Low-income

The Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program is coming back, and applications could open as soon as December. After a federal court ruled in July that the administration could not simply cancel the program, the Commerce Department committed to reopening it under a new Notice of Funding Opportunity. That is good news for the field. But the application window is likely to be short and badly timed, and the organizations that start preparing now will be best placed to compete. Finding the right partner can make or break a joint application, and the clock is already running.

Despite unprecedented broadband investment, the share of U.S. households relying solely on cellular data and mobile devices, or mobile-dependent households, increased from 11.9 to 14.1 percent between 2019 and 2024. This report introduces the MDH concept, which captures the "double whammy" of limited data and limited screen size, and examines its determinants before and after the COVID-19 pandemic using Census tract-level data.

The internet revolution was accompanied by a digital divide. Now, the artificial intelligence revolution threatens a token divide. Access to the internet opened new possibilities for everyone. The eighth grader doing her homework and the local business serving its customers both benefited. Broadband connections gave them information. Now, AI offers them intelligence. Tokens are the unit through which intelligence is organized, measured, and sold. Access to tokens governs access to intelligence.

A federal judge in July gave digital equity advocates a partial victory against President Donald Trump, stopping his attempt to unilaterally kill a multibillion-dollar grant program Congress created. But U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, in a 35-page opinion, also agreed with the administration that it was unconstitutional for the government to use race or ethnicity as the basis to award money under a program created to expand internet skills and access.

The Federal Communications Commission's Office of Managing Director (OMD) announced that the proposed universal service contribution factor for the fourth quarter of 2026 will be 0.42 or 42.0 percent. The FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB), in consultation with the OMD, instructs the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) to apply $69 million in unused funds to offset the Schools and Libraries program demand and $56 million in unused funds to offset the Rural Health Care program demand.

Washington has a familiar playbook when an outdated federal program runs into trouble: Rather than fixing what’s broken, it just finds someone new to pay for it. That is the danger Congress faces today with the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund. For nearly three decades, USF has helped connect rural communities, low-income Americans, schools, libraries, and rural healthcare providers.

There has been continued debate about the best way to measure poverty in the United States since the first official U.S. poverty statistics were published in the mid-1960s. The U.S. Census Bureau releases two poverty measures each September. The first, called the official poverty measure, is based on cash resources. The second, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), includes both cash and noncash benefits and subtracts necessary expenses (such as taxes and medical expenses). The official poverty measure has remained mostly unchanged since it was introduced in the mid-1960s.

In this edition of the Rural Index, I wanted to explore a hypothesis that my colleague Julia Tilton and I have been throwing around over the last few weeks: Are data center developers targeting vulnerable and marginalized communities, where they know residents are not as likely to have the power to fight back? As is the case with most good hypotheses, I wasn’t able to come to a definitive conclusion.

The United States is a global technology leader, yet millions of Americans lack the internet access, devices, or skills to benefit from its technological capabilities or participate fully in the digital economy. Recognizing this divide in 2021, Congress passed the largest federal investment in broadband in U.S.

If the character Edward Cullen of the ubiquitous Twilight saga taught us anything (aside from the fact that Robert Pattinson’s hair can do no wrong), it is that being a heretic can be cool. In the series, the Volturi—the Vampiric Council—operates as an authoritative government dictating the terms of vampire life: encouraging slaughter of humans, forbidding certain romance, and eventually seeking the destruction of Edward and Bella’s baby. Cullen went against these vampire norms to protect his loved ones, doing so in a way that made many hearts flutter.