Marginalized Populations

Awards from a $50 billion federal rural health fund included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act from July 2025 are now paying for digital health care records and home monitoring devices. But whether that remote care reaches a patient still depends on the connection in the patient's home or pocket. Maine's first-year share of that fund is $190 million, according to Andrew Solomon, a senior program manager at MCD Global Health, the Maine public health nonprofit administering the work.

President Donald Trump has been adamant about one thing: the United States is in an existential race against the People’s Republic of China to win the biggest prize of all: AI dominance. President Trump has also weighed in on the side of data centers to meet the demand provided by accelerated AI adoption. Microsoft recently reported a $680 billion backlog in demand for its cloud services—an 84 percent increase over the previous year.

For over four decades, the Lifeline program has helped Americans get online and stay online, and that support matters even more now, with rising prices, a country at war, and nearly half of Americans struggling to afford the cost of living. This enforcement action is a targeted and responsible step that holds the providers who committed fraud accountable while exposing the weaknesses in our own systems that made that fraud possible.

The Federal Communications Commission is proposing more than $10 million in fines against two providers who apparently defrauded the FCC’s Lifeline Program. The Federal Lifeline Program is funded by the Universal Service Fund to provide a discount on phone and internet services for qualifying low-income Americans. The Notice of Apparent Liability adopted by the FCC proposes $2,673,966 and $7,453,966 fines against AirVoice Wireless and TAG Mobility, respectively.

The Oklahoma Broadband Office is celebrating the completion of eight broadband infrastructure projects by Indian Electric Cooperative that will expand fiber-optic connectivity across several rural Oklahoma communities. The projects were funded through Oklahoma’s American Rescue Plan Act State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund broadband program. IEC received approximately $17.7 million for four last-mile and four middle-mile projects. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Development invested nearly $25 billion in loans and grants in fiscal year 2026. These investments are helping rural communities grow and maintain critical services that families, farmers, and businesses rely on every day. Rural Development invested $267 million (yes, 1% of the USDA's investment in rural America) to expand internet access to rural households, farms, businesses, and community institutions.

Governments spend billions of dollars to bring broadband to places that lack it. This report asks how much of the new service in the places six programs came from the subsidies, and how much would have arrived anyway. We compare the areas each program funded with similar areas it did not fund, track both over time, and call the difference the program’s effect. The main measure is access, whether a location can buy at least 100/20 Mbps from a wired or licensed wireless provider.

While the Internet has become essential infrastructure for modern life, online linguistic diversity remains limited, with only about ten languages accounting for most content despite more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. As artificial intelligence accelerates the pace of digital interaction, this concentration threatens to deepen linguistic homogenization at an unprecedented scale, quietly excluding billions of people from the opportunities the Internet provides.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on the E-Rate program, asking if E-Rate is still necessary and how the program should change. This proceeding could drastically impact the work of the schools and libraries that rely on E-Rate funding. Every state has E-Rate coordinators that help schools and libraries navigate the federal program.

Our goal at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society is universal, meaningful connectivity. Under our logo, we say that broadband builds opportunities and strengthens communities. But we haven’t been living under a rock. We know technology does not always build opportunity or strengthen communities. And right now, a real bleakness surrounds technology and what it is doing to us—or might do to us. If you work in digital inclusion, that can give you pause. What exactly are we working to include people in?