Publications: Jessica Dine

Access America Series, Episode 2: Jess discusses the challenges and opportunities of BEAD for the state of Michigan with Jessica Randall of Michigan’s broadband office.

Access America Series, Episode 1: Jess talks with Verizon’s Chris Oatway about the BEAD program’s cybersecurity requirements and whether they’re enough to keep new networks secure.

ITIF policy analyst Jessica Dine appeared on LightReading’s podcast The Divide to discuss her report evaluating and grading state proposals for the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, and how she determined if each state is set to succeed with BEAD.

Congress has allocated $42.5 billion to bridge America’s digital divide through the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. To achieve that goal, states and territories must carefully craft plans to use their shares of the funds to the greatest possible benefit.

Digital literacy is now a necessary skill on par with the ability to read or write. Yet, we have no clear system of measuring this type of literacy rate or comprehensive dataset that tells us where the U.S. population stands. Instead, there’s a piecemeal landscape of measuring digital literacy. Studies often cover members of particular groups rather than the population at large, and without a consensus on the measurement of universal digital literacy rates, we have no clear way of taking a data-driven approach to the problem—which is necessary if we want to solve it.

In a time when broadband affordability plays a major role in the digital divide, the Affordable Connectivity Program meets an obvious need. Winding it down comes at the expense of every American relying on the program and of consumers’ trust in government agencies, digital inclusion groups, and Internet service providers.

The rationale for BEAD's low-cost option requirement and NTIA's insistence on checking it upfront is clear: Billions of dollars spent on new networks for services that disproportionately offline populations can’t afford would be billions of dollars wasted. None of this is rate regulation.

While Congress should codify consensus net neutrality principles in statute, until it does, the current Title I framework, combined with targeted initiatives to address specific areas of concern, provides a more prudent path forward.

In their Five-Year BEAD plans, states’ strategies for achieving digital inclusion provide an early indication of their approach to the central goal of BEAD: to get all residents meaningfully, not just nominally, connected.

Policymakers inundated with self-serving arguments for specific spectrum allocation need ways to evaluate which actually advance the public interest. By focusing on the goal of productive spectrum use, one can differentiate between reasoning that would enhance productivity and that which would only advance private interests.