Tagged: Infrastructure disparities

Digital divide draws lines by color, class, geography

December 21, 2011 | Marina Sideris | Tags: ,

A recent piece from Colorlines highlights the digital divide between those with access to broadband internet and those navigating the internet from mobile devices such as smartphones.  This divide is increasingly separating internet users along race, class, and geographic lines.  Moreover, as Colorlines points out, differential regulatory treatment between the two types of access may create a second-class internet for cell phone users.

Cell phones are a vastly more affordable way to access the internet than broadband access through a computer–and sometimes, broadband access is simply unavailable.  Quite possibly as a result of the relative affordability of cell phone access, the number of people of color adopting smartphones is growing faster than their white counterparts.  Moreover, people of color rely more heavily on cell phone-based web access.  Colorlines reports that 18% of blacks and 16% of Latinos now use cell phones as their exclusive means of internet access, as compared to just 10% of whites.  At the same time, while 33% of whites use their phones to surf the web, 51% of Latinos and 46% of blacks do.

Rural households are disproportionately affected by the digital divide, too.  According to the FCC, at least 20 million people in the U.S. lack access to broadband internet–and 73% of those reside in rural America.  For all Americans, access to the internet is about much more than surfing the web: people now rely on the internet to pay bills, renew driver’s licenses, apply for jobs, unemployment insurance, or food stamps, and engage in the political and electoral processes.   Rural households may have unique needs for internet access, such as to connect to health care providers who maintain offices a great distance away.  (The FCC has acknowledged this need through its pilot Universal Services Program for Rural Health Care Providers, designed to help defray the heightened costs of installing broadband internet in rural and remote areas.)

So, why is cell phone-based internet service inferior to broadband?  The FCC names a few reasons, including that broadband allows more content to be transmitted, enables high-quality internet features that are incompatible with dial-up service, and is always “on” and does not block a phone line.  Colorlines highlights an additional reason: while recent “net neutrality” legislation regulates companies when they are providing broadband access, it does not regulate those providing access via mobile devices.  This means that, while telecommunications companies cannot prioritize what information travels faster or slower over their broadband connections, there are no such restrictions on how companies control access to or passage of information over cell phone-based internet service.

Without equivalent net neutrality for cell-phone based internet service, Colorlines suggests we may well see the emergence of a second-class internet for people of color, poor people, rural households and others who lack access to broadband.

New Orleans six years after Katrina

September 1, 2011 | Gillian Sonnad | Tags:

Two law professors at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law recently revisited the alarming impacts Katrina had on New Orleans.  Six years later, the immensely disparate impacts on the racial and economic minorities in New Orleans are still evident. Some of the most distressing developments relate to the reduction of New Orleans’ population in a manner which has made the city overall less diverse both racially and economically.   African-American families also face serious difficulties when trying to return to New Orleans or rebuild their houses because the apartments they used to occupy were bulldozed and those that lost their homes are awarded only the previous lower value rather than the actual cost to rebuild their houses.  In the wake of such devastating storms, much of the city and state infrastructure suffered as well and now 75% of New Orleans’ public schools are charter schools.  “According to the Institute on Race & Poverty of University of Minnesota Law School, ‘The reorganization of the city’s schools has created a separate but unequal tiered system of schools that steers a minority of students, including virtually all of the city’s white students, into a set of selective, higher-performing schools and another group, including most of the city’s students of color, into a group of lower-performing schools.’”  In addition to the increasing racial disparities, economic gaps continue to grow as well.  For example,  a full 70% more people are homeless in New Orleans and 34% of children live in poverty, 14% above the national average.  The lasting effects of the terrible storms which ravaged New Orleans have much to teach us about the systems on which we rely to help people in times of disaster.