The Issue
Although it's been four years since the COVID-19 pandemic began - a time when the stark realities of the digital divide shocked so many of us - California’s communities of color and low-income communities remain disproportionately disconnected to the internet.
Why? The digital divide is in part due to Internet service providers (ISPs) discriminatory business practices. Large ISPs prioritize building and upgrading their broadband infrastructure in affluent, white neighborhoods in order to maximize profit, a practice that mirrors decades of redlining dating back to the 1930s.
The Result? Historically marginalized communities’ access to education, health care, jobs, housing, public benefits, and civic life is restricted, creating widespread disparity across the state.
Without internet access, one simply cannot participate in today’s society. Make no mistake, this is THE civil rights issue of our modern, digital age, and it's time we come together to combat the discrimination that is taking place head on.
THE SOLUTION
To combat the issue of digital discrimination, we need to first agree on how to define it. Having access to a definition that clearly acknowledges and explains the kind of discrimination that is taking place is an essential first step towards creating systemic change.
Assemblymember Mia Bonta’s landmark legislation, AB 2239, does just this by adopting a definition of “digital discrimination of access” that echoes the definition adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in fall 2023.
By passing AB 2239, California will become the first state in the nation to clearly define digital discrimination as ISP business practices that have a differential impact on consumers based on their income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin.
“To the extent that there are policies and practices that serve to exacerbate this persistent inequity – even when that is not the intent – we must put an end to them. That is my intent with AB 2239.”
DIGITAL DISCRIMINATION - What You Need to Know
1) Multiple large-sample independent studies have proved that major ISPs routinely offer faster, more affordable internet to high-income, predominantly white communities than to low income communities and communities of color in California. These practices take place across all geographies (urban, suburban, and rural).
2) Major ISPs including AT&T, Comcast, and Charter Spectrum benefit financially from preserving their discriminatory business practices in California, and also benefit from significant investment of public dollars to expand their monopolies.
3) ISPs invest heavily to in lobbying to to maintain the status quo, spending more than $4.6 million in California in 2023 alone.
What are Internet Service Providers Saying?
ISPs make statements to the media claiming that they do not discriminate and that they provide quality service under equitable conditions but decline to provide more than talking points in defense of their practices and demand that anti-discrimination policy provides a “safe harbor” for discrimination.
They point to maps claiming that they provide equitable service to nearly all Californians, but these maps are based on self-reported data from ISPs, which has been shown to exaggerate actual service coverage.
ISPs such as Charter Spectrum and AT&T dismiss multiple independent, transparent, data-driven reports from organizations including The Markup, CalAdvocates, California Community Foundation, Communications Workers of America and NDIA, UC Berkeley, and others. They claim the data used in the reports was “cherry-picked,” but they decline to offer their own data to prove their point.
Interested in learning more about digital discrimination?
Check out the Digital DIscrimination Fact Sheet and Advocate Toolkit and other resources: