{"id":14029,"date":"2020-08-20T06:36:50","date_gmt":"2020-08-20T10:36:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/?p=14029"},"modified":"2020-08-18T19:57:12","modified_gmt":"2020-08-18T23:57:12","slug":"using-evidence-to-solve-the-digital-divide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/?p=14029","title":{"rendered":"Using evidence to solve the digital divide"},"content":{"rendered":"

An article in The Hill<\/a> caught my eye this past weekend. In “No more gut-based strategies: Using evidence to solve the digital divide”<\/a>, Gregory Rosston and Scott Wallsten write:<\/p>\n

COVID-19 has, among other things, brought home the costs of the digital divide. Numerous op-eds have offered solutions, including increasing subsidies to schools, providing eligible low-income people with a $50 per month broadband credit, funding more digital literacy classes and putting WiFi on school buses. A House bill would allocate $80 billion to ideas meant to close the digital divide.<\/p>\n

The key missing component of nearly every proposal to solve the connectivity problem is evidence \u2014 evidence suggesting the ideas are likely to work and ways to use evidence in the future to evaluate whether they did work. Otherwise, we are likely throwing money away. Understanding what works and what doesn\u2019t requires data collection and research now and in the future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gregory Rosston is Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and Director of the Public Policy program at Stanford University. He previously served as Deputy Chief Economist at the Federal Communications Commission. Scott Wallsten is president and senior fellow of the Technology Policy Institute and was the economics director for the FCC’s National Broadband Plan.<\/p>\n

Many people mistakenly think the connectivity problem is simple to solve. All we need to do is lower the price and we’ll magically attain universal broadband adoption.<\/p>\n

If it was only that easy. <\/p>\n

In reality, we have gained some experience, learning from programs like Connecting Families<\/a>, Internet for Good<\/a>, and Connected for Success<\/a> that other factors are in play. South of the border, “Learning from the FCC\u2019s Lifeline Broadband Pilot Projects” [pdf<\/a>, 1.8MB] looked at the outcomes of 14 experimental wireline and wireless broadband Lifeline projects facilitated by the FCC around the United States.<\/p>\n

There were some very important observations<\/a> made from those US trials.<\/p>\n

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