In March, Comcast announced new customers of the Internet Essentials program — a less than $10 a month broadband internet service for low-income households — would receive the first two months free when signing up through June 30. Launched in 2011, the program has connected more than 340,000 Washington residents, including more than 132,000 people in King County, said the company’s Regional Senior Vice President of Washington, Rodrigo Lopez.
But some critics say private internet companies limit access for the poor, by throttling internet speeds, requiring yearlong contracts, and limiting the number of devices online at one time.
“They don’t really have an equity lens,” Glaser said.
Since 2015, Glaser’s organization, Upgrade Seattle, has advocated that Seattle join the more than 300 cities around the country that have switched to municipal broadband, in which cities pay for the expansion of broadband infrastructure in order to provide it to every resident’s home. The service is then operated by the city, costs are controlled, just like electricity or water. Seattle City Councilmember Alex Pedersen announced a new resolution in May to encourage the city to start “charting the course for universal internet access in Seattle.”
Levine, the senior policy fellow at UC-Riverside, hopes the pandemic’s revelation of digital inequities shows broadband internet can no longer be treated as a luxury in our society, but rather as a public utility.
“The reason we’re concerned about the digital divide is not because of the digital divide in and of itself, but because it fosters other divides,” Levine said. “It fosters educational divides and economic divides and health outcome divides.”