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Access to high-speed Internet is essential for full and consequential participation in the civic, economic, and education systems of modern life. Yet 30% of Californians continue to lack “meaningful Internet access” at home. This digital divide is worse among already disadvantaged communities and prevents rural, lower-income, and disabled individuals from fully participating in the civic, economic, and education systems of life in 2018. This chapter establishes the magnitude of the digital divide, examines the factors that contribute to the Divide, and looks at which groups are most affected. Successful government programs that invested in utility infrastructure and adoption, such as the Rural Electrification Act, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act and the California Advanced Services Fund, are examined to provide a foundation for broadband specific policy recommendations. The chapter sets up a framework for policy recommendations by segmenting the population based upon the concepts of material and motivational access and establishing meaningful Internet access as the goal for policy-makers. The chapter puts forth a number of specific policy recommendations to address the technological disparity and prevent it from furthering the economic and educational divides.

This study examines the implementation of a community-level Sustainable Broadband Adoption Program (SBA) under the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), a national public policy program meant to expand broadband deployment and adoption under the American Recovery Act of 2009, and administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) at the U.S. Department of Commerce. The California Connects Program (CC) was administered by the Foundation for California Community Colleges (FCCC).

This chapter focuses on one part of CC’s efforts to expand broadband adoption among the most underserved Californians through collaboration with the Great Valley Center (GVC). CC-GVC provided basic computer and Internet classes to disconnected populations with low-literacy levels, and primarily in Spanish, through community-based organizations, public schools, public libraries, small businesses, and others in the Central Valley, an 18 county rural region with a high concentration of digital destitute populations. The program worked with under-resourced local community institutions with a range of poor technology resources and that operated under variable set of social, economic, political, and institutional conditions. Through inductive, process-oriented, and explanatory case study research, the structure, strategy, and training approach of CC was examined. Content and theme analysis of primary and secondary qualitative and quantitative data involving the program’s leadership, direct service providers, partners, participants, and nonparticipants was conducted. This involved a sample of 600 in-depth and short, structured and unstructured interviews and focus groups, archival and participant observation notes.

It was found that CC-GVC was able to meet uncertainty and operated with low institutional resources and paucity of linguistically appropriate teaching resources for new entrants through a flexible leadership approach that adapted to the social situation and was open to innovation. Community technology trainers were also able to engage those without or little direct experience with computers and with low-literacy levels with a linguistically appropriate and culturally sensitive step-by-step teaching approach that empowered and met people where they are. The author expands non-adoption models to include structural barriers in the analysis of the disconnected. It is argued that non-adoption is a result of evolving inequality processes fueled by poverty and under-resourced community development institutions and that teaching and learning is a social and institutional process that takes trust and time.

CC shows that even the most disadvantaged can be empowered to learn-to-learn to use computers and can begin to function online and gain benefit under the most extreme institutional and economic conditions, but it takes more time and resources than providers expected and the Recovery Act provided.

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which academic researchers consider the relationship between broadband access and children’s information seeking in the United States. Because broadband has been cited as an essential element of contemporary learning, this study sought to identify gaps in the attention given to the role of broadband in the information seeking environment of youth.

The researchers conducted a mixed method synthesis of academic research published in peer-reviewed journals between 1991 and 2011 that reported the information seeking of children aged 5–18 years. Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered from leading databases, analyzed separately, and conclusions drawn from integrated results.

The results of this study indicated that broadband is rarely considered in the design of children’s information seeking published in peer-reviewed research journals. Only 15 studies showed any presence of broadband in study design or conclusions. Due to the small number of qualifying studies, the researchers could not conduct the synthesis; instead, the researchers conducted a quantitative relationship analysis and qualitative content analysis.

Given the focus of policymaking and public discussion on broadband, its absence as a study consideration suggests a crucial gap for scholarly researchers to address.

The data set included only studies of children in the United States, therefore, findings may not be universally applicable.

Despite national imperatives for ubiquitous broadband and a tradition of information seeking research in library and information science (LIS) and other disciplines, a lack of academic research about how broadband affects children’s information seeking persists.

This chapter analyzes the ways national, international, and library professional policies address Internet access as a human right. This includes documenting the ways rural libraries fulfill their patrons’ human right to the Internet and demonstrating how Mathiesen’s (2014) framework can be used by library professionals and policymakers to ensure that people have physical, intellectual, and social access to the Web. The author’s intention is to help facilitate a more meaningful definition of access that goes beyond just providing hardware access to bridge the digital divide, but instead asserts the need for librarian assistance and technology training if we wish to allow all members of a society, without exception, to fully enjoy their human rights.

The author analyzes existing national and international policies pertaining to providing information and Internet access in rural and otherwise underserved areas, as well as precedents involving the deployment of previous information and communication technologies (ICTs) in rural areas. This segues into an analysis of barriers to rural Internet access using facets and determinants developed by Mathiesen, leading to the argument that rural librarians’ ability to help underserved populations use the Internet is essential to making Web access meaningful.

• The United Nations (UN) has supported arguments that people have a right to information access and the technologies that support this, suggesting that Internet access is a human right.

• The U.S. government has a history of facilitating access to ICTs in rural areas that dates back to 1934 and continues through the present.

• Funding mechanisms that facilitate Web access in the United States focus primarily on making broadband connections, hardware, and software accessible, leaving out the essential training and assistance components that are essential to making many rural residents and other underserved persons able to actually use the Internet.

The United Nations (UN) has supported arguments that people have a right to information access and the technologies that support this, suggesting that Internet access is a human right.

The U.S. government has a history of facilitating access to ICTs in rural areas that dates back to 1934 and continues through the present.

Funding mechanisms that facilitate Web access in the United States focus primarily on making broadband connections, hardware, and software accessible, leaving out the essential training and assistance components that are essential to making many rural residents and other underserved persons able to actually use the Internet.

Scholarship on rural libraries, including some of the research in this volume, has argued that rural public libraries provide an invaluable service by offering both access to and guidance in using the Internet. While these publications commonly discuss the socioeconomic benefits of providing this access, they often treat the motivation for providing such services as self-evident. This chapter analyzes policies and legal precedents to argue that Internet access for rural residents, through public libraries and other means, is not merely a privilege that will benefit people if funded, but instead a human right that cannot be ignored.

This chapter presents results of a survey conducted over the summer of 2009 to 1485 libraries that serve populations of 25,000–100,000 in the United States about Internet connected public access computers and e-government. The methodology used was a mixed-methods questionnaire using 33 closed ended and three qualitative questions. The main finding was that public library staff do not have enough training in e-government and government documents to help patrons with their questions on these topics. Another aspect of the survey was to find out whether public libraries plan, fund, and allocate monies for computer hardware and software in their budgets.

The limitation of the research was the size of the libraries and the results can only be generalized to this group of libraries. There could be a bias by size of library and the way the questions were worded. The practical implications of the research indicate that future librarians in library and information science programs are unaware of the need to take either government information or e-government courses. Recent emerging roles for the public library includes being the freely available place to access e-government information in lieu of the actual federal, state, or local agencies.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to review net neutrality and the notion that bright light rules are necessary to hold broadband providers from exercising market power. The 2015 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Open Internet Order asserted that broadband providers have the capability and incentive to harm their customers and third-party service providers. It imposed a set of rules to control broadband providers’ offers, prices, and traffic management. The 2017 FCC vacated all but the transparency provisions of the OIO, restoring the oversight of broadband to the FTC.

This paper offers a review of the evidence regarding the effects of net neutrality regulation, including an investigation of the incidence of violations, or lack thereof, during the 2020 pandemic in the United States. It provides a review of the net neutrality literature and the international research on broadband provider behaviour during COVID-19. The paper presents original research conducted with FCC and FTC reports and a survey of news stories. Brief reviews of federal data on network performance and broadband adoption provide additional context. Given the limited incidence of violations that could be uncovered for the period, the paper suggests why broadband providers behaved opposite to regulatory advocates’ predictions. Contrary to many policy assertions, broadband providers did not block or throttle service, nor did they increase prices arbitrarily or decrease quality. Broadband providers appeared to expand availability, lower broadband prices, and make more networks available, frequently without customer charge. The paper suggests how policy could be updated to reflect the actual behaviour of broadband providers.

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which digital inclusion functions as a super social determinant of health, particularly within the arena of family carework and healthcare for vulnerable disabled US communities. The focus on vulnerable populations, including the elderly, chronically ill, young disabled, neurodivergent, and/or medically complex children and the families that care for them, is a useful case to present a compelling argument for the need to take seriously digital inclusion to maximize health, safety, and well-being for growing populations of Americans today. The authors argue that digital inclusion is an increasingly influential social determinant of health and a key dimension of health equity that offers important benefits and potentials, especially for vulnerable patient populations, for whom in-home and family-centered care are necessary parts of health maintenance, prevention, and well-being. The chapter ends with a discussion of ways that the US government can mitigate digital barriers and facilitate equitable access to broadband internet and e-health resources that address the intersections of digital, health, and care inequalities, with significant impacts in all three dimensions.