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. 

The post How Congress is letting die an internet connectivity lifeline for millions appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — President Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled $82 million for North Carolina to help connect 16,000 new households and businesses to high-speed internet, delivering an election-year pitch about policies he says are “just getting started” at improving the United States.

Biden, the Democratic incumbent who is campaigning to win a second term, coupled his economic message with a few jabs at his predecessor, Donald Trump, currently the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and his most likely future challenger.

Biden brought up Trump’s recent comment that he hoped the economy would crash soon because he doesn’t want to preside over job losses if he were to be reelected in November. Biden told his audience that Trump already was like Herbert Hoover, who held office during the 1929 stock market crash.

“He’s the only president to be president for four years and lose jobs,” Biden said of Trump.

Biden said the work his administration is doing in North Carolina, on high-speed internet, infrastructure and more, is happening in communities across the country, regardless of the politics.

“What we’re doing here in North Carolina is one piece of a much bigger story,” he said. Biden said he was keeping his promise “to be a president for all America, whether you voted for me or not.”

Biden talked about all the people who need high-speed internet because they work from home, businesses who need it to reach customers and students who need to do their school work.

“High-speed internet isn’t a luxury anymore. It’s an absolute necessity,” he said in Raleigh, the state capital. “The investment in high-speed internet means something else as well: good-paying jobs.”

Biden’s reelection campaign has made winning North Carolina and its 16 electoral votes a top priority. The Democrat narrowly lost the state in 2020 by 1.34 percentage points to Trump. They are expected to face each other again in November.

Fast-growing North Carolina is considered a presidential battleground, but only twice in the last 40-plus years has a Democrat won the state’s electoral votes: Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008.

Trump won the state in both 2016 and 2020, with the latter victory in part a result of massive turnout for Republicans in rural and non-urban counties overcoming increasingly Democratic strongholds in and around Raleigh and Charlotte.

Republicans hold narrow veto-proof control of the state legislature and a majority on the state Supreme Court. But voters still appear comfortable with a Democratic state chief executive who attempts to counteract GOP policies, which recently have included more abortion restrictions and expanded private school vouchers. Democrats have held the governorship for all but four years since 1993.

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who is term-limited from running this year, spoke before Biden on Thursday, boosting Biden and criticizing Trump.

“I want a president who wakes up every morning thinking about the American people instead of a president who wakes up every morning thinking about himself,” Cooper said.

Polling shows that the economy has been a weakness for Biden, a reflection of inflation hitting a four-decade high in June 2022. Easing inflation rates since then have yet to pull Biden’s approval ratings back to their levels at the start of his presidency. The president has tried to empathize with voters grappling with higher inflation, but he has stressed that his policies are fostering the creation of factory and construction jobs with middle-class wages.

“When jobs grow, everything grows,” Biden said as he ticked through federal spending on projects made possible by his pandemic aid package and an infrastructure law.

The president later picked up a burger, fries and shake from Cook Out and held what his campaign described as a “kitchen table conversation” at the home of a family that benefited from the administration’s student loan forgiveness programs.

The administration is committing a total of $3 billion to build and fund internet connections in North Carolina. The administration estimates that an additional 300,000 state residents will be able to access the internet by the end of 2026.

One way the administration says it has lowered costs for families is by providing discounted internet service to 880,000 households in North Carolina. But the administration is calling on Congress to renew the Affordable Connectivity Program, a separate source of funding that is set to run out of money in April. The program has helped 22 million people save $30 to $75 a month on their internet bills, the administration says.

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post Biden visits North Carolina, a state he hopes to win in November, to promote internet access appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

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.”

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post FCC adopts rules to eliminate ‘digital discrimination’ for communities with poor internet access appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

The Board of Supervisors Tuesday approved a resolution declaring Riverside County‘s intent to join six other Southern California counties in calling for increased efforts to expand broadband internet access to the farthest reaches of the region to ensure all residents can get online. “Without expansion of broadband access, we don’t close the ‘digital divide,'” Supervisor Chuck Washington said. “Some kids still don’t have access to the internet.”

Department of Information Technology Director Tom Mullen told the board that moves are afoot throughout the region and state to “bring broadband access to underserved communities.” The California Broadband Council is preparing a master plan to submit to the governor before the end of the month, he said, and that will likely be followed by legislation funding the initial stages of a build-out. “Mobile home parks, rural areas, even urban centers (stand to benefit),” Mullen said. In 2016, the board approved a proposal for a public-private partnership titled “RIVCOconnect,” under which a countywide high-speed internet system would be constructed, ultimately covering all 7,200 square miles of the county.

The ambitious endeavor envisioned 1-gigabyte-per-second connectivity via fiber optic cables and was projected to cost between $2 billion and $4 billion. However, only two entities tentatively responded to the county’s offer to partner. The idea has been on the shelf for the last three years. Mullen said one of the challenges has been obtaining privileged information from telecommunications firms, including AT&T, Charter and Frontier, regarding their existing networks and how far they extend. “They are unwilling to share the data with us,” he said. “But the California Public Utilities Commission is now requesting that level of detail.”

Supervisor Karen Spiegel said there are “gaps all over the county,” and she urged the Department of Information Technology to enlist support from special districts to identify cellphone towers that might be utilized to aid in “signal boosting.” “By working together, this could be very beneficial,” she said. “This is very timely.” The Southern California broadband initiative additionally involves Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura counties. “Upon identifying broadband opportunity zones, (this resolution) supports … a regional effort that would allow local jurisdictions to develop specific rules to expedite low-cost broadband deployment by internet service providers,” according to proposal.

Because of the coronavirus public health shutdowns and more people — especially children whose schools are shuttered — staying home, greater access to high-speed broadband networks has been accentuated. “High-speed broadband service is important to all residents, businesses and institutions, and it is desirable where residents and visitors work, live, learn and play,” according to the resolution.

-CNS

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post Will Riverside County’s Digital Divide Really Close? appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.