Congress votes to pull funding for free Wi-Fi hotspots at schools and libraries

The Senate has voted to extremity a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regularisation that utilized national backing to screen Wi-Fi hotspots that could beryllium utilized extracurricular of schoolhouse and libraries. 

The program, archetypal implemented by erstwhile FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, applied funds from the $2.6 cardinal national E-Rate programme to a programme that enabled schools and libraries to supply escaped Wi-Fi hotspots to children and others with mediocre oregon nary net entree astatine home. 

As Policyband notes anterior to a palmy Senate procedural ballot yesterday to instrumentality up the measure, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said the regularisation “violates the Communications Act, which intelligibly limits the usage of the funds successful question to classrooms and libraries.” 

In a statement past year, Rosenworcel disagreed that the instrumentality doesn’t enactment hotspot lending. Citing distant learning issues that were enactment successful crisp alleviation by the covid pandemic, Rosenworcel wrote that portion E-Rate had “overwhelming occurrence connecting schools and libraries,” it needed to beryllium modernized truthful that schools and libraries could “loan retired Wi-Fi hotspots to enactment high-speed net entree successful agrarian America, municipality America, and everything successful between.” She noted that the alteration could beryllium accomplished “within the existing E-Rate budget.” 

The FCC nether Chairman Brendan Carr, who opposed the hotspot lending program, has aggressively pulled backmost from user extortion programs and turned into the Trump administration’s de facto censorship arm. GOP members of Congress person worked to rollback subsidies that assistance to summation US net access, specified arsenic the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program, successful the sanction of spending reduction. Citing a caller survey successful March, TechDirt wrote that the “$7–$8 cardinal yearly payer outgo of the programme generated betwixt $28.9 and $29.5 cardinal successful savings acknowledgment to expanded entree to affordable net and distant telehealth services.”

In a statement released aft the vote, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, who was nominated by erstwhile President Joe Biden, said the ballot volition exacerbate economical disparities. “Those with capable net entree are progressively separated from those without, and this determination risks widening that spread adjacent further,” Gomez said.