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Law360 (May 8, 2020, 9:28 PM EDT) -- More than a decade after the Federal Communications Commission first laid out the road map for spreading internet access across the country, one Democratic senator believes the National Broadband Plan is due for an update.
Under the National Broadband Plan for the Future Act, unveiled by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., on Thursday, the agency would be directed to develop a new plan for closing the digital divide and studying the coronavirus pandemic's effect on the country's internet needs.
"The National Broadband Plan laid out a vision for connecting all Americans to the internet, and we have made tremendous progress over the last decade," Markey said in a statement. "But the coronavirus pandemic has shown us that our work is far from done to ensure universal connectivity."
Markey came up with the language for the 2009 bill that directed the agency to lay out the original broadband plan, and he said it was now time to assess progress since then.
Public Knowledge, which advocates for an open internet, said Friday that it was cautiously optimistic about the bill, but that Congress had to "follow through" its ensure real progress. The dream envisioned in the original plan has fallen short over the years, it said.
"Like many plans, [the original broadband plan]began with great enthusiasm," the group said. "But the increasing dysfunction and hyper-partisanship that has rendered so much of Washington dysfunctional took its toll on the National Broadband Plan as well."
And while many across the country have access to the kind of internet speeds expected for 2020, the group said that "many still have the same broadband access they had in 2010 — none at all."
The digital divide has been thrown into sharp relief as the virus continues its deadly march across the country. The spread of COVID19 — the disease caused by the novel coronavirus — ground much of public life to a halt earlier this year, leaving millions without work and cloistered in their homes.
With millions more forced to work from home alongside school-age children now being asked to finish out the school year from their living rooms, access to a good internet connection has come to be a strong indication of how easily people will be able to keep up.
Even before the pandemic, millions of school-age children lived in homes without internet access, leaving them unable or forced to struggle to complete all their assignments in what has become known as the homework gap. Such students often turned to libraries or even fast-food restaurants with open internet connections, but in the rising public health crisis, those doors have swiftly closed to them just as nearly all of their learning moves to an online format.
The FCC has taken steps to ease the burden on such children, allowing schools and libraries that receive agency subsidies to use those funds to keep their Wi-Fi working during the pandemic even if their doors remain shut, so people can at least access the internet from the parking lot.
Democrats have reiterated their willingness to include broadband infrastructure funding in future coronavirus stimulus packages, if they can get their Republican counterparts on board, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying: "That digital divide is now becoming a digital chasm, and we have to really address that."
--Editing by Peter Rozovsky.
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