President Biden’s $2 trillion American Jobs Plan infrastructure proposal used a broader definition of infrastructure than most people tend to associate with the word. It took on everything from roads, pipes, and electricity to climate change, union jobs, and inequality.
It also provided $100 billion to America’s digital infrastructure, with a lofty goal of giving all Americans access to the affordable, reliable high-speed internet they need to participate in today’s economy. The plan is short on specifics for now, but the vast majority of that money will go to building out high-speed broadband connections to the millions of Americans who still don’t have them. There are also provisions about promoting competition and lowering prices. Biden called broadband internet “the new electricity,” comparing the need for a federal initiative to bring it to all Americans to the Rural Electrification Act of 1936.
If you’ve been paying attention, Biden’s focus on closing the digital divide shouldn’t be a surprise. He called for “universal broadband” during his campaign in his Build Back Better plan.
It’s an enormous and complicated undertaking that America has been trying to accomplish for years, under three (now four) presidencies. The exact number of Americans who don’t have access to broadband infrastructure varies depending on several factors, including the maps you use to count them and what your definition of reliable high-speed internet is. Biden put the number at 30 million. And that number doesn’t include the millions of Americans who do have access to broadband internet but can’t afford it, rendering that access meaningless.
Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Technology Law & Policy, said in a statement that Biden’s plan was notable not only in its ambition but also in “the message it sends — that broadband, like electricity, is a necessity, and that one cannot participate in our economy, our education and health care systems and our society without it … The United States cannot afford to be a country of digital haves and have-nots.”
More at Vox Recode.