The influence of digital divide frames on legislative passage and partisan sponsorship: A content analysis of digital equity legislation in the U.S. from 1990 to 2020

Government funding is essential for digital equity. Scholarship on policies to improve internet access often examines the funding mechanisms behind subsidies, or the quality and reach of services provided. However, a better understanding of the issues and constituencies to receive government support to date may help digital equity activists more strategically lobby for new digital divide policies in the future. To do this, we take a macro-level approach to Van Dijk's resources and appropriation theory and examine how the framing of all digital divide–related U.S. Congressional legislation introduced between 1990 and 2020 may be associated with a bill's passage or the political party of its sponsor. Content analysis revealed that bills highlighting privacy literacy programs, educational outcomes, and corporate transparency were more likely to be passed into legislation. Bills sponsored by Republicans were 422% more likely of being passed into legislation. Certain frames were also associated with partisan sponsorship: Republican-sponsored bills were more often framed around deregulation, privacy programs, corporate transparency, and rural access, whereas Democrat-sponsored bills were more often framed around digital skills such as digital literacy and educational outcomes. Findings serve as a historical record of digital equity priorities in the U.S. and highlight possible strategies for future policy design.     

Race,ethnicity, and telecommunications policy issues of access and representation: Centering communities of color and their concerns

This paper examines how and why activist groups representing marginalized communities of color are increasingly engaging in communications technology policy issues, particularly in relation to issues of digital access and representation. It explores three distinct but related case studies to disentangle the issues and concerns of a range of communities of color, and the challenges and opportunities for their advocates in navigating the highly technical communications technology policy arena: the first case study, which centers on the NAACP's original opposition to net neutrality, reveals the primacy of issues surrounding the “digital divide” to populations of color, and the difficulties of engaging in technical conversations surrounding Internet governance when issues of access persist. Meanwhile, the second case reviews the campaign by Free Press to promote set-top box liberalization as an issue of representation and diversity to both policymakers and citizens. The final case, which examines the work of the Tribal International Carrier to build an alternative internet service network for Native populations, highlights the precarity which organizations must strategically navigate in order to mitigate the influence of both the state and large corporations over Internet policy issues in order to both serve and represent their constituents. In all, this paper presents and extends upon a novel approach to communications policy research, foregrounding the need to integrate critical race frameworks and, relatedly, to center the breadth, depth, and lived experiences of communities of color, which can therein facilitate more inclusive digital media and communication environments and policy structures.     

Competition,regulation, and broadband access to the internet

This paper reexamines the effect of the regulatory regime on both penetration and coverage of broadband access to the internet. The framework allows for an evaluation of policy initiatives, guidelines and measures to bridge the digital divide and to promote investment. A welfare analysis compares service-based with facilities-based competition and asks whether and how high-speed access to the internet should be subsidized. Using an approach similar to Valletti, Barros, and Hoernig (2002), the paper highlights the importance of population density for whether firms invest to provide internet access. The analysis reveals a trade-off between coverage and penetration.     

Determinants of internet use by school-age children: The challenges for Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the deep digital divide in Mexico and the enormous challenge faced by its education system in continuing to educate the country's students while under confinement. The objective of this article was to examine the determinants of internet access, use and productive uses for school-age children in households of different socioeconomic levels. The Heckman selection model was estimated based on data taken from the Encuesta Nacional sobre Disponibilidad y Uso de Tecnologías de la Información en los Hogares (ENDUTIH or National Survey on the Availability and Use of Information Technologies in the Household) 2018. The results obtained show that the probability of having children internet accessing and usage patterns (homework, courses, and blogs) depends on level of schooling, economic status, digital skills, and place of residence, as well as the presence of electronic devices and infomediaries in the household. These findings suggest the urgent need to redesign current ICT policy with a long-term integrated vision that guarantees access to ICTs and their productive use for students immersed in an ecosystem of educational innovation for the XXI century.     

Profiling the non-user: Rethinking policy initiatives stimulating ICT acceptance

Business strategies and policies that were successful in increasing internet penetration in the early days may no longer be appropriate. This is most probably so in countries where a bigger proportion of the population is already connected to the internet. As more people are online, it becomes more likely that the remaining fraction of non-users is either hard to convince, under-skilled or simply lacking the financial resources to afford a connection. In view of this, a new policy approach is proposed to increase ICT acceptance. The approach is based on strategies of segmentation and differentiation. This entails that policy initiatives are specifically targeted towards different groups in the population. This article demonstrates that being a non-user can be explained by a combination of access problems, lack of ICT skills or rather negative attitudes towards ICT or by the outweighing effect of one of them. It also provides a framework for setting up new policy measures.     

Understanding the trend to mobile-only internet connections:A decomposition analysis

A growing portion of internet users rely solely on mobile devices such as smartphones for their online access. The percentage of “mobile-only” households increased from 9% in 2011 to 20% in 2015, more than doubling in only four years. As this shift continues, it leads to the question of what factors are driving the rise in mobile-only adoption. Using nationally representative data, this study uses logistic regressions and a decomposition technique to understand the trend. The decomposition reveals that a significant portion (65%) of the growth was due to an increase in the download speeds of mobile networks. An increased acceptance of mobile-only access by households aged 55 and older was also partly responsible. Understanding (and developing a response to) the trend towards mobile-only adoption will be important as organizations and governments continue to work to close the digital divide.     

Examining linkages between Smart Villages and Smart Cities: Learning from rural youth accessing the internet in India

The literature on Smart Cities has not as yet paid adequate attention to the rural sector, and the potential in villages for creating smart and sustainable solutions for the 21st century. This paper focuses on linking proposed smart city strategies to smart village policies to ensure that rural youth have improved opportunities for employment through ICT initiatives to ensure digital inclusion, using primary surveys undertaken in India. The motivation was to understand how mobile telephony could be a catalyst to create Smart Villages in India, where young people can chart out new pathways to realize their aspirations with regard to tertiary education and new avenues for diversifying into rural non-agricultural employment. We use data obtained from a household survey in villages in the states of Punjab and Tamil Nadu to examine the mobile phone usage preferences of rural educated youth to identify the way forward in improving the accessibility of services on the supply side. We make the case that where youth are using mobile phone access to increase their social information base it is indeed possible that the new social media groups formed by rural youth become a powerful conduit for generating new employment opportunities. The key to accessing this solution is to use a demand driven model for mobile services that would permit a bottom of governance model to generate sustainable growth of enterprises and improved human development of these villages.     

The geopolitics of digital rights activism: Evaluating civil society's role in the promises of multistakeholder internet governance

Multistakeholderism is thought to play an important role in democratizing internet governance institutions and processes by including civil society. Therefore, scholars have studied the participation of civil society organizations, from the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society through to the most recent Internet Governance Forum, to understand how they engage in and shape internet governance. However, this category is not well defined; therefore, it is not always clear whose interests are being advanced by civil society organizations. This study evaluates representation in civil society by examining the annual RightsCon conference as an ideal site of civil society engagement in internet governance in order to evaluate the potential of multistakeholderism to achieve the goals of democratization, representation, and inclusion. Through a meso-level analysis of discursive production at RightsCon that operationalizes a critical geopolitical rubric, this study finds that organizations that represent interests from the Global North and West are highly over-represented in three ways: in leading overall discourse, in claiming authority over global issues, and in driving specific topics such as misinformation, privacy, and internet shutdowns. These findings offer an empirical evaluation of global representation in internet governance, raising the stakes for further study about why and how the category of civil society meets expectations. Finally, conceptual implications are discussed, including evaluating earlier critiques of multistakeholderism as less democratizing in reality than in theory, affirming the analytic value of civil society discourse to policy research, and opening up questions about how a more precise understanding of civil society can contribute to multistakeholderism in internet governance.     

The social process of internet appropriation: Living in a digitally advanced country benefits less well-educated Europeans

We generalize and extend the sequential model proposed by the resources and appropriation theory to explain the digital divide in the European Union plus the United Kingdom (EU27+UK). We measure the theoretical constructs of the model with data provided by the EU and test the theoretical predictions using a partial least squares structural equation model. We find support for the hypothesized relationships but find that the effects vary depending on the digital development level of countries. While education overall is the primary determinant of the social production of digital inequalities, a country's digital development level is crucial for less well-educated Europeans. These findings have theoretical and practical implications: (1) they call into question the homogeneity of the effect of causal relationships and the assumption that individuals differ only in terms of motivation, access, and digital skills, and (2) they indicate that socially disadvantaged Europeans benefit from living in more digitally developed countries.     

Evolution and determinants of digital divide in Brazil (2005–2013)

During the last decades, the widespread growth of information and communication technologies (ICT) has posed incentives to broaden the participation of individuals in social, political and economic dimensions of life. However, utilization of ICT also involves access to technology and infrastructure, and acquisition of skills to deal with innovations and, thus, digital literacy is, primarily, a complementary good. The digital divide expresses inequalities in access and utilization of ICT among individuals and populations in different countries. The study adopts inequalities indexes of Internet access and mobile phone ownership to measure use of ICT goods, accounting for the digital divide in Brazil. The inequality indexes are also split according to main determinants using four nationally representative survey data from 2005 to 2013. Results indicate that the digital divide among individuals is decreasing quite fast among Brazilians over time. However, there is room for policies of mass access to ICT goods based on mobile Internet broadband access. In addition, digital illiteracy, evaluated by lack of education, is one of the main determinants of the digital divide in the country, especially among elderly individuals.