As Jessica Dine writes in Broadband Breakfast, It turns out there are two digital divides in America. The first one is the familiar divide between those who have Internet subscriptions and those who don’t. Everyone agrees this is a persistent concern, with about 10 percent of the public lacking subscriptions at last count. But then we come to the second divide: There is a perennial policy debate over why the digital divide exists and what to do about it.
This second digital divide is once again on full display around the latest edition of the biennial Communications Marketplace Report from the Federal Communications Commission. Those who think that broadband should fundamentally be in the hands of the government will no doubt claim it shows America’s private-sector broadband system is a failure; we are a backward nation with inadequate service offerings that are too expensive for consumers and too profitable for providers. The solution to this, advocates say, is to weaken corporate providers and strengthen non-corporate alternatives, including government-run networks.
But the empirical evidence belies their claims. An evenhanded look at broadband data show that U.S. broadband infrastructure is not the problem; it’s a lack of adoption that’s causing the digital divide to persist.
Read the op-ed.
