“You can’t close the digital divide with just pipes and wires,” Huffman said. “You have to also address the human side of the equation.”

These findings reflect a broader discussion about the digital divide’s impact on America’s youth. Numerous policymakers and advocates have expressed concern that students with less access to certain technologies may fall behind their more digitally connected peers. There is some evidence that teens who have access to a home computer are more likely to graduate from high school when compared with those who don’t.

Thirty-two rural ISPs point to “the bureaucratic straightjacket of outdated regulations known as Title II” as a barrier to the vigorous investment they want to pursue.

Innovative providers hoping to offer their customers new, even free services had to fear a Washington bureaucracy that might disapprove and take enforcement action against them

82.9%

the majority of Americans—57 percent—support the current net neutrality regulations that ban ISPs from blocking or discriminating against lawful content on the internet

bipartisan

The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to dismantle landmark rules regulating the businesses that connect consumers to the internet, granting broadband companies power to potentially reshape Americans’ online experiences.

telecom companies, which surged 2.7% to lead all sectors — a reversal of their futility so far in 2017, having dropped 12% year-to-date.

The War for Net Neutrality in the USA won a battle in 2014, but in 2017 we are seeing a second battle which is more likely to be lost. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. GOOG-FB-AMZN traffic would be the most common, due to their popularity among internet users. Because of this market demand, ISPs will likely provide cheap plans with access to GOOG-FB-AMZN, while offering more expensive plans with full internet access. It is already a reality in Portugal.

If we upgraded to competitive wholesale publicly-overseen fiber optic networks all over the country, we could leave the cable industry and its ongoing destructive shenanigans behind. (Without expensive upgrades, the cable guys can’t provide the upload capacity that fiber can.) Yes, it would be initially expensive to do this. But so was the railroad system. So were the highways.

There are so many ways for the local cable monopolies to turn dials in their direction the way things are set up now. They can start charging more for peak-hour usage, so they never have to upgrade their physical facilities. They can start charging more for interconnection of Lane 2 with other networks. They can zero-rate a bazillion other services they provide and bundle them with their own “public internet” offerings. They can charge separately for their proprietary WiFi services nationwide — the new bottled water, the thing we ought to have access to in abundance for free.They can do all of this because most U.S. households have only a single choice of operator for download speeds greater than 25 Mbps. It’s even worse for speeds over 50 Mbps 

Networks are built to meet peak demands. Comcast has already made this investment. No “power user” is having any effect on anyone else’s download experience within Comcast’s Lane 2 — there’s plenty of capacity. (The Netflix/Comcast fracas last year made this eminently clear: as soon as Netflix paid up, presto, Netflix subscribers weren’t faced with a spinning wheel.)

Earlier this month, Comcast announced that it would be launching a $15 per month streaming pay TV service — cleverly named Stream TV — that wouldn’t count against the 300GB data plans (that number is the cap) it had already introduced in several states.

It begins by announcing a data cap that’s set high enough to affect only a small percentage of current users who routinely hit it. Justify it by saying you’re only targeting the “hogs” who gobble up everybody else’s bandwidth. Say you’ll charge for data usage that exceeds that cap. Then sit back and wait. Eventually, increased usage by more Americans will bring millions into the fold. And presto: without lifting a finger, dominant players can charge more people more per month — on every side of every transaction, content sources as well as consumers — without expanding their facilities, much less upgrading to the communications capacity we need.