Blair Levin

What would Jesus do about extending the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP)? That may be the most important telecommunications policy question answered in 2024.

What if there was a way to encourage fiber upgrades to those communities without direct government expenditures? Internet service providers (ISPs) have often complained that cities put up barriers and add costs to fiber deployment; what if cities reduced or removed those enough to change the economics and induce new fiber builds? That is exactly what Memphis (TN) has done. Only 24% of Memphis households have access to fiber, largely from AT&T.

Return to March 2020. A horrible month for the United States. A great month for broadband. The COVID experience led to provisions—widely praised even by those who didn’t vote for them—in the 2021 Infrastructure Bill, to address the digital divide. Yet the United States may soon take the greatest step backward any country has ever taken to increase its digital divide. Why?

In early 2023, Brookings Metro and other experts were warning that, without action, the United States was likely take the biggest step any country has ever taken to widen rather than close its digital divide. The reason? The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provides a $30 per month subsidy for broadband to about 23 million homes, would run out of funds sometime in late April or May 2024. Now, we’ve arrived at that precipice.

What does solving the digital divide look like? The simple answer—getting more people online—is tempting, but it’s just a first step. Focusing only on home adoption rates provides a too limited perspective on the benefits of solving the digital divide. Consistency of connectivity is a key issue for low-income households—and this consistency is an important part of what the Federal Communications Commission’s Affordable Connectivity Plan (ACP) offers. For many households, the digital divide is not a one-time bridge to cross. Instead, online connectivity can be episodic.

Where are we in terms of closing the seven gaps that we think of, or should think of, as the elements of the digital divide? The seven gaps are the rural access gap, the affordability gap, the operating gap of very high-cost rural providers, the adoption gap, the institutional gap, the cable/copper gap, and the utilization gap. We could be using the network to improve outcomes in education, health care, government services, public safety, carbon reduction, civic engagement, and other public purposes. But to do achieve those goals, we need to close all seven broadband gaps.

There is reason for optimism about the federal government stepping up to create a policy framework for artificial intelligence (AI) that will keep us safe while enabling innovations that will improve all our lives. But, beneath the surface, there is a shark in the water, ready to obstruct any congressional or administrative action. That shark is the Supreme Court’s “major questions doctrine.” Although Members of Congress have proposed to establish a new federal commission to protect consumers.

Millions of Americans could be affected by thousands of miles of toxic telephone cables. These old cables, legacies from the pre-internet, dial-up telephone era, are sheathed in lead, an element found to be toxic in humans.

As businesses and governments race to make sense of the impacts of new, powerful AI systems, governments around the world are jostling to take the lead on regulation. Business leaders should be focused on who is likely to win this race, more so than the questions of how or even when AI will be regulated.

Today, government officials have new strategic decisions to make just as momentous as the ones the intersection of policy and technology dumped in our Federal Communications Commission laps back in the early 1990’s. As we look out on a future in which more and more of our economic and civic activity involves online communications, we should not forget there is an urgent and critical task: eliminating the digital divide.