WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, Free Press delivered a letter to the Federal Communications Commission urging the agency’s new leadership to take serious strides toward closing the digital divide by making broadband more affordable.

New FCC Chairman Ajit Pai recently claimed that closing the divide was going to be “one of his core priorities” during his tenure. The Free Press letter commends Pai for this new focus, but strikes a note of caution given his prior track record as a commissioner.

“No matter how laudable the new chairman’s sentiment may be, his proposals to close that divide could be ineffective — and even harmful,” Free Press warns. “The Commission must not subsidize build-out that is already occurring in the market, and yet not even address the primary structural barrier keeping tens of millions of people offline: affordability of the services already available to them.”

The Free Press letter is available here: http://www.freepress.net/sites/default/files/resources/free_press_digital_divide_fcc_letter_final.pdf

In December, Free Press released Digital Denied, a comprehensive study that offers a deep and detailed look at the role race and ethnicity play in determining whether a person has affordable home access to high-speed internet services.

”Our research contains many similar findings that all point to the same conclusion: the root cause of the adoption gap is the lack of affordability, and that is an outcome created primarily by a market structure that produces too few affordable choices and suboptimal competition. The adoption gap is an affordability gap,” the Free Press letter reads.

Pai’s preliminary plan focuses on giving significant tax breaks to the handful of ISPs that control the broadband-access marketplace. Pai proposes using taxpayer dollars to fund the construction of gigabit networks in below-average-income neighborhoods, despite the fact that most of these deployment projects are already underway. His plan does nothing to make these services affordable.

Free Press Deputy Director and Senior Counsel Jessica J. Gonzalez made the following statement:

“Sixty-nine million people in the United States lack any form of home-internet access. People with low incomes and people of color are much more likely to go without, and the steep cost of home-internet access is the foremost adoption barrier. Yet Chairman Pai’s plan does nothing to address affordability and the competitive market failures that have made home-internet access out of reach for many.

“The early policy proposals Pai has put forth won’t move the needle on the digital divide. The notion that government should encourage deployment in currently served areas using tax incentives is not necessarily objectionable in the abstract. But subsidizing deployments that would already occur in the absence of any such incentives is, by definition, corporate welfare. Using taxpayer dollars to fund deployments these ISPs would already make — all under the guise of bringing low-income families online, when there’s no reason to expect that this would actually help in that regard — is the kind of cynical political move that undermines faith in government.

“Telecommunications isn’t a field of dreams: If you build it, they won’t come if the price is too high. Subsidizing large phone and cable companies to provide access to a service is meaningless unless that service is also affordable.

“If Chairman Pai genuinely wants everyone to have affordable choices in a competitive marketplace, he needs to change his approach.”