t subscribe to it.

The broad language of Section 230 should not be interpreted in a way that gives platforms that host third-party content a special exemption from laws that apply to businesses generally, or creates an exemption from the kinds of health, safety, public interest, and economic regulation that governments at every level—from federal agencies to municipalities–engage in. To be clear at the outset, this does not mean that any and all regulations a government may want to enforce are good ideas. Some of them might be. Others might be terrible.

In 2018, the Federal Communications Commission’s Restoring Internet Freedom Order reversed its 2015 decision to apply common carrier regulation to broadband Internet access services under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. Empirical evidence indicating negative investment effects of the regulation played a key role in this reversal, though the quantification of these investment effects were a matter of substantial controversy. This article surveys the studies cited in the recent decision and the FCC’s scrutiny of them.

Two publications released this week have us thinking about the impact the digital divide has on education, schools, and students. In many schools around the country, teachers might be able to take for granted that their students have access to the internet outside of school. Unfortunately, for too many students, that just isn't true. The resulting "Homework Gap" is expanding inequity. 

Based on growing signs that platforms are tipping toward monopoly in key market functions, it is very likely that antitrust is not enough of a solution without targeted regulation that opens markets to new competition. Perhaps the most important change we need is competition-expanding regulations that address the  problems antitrust cannot solve.  A new expert regulator equipped by Congress with the tools to promote entry and expansion in these markets could actually expand competition to benefit consumers, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

First, the only way to fix the Digital Divide is to deal with the fact that America has paid multiple times for fiber optic deployments, upgrades of the state-based telecommunications utilities that are mainly controlled by AT&T, Verizon and Centurylink. Unfortunately, for the most part, the companies never delivered and this, in part, created the Digital Divide. Second, at the core — IRREGULATORS v FCC is new, current challenge to expose one of the largest accounting scandals in American history.

In 2012, 70 percent of schools lacked internet connections fast enough to support basic administrative and instructional needs (100 kilobytes per person), but now only 1.6 percent of school districts fail to meet that low bar. Despite this progress, the Federal Communications Commission is considering changes to the E-Rate program, which subsidizes internet access in schools across the country. The proposal would cap spending and potentially decrease the funding available to schools.