Vice President Kamala Harris listens as President Joe Biden speaks during a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on April 21, 2021, where Biden announced he was putting her in charge of leading efforts to close the digital divide.
Jim Watson/AFP/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesPresident Biden has put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of his initiative to close the digital divide in a move that signals his seriousness about his promise to ensure every American has access to affordable, high speed internet.
President Biden made the announcement Wednesday evening during his first address to a joint session of Congress that the Vice President would lead his effort to expand the availability of broadband throughout the country. Biden's plan includes making broadband more affordable to millions of low-income Americans.
"It's going to help our kids and business succeed in the 21st century economy," Biden said. "And I'm asking the vice president to lead this effort, if she would, because I know it will get done."
Biden's choice to put Harris in charge of the effort is a signal that the White House sees broadband as a top priority. It "shows that the President considers closing the digital divide of utmost importance," said Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology & Policy and former advisor to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler.
Biden's plan calls for spending $100 billion to expand broadband in rural communities where access doesn't yet exist and to help make broadband more affordable across the country. While the proposed spending only makes up a tiny fraction of the overall $2 trillion in spending Biden wants to see Congress allocate for his infrastructure plan, the policy and political ambitions around the issue are huge.
"Broadband is going to be a critical part of our infrastructure of the future," said Blair Levin, an analyst with New Street Research, who led the effort to create President Barack Obama's 2010 National Broadband Plan. Levin explained that aside from the obvious benefits of broadband for education, healthcare and job training, it will also be transformative for what we think of as traditional infrastructure, like bridges, roads and mass transit, which will all be equipped with internet-connected sensors and other "smart" technology.
"To the public, broadband represents the infrastructure of the future, more so than an improved road does," he said.
Solving the digital divide
The digital divide is a problem that's dogged policy makers for decades. In spite of billions of dollars spent by the federal government each year to get more Americans connected, there are still at least 19 million Americans who don't have access to broadband, according to the Federal Communications Commission. That number is likely an underestimate, the FCC admits, given that the maps the government uses to determine who has service and who doesn't are grossly inaccurate.
Though policy makers for years have talked about the problem, the issue has taken on a new urgency over the past year as the pandemic and resulting lockdown provided a stark reminder that having adequate broadband is no longer a luxury. As schools and offices across the US have shut down, the internet has become as necessary to day-to-day life as electricity and running water.
Many experts also point out that closing the digital divide is not just about getting broadband access to rural communities that lack it. It's also about digital equity and making sure communities that have historically been redlined and left out of high speed access get it. It also means ensuring that broadband service is affordable to all Americans, regardless whether they live in rural parts of the country or urban or suburban areas.
During his campaign, Biden said he would expand broadband to every American. Biden's campaign promised $20 billion for rural broadband infrastructure for both wired and wireless networks to help bring internet access to areas where it simply doesn't exist now. It also promised to include help for local municipalities seeking to build their own broadband networks.
Congress has already been allocating funds to address the digital divide since the pandemic began more than a year ago. A half dozen states used federal funding from the CARES Act passed last spring to help fund broadband infrastructure projects. Mississippi was one such state, allocating $65 million of its CARES Act funding to grants for electric co-ops, which used the money to accelerate the buildout of gigabit-speed broadband service on fiber-optic infrastructure.
Funds allocated by Congress in the December COVID relief bill are now being used to provide a $50 a month subsidy to low-income individuals to pay for broadband service. More money for broadband was allocated as part of the COVID relief legislation signed into law by Biden in March.
Harris's experience as Attorney General California and her time serving as a U.S. Senator from California could make her an effective steward of this issue, Levin said. Her work on privacy issues, as well as, her connections to influential people in the tech sector could be beneficial to developing policy.
"Whether we're talking about how to connect rural America or how to make sure that broadband is affordable to low income people in rural America and in cities," Levin said. "She has had a combination of experiences in California that can be really useful in pulling together the right policies and the right politics to make closing the digital divide happen."
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