The federal government first launched a broadband subsidy program during the depths of COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, where internet connections became many peoples’ only window into the outside world. That effort, the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), was made permanent as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It offered a $30 monthly subsidy ($75 on tribal lands) to qualifying low-income households for broadband internet or cell phone bills. The program also offers up to $100 toward a computer or tablet. 

However, it came with a major caveat: The $14.2 billion Congress allocated toward the program was a one-time thing. When the money ran out at some point in the future, Congress would have to infuse the program with more money or find a more permanent funding solution. 

That future has officially arrived. More than 23 million American households, about 45% of all those eligible nationwide, will no longer receive the full subsidies that previously helped them get online. Two-thirds of those households had “inconsistent or zero connectivity prior to ACP enrollment,” a recent Federal Communications Commission survey revealed.

Partial subsidies of $14 ($35 for households on Tribal lands) will be available for some ISP customers for service in May, according to an FCC notice. But that will be the program’s last disbursement.

“Many recent press reports about the impending end of this program describe how ACP households across the country are now facing hard choices about what expenses they have to cut, including food and gas, to maintain their broadband access, with some households doubtful they can afford to keep their broadband service at all,” FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel wrote in an April letter to congressional leaders. “These press reports echo what the Commission has been hearing from ACP households directly, with many writing the agency to express their distress and fear that ending this program could lead them to lose access to the internet at home.”

Case in point: Alfredo Camacho, who lives in Guadalupe, California, told CalMatters that because he is no longer able to afford home internet service, he’s started taking his daughters to the parking lot outside a local library so the family can use the free wifi to do homework and look for jobs. 

“This takes away grocery money,” said Camacho, who is one of around three million Golden State residents losing access to the subsidy. “Being a single father, $30 goes a long way.” 

In anticipation of the shut-down, the program stopped accepting new sign-ups in early February. Participating households started receiving notifications about the program’s  potential shuttering in January. After it ends, internet service providers are required to allow ACP-using households to cancel without termination fees.

The program has been an essential part of how millions of Americans get online, with nearly one-in-five U.S. households relying on the subsidy to keep their internet subscriptions active. Uptake has been especially strong in areas with high-poverty rates in both urban and rural areas. 

The program is “helping people who did not previously have access to get online,” wrote John Horrigan, a leading researcher tracking connectivity trends, who noted that enrollment has been especially high in diverse, high-poverty areas. “In other words, the answer to the question of whether the ACP is closing the digital divide is a clear yes.”

In 2022, the Biden Administration announced securing commitments from 20 providers to begin offering internet service with at least 100 Mbps speeds to ACP-qualifying households — for just $30 a month and without data caps. When combined with the $30 monthly ACP subsidy, internet connectivity became effectively free for low-income households.

The program also increased the reach of another Infrastructure bill-created effort: The Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. BEAD is a $42 billion pool that subsidizes internet providers to build new broadband networks in parts of the country where infrastructure is lacking. A Common Sense Media study found that by allowing more people to sign up for internet service, ACP reduced the per-household BEAD subsidy necessary to incentivize internet providers to build new networks in rural areas by 25%. That meant money the government has budgeted to expand broadband coverage could go a lot farther in closing the rural digital divide. 

ACP is also massively popular with the public. A survey released last year found 78% of registered voters supported extending its funding. That support crossed the political spectrum, with nearly all Democrats and just over two-thirds of Republicans responding in favor of its continuation.

On Capitol Hill, the program initially appeared to have uncommonly broad support. Last fall,  45 lawmakers, 29 Democrats and 16 Republicans, wrote to congressional leadership asking them to make ACP extension a priority. “We have a unique window of opportunity to ensure that every family and child — rural, urban, and suburban — have access to affordable broadband, and can thrive in the digital age. ACP has become a lifeline for Americans, and we cannot afford to let it expire,” they charged.

It has even united the left and right sides of the political spectrum. The Communication Workers of America, a labor union representing many telecom employees, has advocated for renewing the program. (Full disclosure: The CWA is the parent union of The NewsGuild-CWA, which represents employees of The Markup and CalMatters.) Non-profit advocacy groups like Common Sense Media and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance organized drives for supporters to call their representative about the program’s looming expiration. The R Street Institute, a libertarian think tank, has made its own push – hailing the program as a model for other government connectivity efforts. Conservative publisher Steve Forbes wrote a supportive op-ed for Fox Business. 

“It’s often said there are three parties on Capitol Hill – Republicans, Democrats and appropriators. In a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, the first two have recognized the positive impact of the Affordable Connectivity Program,” Forbes wrote. “Now it’s time for the appropriators to get on board and find a solution to permanently fund the program.” 

A coalition of more than 230 nonprofit groups and municipal governments, ranging from the NAACP to the City of San Antonio, Texas, wrote a letter begging congressional leaders to renew the program.

ACP didn’t just have bipartisan backing, it also had bipartisan uptake. A report by researchers at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found a nearly even split in households taking advantage of the subsidy residing in Democratic and Republican congressional districts.

In 2022, The Markup published an investigation showing how several internet service providers disproportionately offered the worst internet deals to poorer, less white, and historically redlined neighborhoods, in major cities across the country. By way of comment, many companies highlighted their participation in ACP as a defense against their inequitable infrastructure deployment and pricing practices. When it comes to closing the digital divide, ACP is the method the telecom industry points to as an ideal solution – and industry group USTelecom has come out in favor of its extension, alongside individual providers such as AT&T.

Companies have also announced their own, private efforts to fill in the gap left by ACP’s expiration. AT&T, for example, was one of the companies that rolled out one of the $30, 100 Mbps internet plans. The company will continue offering this low-cost plan, which will no longer be effectively free, after the end of ACP. 

A directory of ongoing low-cost internet plans offered by internet providers, compiled by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, is available here. The FCC’s Lifeline program, which provides a monthly $9.25 ($34.25 on Tribal lands) connectivity subsidy to eligible households, will remain in place; however, Lifeline’s eligibility qualifications are more stringent than the ACP’s.

The ACP has had its own controversies. A 2022 report from the FCC’s Inspector General identified some likely fraud in the program. “In the most egregious example identified, more than one thousand Oklahoma households were enrolled based on the eligibility of a single (qualifying), a 4-year-old child who receives Medicaid benefits,” the report noted.

Some Republican senators jumped on the report to attack the program. “Any extension of this program—if it should occur at all—must only happen after there’s a thorough review of the program’s effectiveness at increasing broadband adoption and preventing fraudulent, wasteful, and duplicative spending,” Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz told the Washington Post. 

According to the Institute For Local Self-Reliance’s ACP Dashboard, there are 1.7 million Texas households currently using the program. 

Last October, the Biden Administration requested Congress pass funding to keep the program active through the end of 2024. “Without this funding, tens of millions of people would lose this benefit and would no longer be able to afford high-speed internet service without sacrificing other necessities,” read a White House press release.

Those efforts have not proved successful.

While the $1.1 trillion spending bill passed in March avoided a government shutdown, it didn’t contain a provision to fund ACP – despite the pleadings of a supportive letter sent to Congressional leadership by dozens of U.S. senators.

Early this year, lawmakers introduced stand-alone legislation that would add $7 billion to fund the program through the end of the year. The House version, introduced by Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York, has attracted 224 co-sponsors, including 22 Republicans. That’s above the threshold of 218 votes required to pass a bill. Even so, Republican leadership has not elected to move the bill out of the Appropriations Committee, where it’s been stalled since January. 

On Tuesday, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania introduced a bill that would pay for ACP on an ongoing basis through the Universal Service Fund, a pool of money funded by fees imposed on telecommunication providers that currently pays for things like Lifeline and a program supporting broadband connections for schools and libraries. 

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Communications Commission has enacted new rules intended to eliminate discrimination in access to internet services, a move which regulators are calling the first major U.S. digital civil rights policy.

The rules package, which the commission ratified on Wednesday, would empower the agency to review and investigate instances of discrimination by broadband providers to different communities based on income, race, ethnicity and other protected classes.

The order also provides a framework for the FCC to crack down a range of digital inequities including the disparities in the investment of services for different neighborhoods, as well as the “digital divide,” a term experts use to describe the complete lack of internet access many communities experience due to regional or socioeconomic inequality.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said that Congress required the agency to adopt rules addressing digital discrimination, through bipartisan infrastructure legislation passed at the start of the Biden administration.

“The digital divide puts us at an economic disadvantage as a country and disproportionately affects communities of color, lower-income areas, and rural areas,” Rosenworcel said in a statement to The Associated Press.

“We know broadband is essential infrastructure for modern life, and these rules will bring us one step closer to ensuring everyone has access to the internet, no matter who they are or where they live,” she said.

Poorer, less white neighborhoods were found to have received lower investment in broadband infrastructure and offered worse deals for internet service than comparatively whiter and higher-income areas. That inequity in access “was especially pronounced during the pandemic,” the chairwoman said.

There is no clear standard for tracking inequities in the provision of digital services, though communities impacted by other discriminatory practices such as redlining and rural disinvestment report worse rates of service or outright lack of access. The FCC hopes its new rules will streamline the process for reporting such issues to establish an official record of discrimination going forward.

The rules allow the agency to examine whether an internet service provider knowingly discriminated against a community in how it built, upgraded or maintained internet access, as well provide a framework for determining whether a proposed service plan would create a “discriminatory effect” that couldn’t otherwise be avoided by reasonable steps.

“While the intent of the statute is to apply pressure to internet service providers in order to avert discrimination, it also eases the responsibility of states and localities who are receiving (federal infrastructure) funds to have that same responsibility,” said Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at The Brookings Institution.

The telecommunications industry has opposed the framework, arguing that the policy would hamper investment in communities by requiring regulations that the industry says are unnecessary. In a statement after Wednesday’s vote, The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the industry’s main trade association, called the new rules “potentially unlawful.” The group also said the FCC was seeking “expansive new authority over virtually every aspect of the broadband marketplace.”

“Many, if not most, long-standing, uniform business practices could be seen to have differential impacts on consumers with different income levels,” the group said.

Meanwhile, Free Press Action, a digital advocacy group, applauded the new rules and called on the FCC to go further by reclassifying some aspects of broadband to bring about “quick action to bring back the important oversight powers the agency needs to do its job.

During Wednesday’s FCC hearing, Brendan Carr, one of the agency’s commissioners, argued that the new policies opened the agency up to potential litigation and would hamper operations by the telecommunications industry. “It’s not about discrimination. It’s about control,” said Carr, who said that the telecommunications industry had entered a “Faustian bargain” by supporting the bipartisan law and had previously called the framework a “power grab.”

“Ignoring disparate impact would have denied Congress’s directive to this agency. It is simply not plausible that we could prevent and eliminate digital discrimination by solely, solely addressing intentional discrimination,” said fellow commissioner Geoffrey Starks. “The rules we adopt here today are not the end of our work.”

The FCC is also poised to reimplement landmark net neutrality rules that were rescinded under the Trump administration. President Joe Biden has said the investments in the bipartisan infrastructure law are meant to connect every U.S. household to quality internet service by 2030 regardless of income or identity.

“Whatever the FCC does in terms of discipline or punishment, I would hope that the benefit goes to the community being discriminated against in the form of more equitable deployment,” said Christopher Ali, a professor of telecommunications at Pennsylvania State University.

“That’s going to be difficult to order. But we need to make sure that the communities are reaping the benefits of these decisions. I think not just that these companies have been punished,” said Ali, who participated in an FCC diversity and equity working group focused on takeaways from the pandemic.

“It’s unclear at the moment how many complaints would be needed for the FCC to elevate it to an investigatory issue,” Ali said. “So maybe then, that’s where community groups and local organizations are going to become absolutely vital.”

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