| Friend—
The infrastructure bill that the House passed last week is a historic win in the fight for affordable high-speed internet — and one that is the result of years upon years of advocacy.
You see, before Congress could even contemplate including broadband money in an infrastructure bill, Free Press Action and our allies had to convince legislators, policymakers and other decision-makers that broadband should be considered a vital utility that everyone deserves affordable access to — no matter who they are or where they live.
And that wasn’t a small feat. In the early 2000s, leading policymakers saw broadband as a luxury — going so far as to compare wanting broadband to wanting a Mercedes.
Here are just a few of the highlights from our fight to ensure that everyone in the United States has affordable, reliable access to high-speed internet: The first time we testified in Congress, back in 2006, we argued that the Universal Service Fund (USF) — a federal program created to subsidize telephone service to low-income households and high-cost areas — must include high speed internet. Our policy experts’ work in Congress and at the FCC helped shape the 2010 National Broadband Plan and subsequent transformation of the USF from a telephone-centric program to a broadband-first one. In 2014, we brought Obama FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to Oakland, California, to hear directly from people affected by the digital divide — a significant achievement in our tireless work with allies to uplift and center the voices of communities of color in policy discussions in Washington, D.C. In 2016, Free Press published Digital Denied, an exhaustive 225-page report that examined how the digital divide disproportionately impacts people of color. After the devastation of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017 — when one of the worst communications outages in modern U.S. history contributed to the death toll — we launched a massive campaign demanding that the FCC do more to determine what happened and how to prevent this kind of crisis from happening again. Our work led to a U.S. Government Accountability Office investigation. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we began working with utility-justice groups to call for a moratorium on water, electricity and broadband shutoffs. We organized countless meetings between Free Press Action members and congressional staffers and legislators, testified in Congress multiple times and submitted comments to the FCC again and again. We also built relationships with journalists around the country, wrote influential Op-Eds, participated in panel discussions, fought bad mergers in the telecom industry and rallied, rallied, rallied. Friend, this is what movement work looks like. The truly countless hours, sweat and (often) tears that went into this work are why we now have an infrastructure bill that invests $65 billion toward ending the digital divide.
The work that our movement does — a movement that includes you and 1.4 million other activists — is truly changing our country for the better. Of course, there is so much more work that we must do together to build a media system that provides real justice for low-income, Black and Brown communities.
If you can, please donate today to help provide the reliable, ongoing support we need throughout the year to pursue every opportunity that arises to move our work for justice forward.
Thank you for everything you do for our movement.
In solidarity,
Heather and the rest of the Free Press Action team
freepress.net
P.S. At Free Press Action, we don’t take a single dollar from business, government or political parties — our work is powered by the generosity of charitable foundations and people like you. If you can, please make a gift today to sustain our work to expand access to affordable high-speed internet for all. |
