Op-Ed

In my role as House Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member, addressing the “digital divide” has been one of my top priorities. In order to address areas that have unreliable broadband, we need to accurately know where those locations are.

The Federal Communications Commission faced criticism from Capitol Hill when a bipartisan letter from the New York delegation complained that the state has been unfairly excluded from participating in the agency’s new $20 billion broadband initiative. Sens.

If Democrats are able to wrest control of the White House and Senate in November, dramatic changes could come to the Federal Communications Commission and US communications policy. Net neutrality would be the major issue revisited. A Democratic-controlled FCC might seek to re-establish a role for the FCC in ISP privacy regulation, especially if Congress does not enact a federal consumer privacy law covering ISPs.

[Ari Fitzgerald is a partner at Hogan Lovells]

Among smart city enthusiasts, digital inclusion — the idea that nobody in the city should be deprived of digital technologies — is an oft-repeated social objective. Despite lofty commitments, the smart city is still a work-in-progress and its record in fostering social inclusion and diversity has been dismal so far. If technological interventions are as apt to deepen divides as redress them, why do proponents insist on the smart city’s promise of lessening urban inequalities?

The problem with using speed alone in assessing the capabilities of broadband networks is that it represents only one product characteristic, and is not necessarily linked with the requirements of the applications commonly used by end consumers.

The Internet Society, a nonprofit to which the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) delegated the duty to host Public Interest Registry (PIR), announced a deal in Nov to sell PIR and its license to sell dot-org names for more than $1 billion. The buyer is Ethos Capital, a private-equity firm with investments in digital advertising, data brokering and other Internet services that has several former ICANN executives on its staff.

Given the challenges confronting emerging innovation economies, district leaders are faced with a difficult, but important question: How can we advance place-based, innovation-driven economic development while ensuring more people reap the benefits? In 2015, stakeholders in Chattanooga (TN) launched a digital-equity initiative, Tech Goes Home (adapted from the successful Boston model), to coincide with the launch of the Innovation District.

Nearly half of Americans do not have an internet connection that meets minimum broadband speeds. Moreover, a staggering number of poor people of color do not have home internet access of any kind. And, across the board, Americans are charged some of the highest prices for internet service in the developed world. These are all symptoms of a much larger, structural problem: the corporate capture of the pipes, wires, and other infrastructure that powers the internet.

To be a part of the modern world, high-speed internet access is no longer optional. We’ve been saying this since at least the 1990s, yet Missouri continues to lag behind other states. Somehow we have entered the third decade of the 2000s with more than 1.2 million Missourians still lacking access to broadband internet. This is more than any other state except California and Texas. Missouri Farm Bureau made broadband access a top priority the past two state legislative sessions.

Frustrated with limited deployments, high prices and slow speeds, some municipalities have decided to take matters into their own hands, installing community networks through muni-fiber. Some cities are installing a conduit system with dark fiber, which gives them the choice to lease to broadband providers or switch to a municipal network in the future. A low-cost, low-risk option, the system allows ISPs to place and maintain their own fiber-optic cables. The city manages the asset leasing and creates an open platform for local provider competition.