In less than three months, nearly 800,000 low-income people who receive telephone subsidies through the Universal Service Fund's Lifeline program will be negatively impacted by changes scheduled to go into effect at the Federal Communications Commission on December 1, 2021. The FCC needs to change course and help more Americans keep connected to communications services that are essential to navigate the ongoing public health and economic crisis. Most importantly, the FCC should act swiftly and hit the pause button on the 2016 plan to zero-out support for voice-only services. During the pandemic, the stakes are just too high for anyone to be disconnected from essential communications networks. Then the FCC should launch a new effort to reform and further modernize the Lifeline program, informed by what we've witnessed during COVID, and the findings in Grant Thornton's and the FCC's own recent review of the Lifeline program. 

1. Lifeline needs to have foundational governance documents—such as strategic plans, performance objectives, and an integrated communications plan—to assist in the longitudinal success and guidance of the program.
2. The FCC has to consider raising Lifeline's monthly subsidy, $9.25, so it can make more meaningful services affordable for low-income families.
3. The FCC must adopt changes in the program so it better benefits the people it was created to connect. This includes understanding the composition of Lifeline households and the specific services they need, finding ways to improve program enrollment, and providing opportunities for consumer feedback.
4. Changes in the Lifeline program should encourage all telecommunications and broadband service providers to compete to serve low-income households in their service areas. 
5. The FCC should also consider revising its measure of affordability of broadband for low-income consumers. We need the FCC to act now to keep everyone connected. And we need the FCC to update the Lifeline program so everyone can rely on a basic level of connectivity no matter how much income they have.

[Adrianne B. Furniss is the Executive Director of the Benton Foundation.]

The Federal Communications Commission is partnering with the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) and the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates (NASUCA) to acknowledge Lifeline Awareness Week, September 20-24, 2021. Lifeline is an FCC program designed to help make communications services more affordable for low-income consumers. The program provides up to a $9.25 monthly discount on qualifying voice and broadband services for eligible low-income subscribers and up to $34.25 per month for subscribers on qualifying Tribal lands. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the new Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) program is also available to help families and households struggling to afford internet service. Households that qualify for Lifeline also qualify for the Emergency Broadband Benefit. In most cases, they simply need to opt-in with their current Lifeline provider or contact a different participating provider and choose an eligible plan to start receiving the monthly benefit. To learn more about Lifeline support, go here. Consumers can find Emergency Broadband Benefit application information here.

The digital divide has remained stubbornly persistent for decades, even as the internet has become steadily more inextricable from daily life, business, health care, and education. Research group BroadbandNow estimates that 42 million Americans have no broadband access, while a depressing 120 million people in the US are without any connection fast enough to even call the internet, according to Microsoft. These disparities are particularly severe among Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and rural communities. In denser towns, it's more economical to deliver broadband over fiber-optic cables, the industry's gold standard for speed and reliability. However, it can still be way too expensive in rural areas. Local broadband providers are turning to Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), a wireless spectrum historically used by US Navy aircraft carriers for radar transmissions. In recent years the Federal Communications Commission has opened a slice of this spectrum for commercial use, enabling providers to beam broadband as far as 6 miles over signal stations—installed atop cell towers, barns, even prisons—that are sort of like massive Wi-Fi routers. CBRS is fast enough to stream movies and costs a fraction of what fiber costs to build. Yet the messy reality of the digital divide is that a mix of physical and wireless networks would be cheaper and more practical than some one-size-fits-all solution. The US is full of diverse communities and regions, and each requires its own custom infrastructure plan to make broadband available and affordable.

Experts have concluded that Virginia is a national leader in bridging the digital divide. Virginia's success in broadband can be attributed to several factors: the governor’s consistent prioritization of broadband, bipartisan support and funding from the General Assembly, an efficient and successful Virginia Telecommunications Initiative (VATI) program and enabling electric utilities to deploy middle-mile infrastructure. This framework will deliver universal broadband throughout the commonwealth and it is a model for many other states in our nation. Virginia addressed the unfortunate fact that it’s expensive to deploy and operate telecommunication infrastructure in rural areas. Virginia and several local governments have leveraged hundreds of millions in public funds to help build last-mile connections between rural residences and nearby infrastructure. The state’s flagship VATI program continues to support broadband deployment in hard-to-serve parts of the state. Another critical step Virginia has taken involves empowering electric utilities to be part of the solution, enacting legislation to give electric utilities the flexibility to build middle-mile fiber that connects communities to the core of the network. It also established a three-year pilot project in which Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power could lease excess fiber capacity to broadband providers aiming to reach unserved communities. I can say without reservation that Virginia is leading the pack in establishing a framework for what I like to call “digital opportunity” for all its citizens.

[Ajit Pai, a Virginia resident, is a partner at Searchlight Capital Partners, which is investing in a Virginia broadband provider. He served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2017 to 2021.]

Small wireless carriers expressed dissatisfaction and concern about several aspects of their business at the Competitive Carriers Association (CCA) Annual Convention. They’re concerned that digital-divide money will all go toward fiber, that Universal Service Funds (USF) are drying up, that their spectrum needs are being ignored, and that they’ve missed the boat on private wireless. It would seem intuitive that small wireless carriers would reap some of the benefits of the coming federal funding bonanza to close the digital divide since they oftentimes serve rural markets, but the operators noted that much of the funding from the government is geared toward deploying fiber. CCA members also expressed frustration about the allocation of spectrum in the US. They have had opportunities to buy more spectrum lately through the CBRS and C-Band auctions, and there are some upcoming auctions of 2.5 GHz and 3.45 GHz as well, but carrier executives complained that the partial economic areas (PEAs) that the FCC often uses for spectrum auctions do not work for smaller operators. They can’t afford to buy geographically large PEAs, especially where big portions of the PEA aren't in their coverage area. When asked if they were launching any private wireless offerings, CEO of Nsight–Cellcom Mark Nazé said “a number of things have to intersect for there to be good opportunity” in private wireless where the capital investments align with customer demand in various industries.

The way that Facebook controls its News Feed is often controversial and largely opaque to the outside world. Now the company is attempting to shine more light on the content it surpresses but doesn't remove entirely. Facebook published its “Content Distribution Guidelines” detailing the roughly three-dozen types of posts it demotes for various reasons in the News Feed, like clickbait and posts by repeat policy offenders. That process, which relies heavily on machine learning technology to automatically detect problematic content, effectively throttles the reach of offending posts and comments without the author knowing. There’s still plenty that the guidelines, which Facebook has mostly confirmed in various reports over the years but is just now publishing for the first time in one place, don’t say. They don’t detail exactly how a demotion works and exactly how much it reduces a piece of content’s reach. Or how severely a certain kind of post, like a link to spam, is throttled in the News Feed relative to a post about health misinformation, for example.