Name: Congress Proposes Bold Plan to End the Digital Divide
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Congress Proposes Bold Plan to End the Digital Divide

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Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItNew year, new Congress, but the problems of Internet access remains. If anything, the longer the COVID-19 crisis continues, the stronger the case for fast, affordable, Internet for all becomes. And so, an updated version of the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act has been introduced. It remains a bold federal program that will tackle broadband access in the same scale and scope the United States once did for water and electricity.EFF and we enthusiastically support it today after its updates. Most changes simply reflect past COVID-19 provisions that have already been enacted into law such as the , a program that ensures people are not disconnected due to a lack of income caused by the pandemic. But its most noteworthy updates are the preferences for open access and a minimum speed metric of low latency 100/100 Mbps, which inherently means fiber infrastructure will play a key role. By adopting these standards—along with a massive investment of federal dollars—Congress can reshape the market to be competitive, universally available, and affordable.The digital divide isn’t about whether you have access to a certain speed like 25/3 Mbps, which is the current federal standard that is as a metric to measure connectivity, it is about what infrastructure has been invested into your community. Is that infrastructure robust, future-proofed, and competitively priced? If the answer to any of these is no, then you have folks that are not able to fully utilize the Internet and they sit on the wrong side of the divide.&nbsp;As EFF , the fact that major industry players were slow-rolling or shutting down their fiber to the home deployments, even in major metropolitan areas where really no excuse exists to not wire everyone, was a danger sign. It meant that future-ready access was no longer on track to being universally deployed except through local governments and small private providers who lack the finances to do it nationally. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 as the stay-at-home orders were coming in, we pointed out that the digital divide failures we will see are going to be .The pandemic demonstrated what that means in terms of real dollars to the government support systems. In areas where fiber was not present, millions of dollars had to be burned to give people temporary mobile hotspots with spotty coverage. Whereas communities with fiber providers got things like free fast Internet from both and . In fact, while the federal government is subsidizing broadband access as high as $50-$75 a month, Chattanooga’s EPB is able to deliver via fiber 100/100 mbps at just $3 a month in subsidy cost.We focus on fiber optic infrastructure because it is the universal medium that is unifying all of the 21st century-based communications networks. Low earth orbit satellites, 5G, next-generation WiFi, and direct wireline connections that seek to deliver ever-increasing speeds are all dependent on fiber. Demand for data has never waned, but rather has consistently grown for decades at an average rate of , meaning if you are in a community that is not deploying fiber, which is decades ahead of the demand curve, you will run into capacity problems.&nbsp;We see these capacity problems already in the legacy infrastructure, namely copper and cable, as they get more expensive to operate yet can only deliver obsolete connection speeds with lots of restrictions. We detailed why this is happening in our that explains why different broadband networks yield different results in connectivity. But really the evidence is clear when increased usage of an essential service is being met with and instead of just delivering the service to meet demand. It is why subsidizing or propping up legacy networks is actually going to be in the long run.This is the reality that many Americans are all too familiar with and why we must pass this bill. If we do not, it is a certainty that we will continue to talk about the digital divide in perpetuity. But that is a choice now facing Congress and you need to make sure your legislator is on board. If we figured out how to get an electrical line to every house, there really is no reason we can’t do that with a fiber line.Share ItIn response to the very real pressures that online news outlets are facing, Congress continues to believe the very flawed Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) is a magic solution. It is not. In fact, it is actively dangerous. And there’s a available....In May, Senators Mike Lee, Amy Klobuchar, Ted Cruz, and Richard Blumenthal introduced the “.” The bill, also called the “Digital Advertising Act” or just “DAA” for short, is an ambitious attempt to regulate, and even break up, the biggest online advertising companies...Westlaw, the world’s largest legal research service, is very likely to face antitrust liability. A federal court has ruled that ROSS Intelligence, a tiny rival offering new research tools (which Westlaw forced out of business with a copyright infringement suit) could proceed with claims that Westlaw uses exclusionary and anticompetitive...In December, 2020, Apple did something insanely great. They changed how iOS, their mobile operating system, handled users’ privacy preferences, so that owners of iPhones and other iOS devices could indicate that they don’t want to be tracked by any of the apps on their devices. If they did, Apple...The California Senate Energy, Utilities, and Communications Committee will soon be the first to consider new and terrible amendments to Assemblymember Quirk-Silva’s A.B. 2749—which is backed by AT&amp;T and other telecommunications interests. The legislation would prohibit the state from implementing affordable broadband rules for broadband companies receiving state subsidies as...The state of California is primed to bring 21st-century fiber access at affordable rates to every Californian. Last year’s means every California community has the resources available to chart a long-term course toward building fiber networks. The Department...There is a lot to appreciate in the recently published “Notice of Funding Opportunity” (NOFO) by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA). It is arguably the first federal government proposal that seeks to promote infrastructure policies focused on the future, rather than the usual subsidizing “good enough...Imagine if your boss made up hundreds of petty rules and refused to disclose them, but every week, your pay was docked based on how many of those rules you broke. When you’re an online creator and your “boss” is a giant social media platform, that’s exactly how your compensation...The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a proposal for bringing competition and fairness back to online platform markets. It just cleared a major hurdle on the way to becoming law in the EU as the European Parliament and the Council, representing the member states, reached a ...The European Union’s (DMA) allows new messaging services to demand interoperability (the ability to exchange messages) from the internet's largest messaging services (like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage). Interoperability is an to promote competition and prevent monopolists from shutting down user-empowering innovation. But...Share It

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItNew year, new Congress, but the problems of Internet access remains. If anything, the longer the COVID-19 crisis continues, the stronger the case for fast, affordable, Internet for all becomes. And so, an updated version of the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act has been introduced. It remains a bold federal program that will tackle broadband access in the same scale and scope the United States once did for water and electricity.EFF and we enthusiastically support it today after its updates. Most changes...

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Ernesto Falcon

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Congress Proposes Bold Plan to End the Digital Divide

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