By Lawson Faulkner
On July 18th, the FCC voted to expand its E-Rate program for public schools and libraries to pay for off-campus Wi-Fi hotspots. Proponents of the 3-2 decision argued that these subsidies are necessary to modernize remote learning.
However, a growing coalition of lawmakers, industry trade groups, and youth mental health advocates are pushing back against E-Rate overreach. They argue that hotspot subsidies will only waste precious taxpayer resources on children’s unsupervised internet use. As we have argued previously, Wi-Fi on school buses is a horrible idea for these reasons.
Established in 1996, the E-Rate program is housed within the Universal Service Fund, a federal initiative responsible for subsidizing telephone services for low-income households. On an annual basis, the E-Rate program distributes over $2 billion to connect public schools and libraries to reliable broadband technology. Following educational dysfunction throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the FCC has faced growing calls to appropriate E-Rate funding for remote learning activities.
At face value, this subsidization effort appears to be an admirable stab at closing the “Wi-Fi gap”, ensuring that broadband connectivity will no longer be an obstacle to the future of remote learning. As FCC Chairwoman Rebecca Rosenworcel has insisted, “every library and every school in this country should be able to loan out Wi-Fi hotspots to help keep their patrons and kids connected.” No program, however, should be judged on intentions rather than results. While Rosenworcel’s is a commendable vision in theory, the FCC’s unwarranted E-Rate expansion is riddled with legal, ethical, and fiscal side-effects that promise to do more harm than good.
For one, there are legitimate concerns over the legality of off-campus hotspots. As the American Cable Association has pointed out, Section 254 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 specifically designates “classrooms” and “libraries” as eligible for E-Rate funding, making no mention of off-campus locations. In a statement dissenting to the FCC ruling, Commissioner Brendan Carr backed this assessment, arguing that “Congress has never authorized the FCC to use its E-Rate program to provide funding that schools and libraries could use to lend Wi-Fi hotspots out to students and patrons.”
House Energy and Commerce Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) went even farther in her criticism, asserting that the FCC’s loose interpretation of E-Rate jurisdiction “violates federal law and will result in taxpayer dollars subsidizing children’s unsupervised internet access.” With no evidence to suggest that hotspot subsidies improve remote learning outcomes, youth mental health advocates have predicted that an E-Rate expansion will only supercharge online addiction.
According to the American Psychological Association, teenagers spend an average of five hours per day online. More alarmingly, the Pew Research Center has found that 43% of teens are online almost constantly, up from 24% nearly a decade ago. Critics of E-Rate expansion fear that off-campus hotspots will send these metrics soaring even higher. As the Foundation for American Innovation argues, “the FCC’s idea that students are going to use a loaned hotspot primarily for homework, as opposed to ‘doomscrolling’ TikTok or Youtube, may evince a certain naïveté about how an unsupervised child uses the internet.” In a March letter opposing E-Rate expansion, the Heritage Foundation expressed similar concerns, denouncing an E-Rate expansion as “arbitrary and not evidence based”, while arguing that it is “unreasonable to expect unsupervised children to have the discipline to only use a hotspot for homework.”
But most debilitating to the cause of E-Rate expansion is the question of fiscal feasibility. As the FCC has already acknowledged, there are “insufficient E-Rate funds to support Wi-Fi hotspots and services for every student, school staff member and library patron across the nation.” USF fees, which would fund the program, continue to rise year-on-year to meet unsustainably large commitments that have nothing to do with the fund’s original phone service remit. With federal initiatives such as the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program already working to close the digital divide, the FCC appears to be overstepping its statutory authority and needlessly wasting taxpayer resources.
With this in mind, critics such as the Foundation for American Innovation have argued that “expanding E-Rate’s mission to connect students and library patrons off-site could be fiscally irresponsible.” Aside from budgetary concerns, the threat of overbuilding through E-Rate expansion could neutralize the progress of the $42.5 billion BEAD program. As the cable association NCTA explains, distributing E-Rate funds to households already “supported by the High-Cost USF program or other governmental initiative would waste USF resources that could be used to promote deployment of broadband facilities elsewhere as needed.”
The FCC’s move to grow the E-Rate program will create a trove of legal, ethical, and fiscal conundrums that promise more harm than good. Instead of wasting taxpayer resources on needless overreach, the FCC should stay in its lane and not further dilute an already-overburdened pot of money.
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