Chamber of Progress

Affordable, accessible broadband unlocks tremendous economic, educational, and telehealth opportunities. Accordingly, achieving true universal broadband connectivity has been a long-standing bipartisan goal. Despite years of heroic eort, many parts of rural and hard-to-serve America lacked affordable access to broadband until recently. The advent of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband services like SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper has transformed connectivity for the better. Chamber of Progress has long supported public policy to advance LEOs.

The Chamber of Progress wrote to Donald trump asking him to clarify his position on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as voters and donors assess the candidates in this year’s general election. Section 230 is the legal bedrock for online speech. People deserve to know whether Trump still plans to repeal the law that’s enabled online platforms to host user posts, or whether he plans to rewrite the rules for speech online. Republicans often rail against Section 230, but it’s a key tool in enabling free expression online.

More than 23 million low-income American households will soon see a new line item in monthly expense statements: prohibitively expensive internet bills. For some, the new cost will eat into other essential areas of their budget—for others, it will mean going without the internet altogether. While the federal price tag for monthly internet subsidies under the Affordable Connectivity Program comes to $8.4 billion annually, our research indicates that, for low-income communities, the economic impact of losing the ACP will be more than twice that.