Half-Connected America

America has two half-connected segments and a third that is not connected at all, and the policy conversation gets all three wrong. The two half-connected segments are mirror images, each on a single network: the household with a phone and no home internet, 14.8 million strong at 11.5% of the country in the 2024 American Community Survey five-year estimates, and its mirror, the household with home broadband and no cell phone, three to six million adults the industry does not track. The third segment is connected to nothing, 11.5 million households, 8.9%, with no internet subscription of any kind, and most of them are offline by choice. The dominant reason they give is not price and not availability; it is that they do not want the internet, and that answer has grown through every subsidy era. Much of the disconnection in this country is a decision, not a deprivation, and a free society owes that decision the respect of its dignity, not a conversion campaign. The two half-connected segments fail the policy frame differently: it prices the connection and forgets the endpoint. Lifeline and the programs after it hand a low-income household a working phone with the service included; no program of any size hands that household a computer. A home with no computer gets nothing from a wired connection the phone in its pocket does not already deliver. Call it the missing screen.