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Last year was painful for many. Along with those who lost loved ones to Covid-19, perhaps no one felt that pain more than the essential worker, the low-income single parent, the isolated, the marginalised. Often they were the same person. Whether Black and poor in a densely populated city, or White and secluded in a rural area, large numbers of Americans who were already struggling before the pandemic came under even further strain. Adding to the distress, these people were deprived of a lifeline that allowed many of the rest of us to endure the lockdowns and limitations on our routines without undue difficulty: internet access.
Compared to healthcare and running water, internet connectivity may not seem so vital. But the pandemic showed why that thinking is wrong. Quarantined households have relied on laptops and tablets to stay connected to work, school and other humans — as well as file for unemployment, search for and apply to jobs, visit a virtual doctor appointment or schedule a Covid-19 test. Those who can’t connect are at a severe disadvantage. While the lucky ones treat the new year as a milestone — celebrating the end of 2020 through TikTok dances and Instagram memes — the virus and the economic gaps it blew wide open haven’t resolved just because the calendar changed. The story of kids without Wi-Fi doing homework from a Taco Bell parking lot that went viral in August shouldn’t be thought of as a snapshot in time, but rather a constant.
When Joe Biden takes office as president later this month, the four policy areas that he and his White House transition team have said they’ll prioritise are Covid-19, the economic recovery, racial equity and climate change. Tackling these interconnected yet discrete crises depends in part on ensuring that every American has access to high-speed internet. This is achievable, but it will require a high degree of collaboration between the public and private sectors as well as careful planning of resources — both of which are lacking from the US government’s effort now. Biden has the opportunity to change that.
To begin with, officials actively working to close the so-called digital divide need to be able to answer this most fundamental question: Where is it? Determining precisely who in the country has internet and who doesn’t would greatly improve upon the scattershot approach employed thus far, but it’s still an unknown. Biden has already promised $20 billion for rural broadband infrastructure (and related job creation), and that’s a good thing; however, “rural†ignores half the problem, which is that plenty of urban dwellers don’t have affordable access, either.
The need for more accurate broadband mapping has been a continuing frustration for the industry and its regulators. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimates that 18 million people in the country don’t have broadband access, and yet almost no one believes that number to be correct. It relies on census-block-level data that by the FCC’s own admission is flawed. Even if just one household in a census block has internet, that counts. And even if an internet provider doesn’t offer service somewhere but says it “could†in the future, that counts, too. BroadbandNow dug into this discrepancy, and after checking service availability for more than 11,000 random addresses, it estimates that 42 million Americans don’t have a way to purchase broadband internet. That’s more than double the FCC’s count.
The cohort that probably has the best sense of the true picture are companies with which the government has a notoriously tenuous relationship: technology giants whose devices and software are ubiquitous. The Justice Department sued Google’s parent Alphabet Inc last year over antitrust violations, while another lawsuit was brought by dozens of state attorneys general. Likewise, the Federal Trade Commission sued Facebook Inc, alleging that it, too, is an illegal monopoly. House lawmakers have also accused Amazon.com Inc and Apple Inc, along with Google and Facebook, of anti-competitive behaviour.
—Bloomberg