Incremental progress and temporary band-aids to mend the digital divide aren't a sufficient response to such a fundamental obstacle to equity and opportunity; as the late Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis argued, unequal internet access is "the civil rights issue of the 21st Century." That's why Congress must now work to transform the temporary Emergency Broadband Benefit initiative into a permanent broadband assistance program. Civil rights advocates–including the National Urban League, the NAACP, and the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council–have laid out a bold, direct solution to this crisis in digital equality: a long-term, federally-funded Permanent Broadband Benefit (PBB) program. Faith leaders are also speaking out in support of the PBB proposal, emphasizing that full digital enfranchisement is a prerequisite to full civic and political enfranchisement. We need universal broadband connectivity for everyone; we need the Permanent Broadband Benefit. 

[Dr. Fallon Wilson is Vice President for Policy at the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council (MMTC).]

President Joe Biden backed a new $1.2 trillion infrastructure package which would shave $35 billion off the funding total originally proposed for broadband improvements, insisting the lower amount was still enough to connect every citizen to high-speed internet. The bipartisan plan negotiated by Senate leaders includes $65 billion for broadband infrastructure, a steep drop from the $100 billion Biden pitched in March 2021. Little detail was available about how the broadband funds would be spent; analysts at New Street Research speculated some $40 billion could be devoted to grants for states to fund deployment of broadband networks, with another $14 billion potentially allocated to the US Department of Agriculture’s ReConnect program targeting rural areas. They added an additional $5 billion could go toward refreshing the Federal Communications Commission’s Lifeline broadband subsidy program. Biden called on lawmakers to pass the infrastructure deal, but it is unclear whether the proposal will make it through a divided Congress. 

President Joe Biden announced a $65 billion broadband-deployment deal with Senate Republicans and Democrats, but he provided no details on whether the plan will prioritize municipal broadband networks as he originally proposed. Congressional Republicans have tried to ban municipal broadband nationwide, so it's highly unlikely that they would have agreed to Biden's stated goal of giving public networks priority over private broadband providers in the next big round of government subsidies. No one is saying yet whether President Biden agreed to drop his preference for municipal broadband in order to make the deal with Republicans. If the status of municipal broadband was not addressed in the agreement, the details would be worked out in upcoming Congressional negotiations. While Republicans would likely want the funding awards to prioritize private providers or even prohibit funding for municipal networks, one potential compromise would be to let public and private networks compete for funding without any restrictions on either.

Hopes persist that a burst of relocations by tech companies and remote workers will revitalize the American heartland. Maybe remote work and pandemic-spurred moves really are going to redistribute economic vitality more evenly across the country after a decade of excessive concentration in coastal “superstar” cities, or maybe not; while aspects of the corporate relocation story may be real, new evidence raises questions about the true potential of the remote-work-driven renewal storyline. An analysis on migration patterns reported that while the outflow of people from dense, high-cost urban metro areas accelerated in 2020, the flows were rather modest in most cases. What’s more is that most of the moves were short to moderate distances, often to nearby counties instead of the nation’s interior. Even modest gains like these could be eroded or outright eliminated by sustained outflows from the heartland and Mountain West to superstar metro areas, including workers who only moved temporarily and now are returning to the coasts. Attraction strategies seem like a long shot for the places most in need of growth as the pandemic eases and remote work declines, and regional leaders will need to continue making the kind of conscious, long-term investments that have long been the drivers of local economic growth and high standards of living.