 So right now we're gonna get into the action in terms of looking at the different themes and key issues in the report and it's my pleasure to introduce Lisa Guernsey who's going to moderate the first provocateurs, provocations like statistics. Most of you here know that Lisa Guernsey heads up, actually she's the deputy director of the early education initiative and the director of the learning technologies initiative. But much more importantly than our title she's a leading journalist, researcher and policy expert and even more important than that she has recently written a book called tap-click read growing readers in the world of screens for which it is my pleasure to say I am her co-author Lisa Guernsey. So I'm actually not gonna stand at the podium and I'm gonna kind of get us not necessarily moving around but really kind of get this conversation jump-started here. This has been a fantastic morning so far. I'm just I'm thrilled to have heard Chairman Willard's remarks but certainly to be able to go through the richness of this report and this study is it's just a lot that we need to talk about. So what we're gonna do let me just give you a little bit of what will be happening over the next say 80 to 90 minutes here we're gonna try to stay on schedule and I'm certainly gonna try to be a pretty heavy-handed timekeeper on this as well. So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna be calling on a couple of people that you see in your agenda they're gonna be speaking for just a five minutes maybe even less if I might be able to ask you guys to tighten your remarks and and then we're gonna open it up to a couple other folks in the room who have some things to say that could respond to that we don't have to make every single response in the form of a question we do want this to be a conversation but we also want to keep things moving and so I'll be trying to help us do that and asking some questions as well of the experts here. I'm gonna start and we have microphones at every table so when we get to that part I want you all to feel very you know think I encourage you to be part of the discussion. I also just want to let you know this is being live streamed if you didn't hear that already and we are there are a lot of people on Twitter who are talking about it so everything we're talking about here in this room really is we're in a public forum and I think that's incredibly important. So what we're gonna do is we're going to start right now with Craig Watkins who is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and he's the author of the young and the digital what migration to social what the migration to social and network sites games and anytime anywhere media means for our future so please join me in welcoming Craig to the podium. So thank you for that introduction and so I'm aiming for five minutes so I'll look to you to to push me off the stage. Thank you to Vicki and Vicki and to Michael and to New America for for the invitation here. So I've been asked to sort of kick off our kind of interactive session or conversation around one of the more interesting findings among the many interesting findings from the study that we just heard about is that the greater likelihood that lower income and immigrant households are much more likely for example to have mobile only access to the internet and I think this is a really important kind of recognition. It's consistent with a lot of the data trends that we've been noticing over the last five to ten years or so. You know I can remember you know within this five or seven year period just because of some of the work that I've been doing with the MacArthur Foundation around digital media around learning around youth around connectivity around equity you know occasionally you know and still even today but certainly a few years ago when a lot of this data was becoming more and more apparent in terms of how the digital divide was shifting in ways that none of us could have predicted particularly in terms of the adoption of mobile but reporters from the Washington Post you know the New York Times, Austin American Statement where I'm based sort of you know asking me about these trends right and more specifically the degree to which mobile devices and the mobile web were increasingly being accessed by lower income African-American Latino individuals families and households and the premise of a lot of those stories right was that mobile was doing what policymakers what education or what educators and other intervening programs that really been unsuccessfully doing and that is sort of bridging what we refer to here as the digital divide. It also reminds me of you know just a few years ago when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad to the world one of the things that he kept saying that day was it's like holding the internet in your hand and I was mindful of a lot of the research that we had been doing on the ground around that time starting with the MacArthur Foundation and we were noticing more and more kids holding the internet in their hand but the question that we asked and that we've asked since then is what kind of internet are they holding in their hand right and what does that internet enable them to do what are the affordances of the internet and I think this study begins to give us some insights in terms of what may be an interesting sort of counter narrative to the idea that mobile is sort of bridging the divide and that is I'm going to push us to sort of you know ponder the inversion of that and that is is mobile only access in some ways driving digital disparities and so what we mean by that right is the extent to which one of the data points that Vicky Rideout shared was the I think it was kids growing up in households mobile only households were much less likely for example to sort of pursue their interest online and we learned from the work that we've been doing with the MacArthur Foundation that this is a critical pathway to developing a lot of the 21st century literacies that more and more people are beginning to recognize are absolutely critical to preparing young people for a knowledge driven economy and that is to say the degree to which they are accessing internet accessing information accessing knowledge networks accessing participatory cultures that really support literacy they really support engagement they really support their ability to develop greater depth expertise and whatever interest they may be driven to pursue and so as we begin to think about you know what it means to be a digital in a digital world what it means to be connected in the connected world I think this mobile only access sort of raises a number of interesting challenges for us they're really compelled us to think about the ways in which digital disparities continue to persist even in the face of what we might what might appear to be kind of a bridging if you will or a closing of the divide so let me just end with this one example so we with the MacArthur Foundation we've done a kind of ethnographic study we spent a year in a high school and in that high school we you know talk to students we talked to families we talked to teachers from a population very representative similar to the study that we heard here today and we were oftentimes struck by more and more kids having access to the internet but also thinking about the kind of home environment the kind of learning ecology that they had access to and how in some respects what what we began to sort of discern is a kind of design disposition that is increasingly young people are going online to learn how to make something to create something to design something and particularly right if they're in schools and if they're in learning ecologies were access to teachers access to high curriculum access to structural environments may not support right those kind of learning interest that they develop they oftentimes seek other means YouTube network community social media as a kind of alternative kind of learning ecosystem and learning platform but what we also found right is that when kids were going home right because they were facing these kinds of circumstances that we hear about today they weren't able to extend those learning opportunities in a way that was meaningful and in a way that was robust so I'm getting all indicators that I should stop here so I will stop but my provocation is I think the narrative has been mobile is bridging a divide and should we consider the reverse of that and I do think that that is a really interesting provocation I think this is where one of the big things is that we're going to be talking about in the next 20 minutes here so before I start opening it up to some questions I really do we have a lot of great industry representatives in the room and I will be calling on them in a moment but I want to turn it over now to to Jamie Kassup who is here as from Google to speak with us he's Google's education evangelist and is is criss-crossing the world evangelizing education let us know what that means and I'll keep you to your time thank you yes and I dressed up for you guys today so I'm Jamie Kassup I've been a Google for 10 years and and my whole focus of the last 10 years is the use of technology and education and I just want to I had a chance to go through the report thank you for a version of that early some very interesting things in the report and and this is something I deal with on a day-to-day basis is this idea of technology and education so I want to lay out a couple of things so I'll stand here for three hours so cut me off the the first thing is the understanding the understanding that technology is not something that's new in education we've been talking about technology for a long time but I also want to think about from a very positive perspective where we are in the world I'm an old guy and I remember when the access to information that I was able to get to was in the library on 51st Street in Columbus sorry 51st Street 10th Avenue the Columbus Library in New York in Hell's Kitchen I grew up in Hell's Kitchen and as a kid who grew up on welfare and food stamps attended PS 11 education was is your silver bullet out of a community like that and so access to information is very critical and I grew up having access to this building where everyone had to use the resources in that building right we all had access to that one library it was it closed on at five o'clock in the evening it wasn't open on Sundays if you finally got through the card catalog to find that book that you were looking for there was a good chance it wasn't there because it was the library for me every kid who went to PS 11 PS 17 PS 51 PS 45 and everyone else who grew up and lived in Hell's Kitchen and so the the the amount of resources that are available to available to you is we're limited and so if you think about where we are today that the world is fundamentally shifted beneath our feet most of us haven't even noticed now now we have access to a hundred million libraries at our fingertips and I'm hoping that a lot of this access a lot of this access to information is happening at the school level but obviously home is part of this as well and we have to think about access that kids have at home and so quick I got one minute so quick two things that I want to point out number one is this idea that you know we have to think about the fact that we've been talking about technology and education for a long time but what we're seeing is a shift in learning models where we're seeing more student-centric learning models we're seeing more project-based learning models and those projects are more and more turning into technology based projects and so kids have to have access at home to be able to continue the projects forget homework just the idea of project-based learning and learning as a from a central point of view a kid is going to have to learn not just in school not just at home not just on the go but in lots of different places and so that's really important to point out and to end on a positive note and I know I'm running out of time here I want us to remember that this is all exciting because it's relatively new right don't forget don't remember we used to have to call the internet you know like place the phone call to the internet with our home phones and the internet was busy and you are okay with that that wasn't that long ago right and so we're getting to the point now where we we can actually take advantage of that technology and we're just at the very very beginning of this so I'm excited that we're paying attention to this issue and that we're doing something about it thank you guys yeah Jamie thank you to Craig and Jamie for getting us started here so I do think I want to go back to a little bit what Craig mentioned earlier as well I mean are we at a place where it's maybe not such a positive that we have families that have mobile access or that they have mobile only access that that's where we need to start turning attention that they don't have more than mobile and I want to see so Scott Saperstein from AT&T is with us and so Scott do you have a moment to in use the mic if you if you don't mind at your table there if you could just I'm curious myself about how you might respond to that and if you've looked at some of this data on mobile only access and what that means to AT&T please yeah great thanks for this is on yeah great thanks for the opportunity I'm gonna I'm gonna agree with both with both Craig and Jamie just to some extent I I think it's really important right now or for the industry to be getting involved in getting both wireline and wireless opportunities into the hands of students low-income students lower income families so there are a lot of activities going on presently AT&T is about to run out in April our commitment to offer wireline broadband to snap eligible household so one person in the household it's a part of our merger commitment from the Direct TV acquisition but it'll be a four-year program offering 10 megabits download speeds for $10 where it's available and that's one of the ways we're trying to actually reach out to some of these lower-income families that actually need wireline in the home and brought high-speed broadband for their students to continue the homework gap or for the parents to learn and to figure out what is what is digital you what is digital literacy why do I need the internet so we'll be announcing that early February we're gonna be targeting and getting the word out through through many through schools military through a lot of civic organizations diversity organizations that we work with working with the American Counselors Association as well so it's important programs like that there are many others from competitive competitors of ours that are that are already in market that are also fantastic and are working the other thing that a lot of us are all participating in is the White House Connect that initiative and that was a great initiative to actually get wireless mobility into the hands of students classrooms and teachers we committed a hundred million dollars to that effort we've been rolling out on an ongoing basis and these are putting tablets in the hands of teachers and students and these tablets can actually then go home with the students to be used for educational purposes part of our partnership is with with with Apple and part of our partnership is with some of the other vendors where we're providing that the data and actually the the background the software to actually manage you know what students can reach thank you so many many of you may if we want to ask some some questions about actually let me go straight to you then Vicki did you have a response or a and stand up go ahead stand up Vicki and it should just it should be on okay it's got thank you so much for being here and very happy to hear that AT&T is joining the effort in this way and that you'll be announcing this soon I just wanted to see that I'd heard you the 995 will be a wire line connection for families or wireless it's a it's a wire line offering in our 21 state footprint which is our legacy footprint where we offered telephony service so it's a wire line it's $10 for 10 megs where it's available or or or it's 5 meg if that speed isn't available there so it's clearly a wire line offering is there any chance we might convince you to make it a wireless offering we can set probably not for the start in April but it's sure so certainly something that that we can we're looking at it in the future and like I said the connected opportunity has actually provided us that that roadmap in the runway to kind of see how how it's working how best to get those tablets out into the community and how best to manage the data plans so and let me just push on something a little bit here just so everyone around us understands so there's mobile and wire line and why are less can you make you just explain a little bit more about because of what you heard in those case studies about that that ethernet or that wire line connection I mean you touched on it but give us a little bit more context I mean we interviewed you're gonna be working with snap eligible families there's a lot of overlap between that and kids who are on free and reduced cost lunch which are the kids that qualified for Cox's offering and Comcast's offering in the districts where we looked at these families and you know we interviewed a hundred and seventy thirty seven of them were using it and from many of them they discontinued because it wasn't an ethernet line a wire line cord to one device didn't allow them to be connected across all their devices and then we saw in the survey that six percent of eligible families were using these subsidized programs or ones that are like it so I'm not singling out AT&T by any stretch but I think it would be wonderful if the data that we have here would be capable of informing efforts to meet families where they are with regard to their needs for not just wire line but wireless access because while mobile only access is not you know going to allow us to declare victory that everyone has what they need mobile access is incredibly important to families and a big part of meeting them where they are so it's rare that I get to say I can solve your problem within two seconds but the offering will provide for a wire for a modem within that but in every household so that it can be used on there's there's a wire line connection but they can be used on wireless devices in the house by multiple users right right behind you there's someone who has a question on this Angela see from the National Digital Inclusion Alliance Scott can I just ask you to clarify snap eligible versus snap participants because the language was participants and then your press release was eligible so there's a little bit confusion out there putting Scott under the gun here yeah I'm even gonna look at notes make sure I'm not going script so at least one person in the household has to be snap eligible and as long as they're snap eligible they go through the process process the verification process they're in great and that's why we're also hitting that overlap them between snap and school lunch I mean it was the wisdom of the FCC helping guide us that the snap would be a larger a broader group that we'd be hitting but we're also going to be doing a lot of outreach with the schools to actually hit those those groups so we're in a few minutes shift to kind of another topic under this and know this larger umbrella that results from the report but I also want to see is Maribel Durand here I haven't met Maribel hi Maribel great to see you so Maribel is with the White House initiative on educational excellence for Hispanics and I wanted Maribel if you could just provide a little bit of context around the data on immigrant Hispanic families and their real under connectedness so first of all I want to say hi to Vicki who I met last year in Chicago we put together an early learning symposium focused on Latino families and early learning and one of the conversations that we had was around STEM education connectivity and so she previewed a little bit of what she's talking about today but on the personal side I just want to say quickly that I often goes to schools where I meet parents and students across the nation and I often see myself in the faces of these students and parents as a first-generation Latina with immigrant parents all of this conversation is very relevant and it resonates with my personal story but the one thing that I want to emphasize is that for the very first time or I want to say very few times in my experience as a White House initiative is that I this is the first time I'm seeing myself in the data right and so I think you're very much on point because we don't see enough data and research and statistics that tell our story right so I'm wanted to get that out of the way the second piece is around mobile connectivity so the one thing that I come across when we talk about access is that Latinos overall so I know that we're talking specifically around immigrant families but Latinos overall over index and mobile use so I think to your point and the conversation that we're having there's a separate effort around access and I think we're getting there the Department of Education has done a lot in that effort but the the notion that what are we doing with that access because it's very passive use and that's something that whether it's mobile use whether it's you know accessing computers at home we're not engaging the students and that's something that we hear across the country how our students and parents using when they do in fact have access so that's something that I would want all of us to think about how are we engaging these families the other part that I think is really critical as we talk about moving beyond just mobile access and how we're leveraging this these opportunities as what are the tools that we're providing these families so I'm pretty sure that it's not for a lack of not wanting but it's they don't have the resources even the language they don't know what they don't know right and so when we talk to parents they don't know about the resources and the capabilities and that their students their children can how they can maximize these tools because they don't know what to ask for so I think that's the other part that I think we hear pretty much everywhere we go so I don't know that answers your question that's great and other others in that in the room right now that might much want to add to that or thinking about immigrant families in particular yes and if you just introduce yourself hi I'm Karen Hansen I'm with the Department of Commerce and I worked on our broadband technology opportunities program I had the privilege of working on the broadband adoption portfolio and it's almost a bit of a provocation which is to say that I worked on the program when the Comcast Internet Essentials program was rolling out and what we saw is that a lot of the community groups the grantees were essential to helping the families actually navigate through the application process so there's one thing it's one thing to make these programs available it's a whole other thing to make them easy to access and easy to use and so I just want to throw that out there for those who are looking into this the role of the library's role the community-based organizations the types of connections that you're making with the actual people on the ground who are going to be helping these low income families adopt it is absolutely vital and critical yeah thank you and I want to take a moment actually to call out some of the work of the Open Technology Institute here at New America on just that issue and Sarah Morris will be speaking in a moment and maybe Sarah you can reference it as well but over several years many of our field people here really do go out in the field and understand who the community organizers are and who the experts are on the ground have been helping to try to build those links between just providing access and actual real usage and real empowerment from it and so I'm really proud to learn from my colleagues now I know that there are many others of you in the room who are doing the same and I think it's critical so I think what I might do right now I'm going to shift us to the second portion then of of this discussion where we want to talk a little bit more now about broadband adoption and and what policies can really help to promote and sustain that for all I'm going to first call on our one of our attendees who was we're very pleased to have with us Zach Leverenz who has been in the trenches working to expand broadband access as the founder and CEO of everyone on and everyone on as many of you in the room know have been really they've been working pretty hard to foster some private partnerships around this issue so Zach where are you there you are okay so yes thank you very much and give you five minutes thank you good morning I've lost to add to all parts of this conversation today connected compete and c2c is one of the flagship programs with our cable companies under everyone on but I'll hold that because my for the for the conversations and in responses in this format because my mission today is to be a provocateur and to talk specifically as fast as I can about one one issue and also take chairman Wheeler's statement very seriously you know state of truth issue a challenge provocateur titles are you know probably fun but not advisable in those cases but I'm gonna jump right in educational broadband service EBS how many just by quick show of hands know what EBS is okay about half or less than half of the room educational broadband service is a band of spectrum 2.5 gigahertz spectrum that was issued in about 50 years ago by the FCC to nonprofits education institutions religious organizations as a public asset for educational purpose and social goals it was at the time called IFTS instructional fixed television spectrum and it was to be honest not that valuable if this is TV in schools if you remember TV in schools right well what happened was as it does in this space so often technologies changed there was innovation and in 2004 the broadband capability of that band of spectrum was realized so now all of a sudden I read somewhere someone someone put it I thought pretty well you had a swamp land that became a luxury beachfront property extremely valuable most some estimates now none of this is public you can't find I've been researching for two years but most estimates put the value of the 2.5 gigahertz spectrum at around 14 billion dollars 14 billion dollars when the FCC allowed allowed for the EBS licensees that's what these nonprofits are who received the spectrum to inherit the new capability of the spectrum they also allowed them to lease that spectrum to commercial ISPs internet service providers 95% could be used for commercial purposes in those leases 5% had to be reserved for social that education purpose so there were three really key rules that it accompanied that for the licensees one that 5% had to be reserved for educational purposes to there was a substantial service requirement which is broadly defined but essentially means that about 20 hours per week per channel had to be utilized active for each license and then it was a max 30 year lease which is a pretty long time sprint and clear wire formerly clear wire became the primary holders of those leases so that's great right we got 14 billion dollars worth of public asset that's been assigned to nonprofits some of them are digital inclusion nonprofits education organizations and five at least 5% which is pretty substantial amount of that 14 billion dollars should be reserved for educational benefit correct the reality has been very different the fact that only half or less than half of this room knows what EBS is gives some signal to what you know as to how underutilized that public asset is so what are the problems there's really well let me talk about the symptoms and then get to one core source problem and they'll be very quick one no transparency no one knows what's going on no one knows how those licensees are using the spectrum or if they're using it the last time a substantial service kind of compliance a process was done at the FCC was 2011 I believe but but even then there was very little substantive information for the public on how that public asset is being used to do anything I don't care if it's digital inclusion to be honest I just want to know what those multi million dollar leases that the nonprofits are receiving every year are is being used for what social purposes being achieved that's our right as the public to there's no impact being being provided or required on a specific kind of quantified or even quality a qualitative impact being being required by the FCC and that gets the real reason why which is there's no compliance issues there's no compliance enforcement at the FCC there's also if there's no compliance that leads to this misincentive or perverse incentive structure where you have leases who don't know much about broadband capability there's some that do who all of a sudden landed in his gold mine and are in there being approached by ISPs with 30 year 7 million dollar per year lease agreements which for a board of trustees you only see the immediate future of the viability of your organization and they're taking it those are not public we can't even see the contracts we don't know what the valuation is per megahertz pop which is how they do it for each of the different licensees and most believe that the licensees are being undervalued in the way that they are entering into those lease agreements but they have no incentive to to do anything differently correct like they they need that money they don't want to stir the pot the ISP obviously has an incentive not to to lose that spectrum and so to lose and also to use as little of it as possible so here's a hard fact of all the licensees back in 2011 less than one tenth of one percent of the total 2.5 gigahertz spectrum was being used so that's a that's a problem so my call to action and I know I'm gonna get out is make let's make it transparent let's demand that it be transparent and let's also get a you know the the impact to be realized even if it's just on education versus digital inclusion we have a right to know and it's in it's a 14 billion dollar asset that's right under our nose right now so thank you very much it's a it's hoping there are some other FCC people here to take that message back right now let's bring up Sarah Morris who is my colleague here at New America she is senior counsel for the Open Technology Institute and director of open internet policy waters which are so conveniently sitting up here hello everyone thank you all thank all of you and our partners for joining us today ensuring that all Americans have equitable internet access is central to the mission of the Open Technology Institute we see affordability robust accessibility and openness as central components of an equitable internet our research agrees with other research you've seen presented this morning Americans continue to lag behind in terms of both speed and cost of access without even looking to the challenges specific to low-income households as a country we are starting out as a disadvantage and as we've seen the picture is even darker for lower-income communities however as we've also seen today the Federal Communications Commission under the leadership of Chairman Wheeler has taken important steps to promote equitable access to the internet 2015 was a landmark year we saw the Commission enact the strongest open internet rules to date and also to extend those same rules to mobile broadband for the first time this is tremendously important because as we've seen here today low-income communities and communities of color tend to rely primarily or even exclusively on mobile broadband to access the internet parity in the open internet rules ensures that everyone on every device has access to an open internet the Commission also paved the way for communities to self provision their connectivity as our research indicates the American cities with the most robust and affordable connectivity are those with strong municipal networks I think you'll hear more about that later today as well and these two orders came after an extensive series of proceedings to modernize the FCC's E-rate program and ensure that libraries and schools around the country have access to affordable broadband but this work is not done among low-income families as we've learned today even those who are connected are often under connected an article from Dr. Harris Technica just yesterday noted that over 16 million Americans still do not have access to internet at speeds of even four megabits per second down the broadband affordability gap has not closed and we have not yet developed a systematic plan to promote broad digital literacy efforts and ensure that community anchor institutions have the resources across the country to serve as an interwoven network of social infrastructure for their communities we've had some good starts so what's next the FCC's efforts to reform the lifeline program are a critical step the time has come for the program to enter the digital age allowing recipients to use their lifeline support for broadband we're anxious to see how the details of the reforms play out we hope that the FCC will be able to ensure that offerings through the lifeline program are robust and comparable in speeds to non lifeline offerings and not a second tier internet service and affordability is only one piece of the problem we must support non adopters as they come online through thoughtful digital literacy training and support for anchor institutions we must also also ensure that baseline consumer protections including privacy protections are part of all broadband service offerings not limited to those who can afford to pay for them these are not just FCC problems these are problems we must work together to solve lifting up best practices identifying more resources and synthesizing federal efforts in a systematic effective way thank you Sarah so just to kind of for my own clarity right to sum up a little bit of what we've just been hearing there are policy options on the table to expand broadband access try to work on this affordability issue I want to bring us into a deeper discussion of that so we've been talking Zach can talk a little bit maybe more about the EBS obviously we've got a lot of good information from what you just described there's a line which we heard about from Chairman Wheeler and that Sarah is pressing on as well there are also questions around certainly transparency regulation of various companies that are able to provide access so why don't we do this there are a few people I want to call on as I did in the earlier round but I also want you to start thinking about the kinds of questions you may want to ask each other let me turn right now to Amy Quinn with Cox Communications and Amy how do you respond to what Zach and Sarah have said and also if you can help us hit on the findings in the survey about the relatively low proportion of low income families that have even signed up for the discounted services can you hear me good morning some of you may know that Cox actually piloted the CDC program for the FCC back in 2012 the program was modeled after an initiative we had in California back in the late 90's our interest in broadband adoption, internet adoption comes from our company's founder we're privately held our founder was a school teacher in Ohio and our own president who was supposed to be part of today but his schedule changed was cares very deeply about this initiative as it relates to the communities we serve as it relates to the research incidentally we started the program in 2012 four years sitting here today we've increased the speeds of the service nearly ten times we've added in home wifi and free access to hundreds of thousands of wifi hotspots nationwide for free at no additional charge to eligible families we've increased eligibility programs so in addition to free we also include SNAP and TANF and we were one of the first ISPs to partner in ConnectEd so we have been very we like to think of ourselves as very progressive with respect to the program and we've also invested heavily in the enrollment process to make it easier for families to enroll but candidly there's a secret sauce to our program well first let me tell you our program has tremendous momentum in the last year alone we have 85% more families enrolled than we did in 2014 we are on an upward trajectory and we're not going to slow down in terms of investing in the program but candidly where we make the most investment and where it really is is making an impact is people like Mimi Lu who's here from our California market we have representatives in all 20 markets whose primary job is to meet with schools and community leaders host live enrollment events and personally walk families through the process that takes time it takes money it's not glamorous but our folks are physically walking families out of these events with their brand new computers you know when I think about why we do this it's because it makes sense there's no other reason because we care very much about the communities we serve and the children should have access to the internet no matter where they live no matter the income of their parents no matter the color of their skin and that is what drives us every single day I want to make sure oh when we ask community leaders what is the difference they say it comes down to trust why our program has grown so much in the last year and a half it's trust teams year over year at these back to school nights at the boys and girls clubs at the public housing authorities you know they see this familiar faces and so we're entrenched in the communities and we know that that's what's driving the enrollment in our communities thank you are there others who want to talk a little bit about what positive steps can be taken to drive enrollment and let me open this is that the issue is it that families just right now just don't have enough support to kind of get connected to learn what the programs are out there or is there something else that still has to be done yes go ahead and please again I'm just state your name and title before you start next century cities previously ran a digital inclusion project but what we really discovered was that sometimes it's the literacy level on the application sometimes it's a lack of translations sometimes the process is so complex that it just takes so long that folks give up this is really we need to simplify and we need to give folks an easy pathway and I agree with you Karen it often takes a community-based entity to help people through that process and it would be helpful if there were a way to connect the folks providing that service AT&T and Comcast Cox with the community entity that could make it happen and have there be a nice conversation and a throughput there that would allow us to get folks online more easily thank you thanks much I think we're here a little bit more from Deb later as well I also just want to throw out there I mean obviously like yeah where is it cost right great affordability we need to have in this conversation as well Vicki did you want to make a point I just wanted to add one thing just about some of the I'm some of the process for application has been streamlined and so forth two of the things that we heard very often from families about difficulties with enrollment one was that if they had any history of debt with the company that they were not eligible for the program which for low income families is just a reality of life if you're picking between the lights and internet at some point you're gonna have debt so a lot of families were immediately not eligible for the program the other thing that we heard in different districts was that if they were existing customers who were paying a higher rate than the $9.95 a month they had to cut off connectivity for either three or six months depending on where we were and it's a deep irony that their connectivity was so important to them that they couldn't be without it for three or six months in order to take advantage of the lower rate so I don't know if those were some of the things that have been streamlined or perhaps debt being forgiven or that you wouldn't have to cut connectivity but those were the things that we heard most often as barriers to being able to take advantage of these programs. Amy or others who run some of these programs if you wanted to make a point go ahead Zach. Thanks. I'd love to hear more about EBS 200 guys have solutions for how to make that work like as a right now solution but I wanted to add to what Amy was saying and also respond to Vicki and Deb who has been doing this work first with that goes home the other big variable that makes a huge difference at the local level in terms of access to a local offer versus adoption is inclusivity in the eligibility model itself so what we call auto qualification as opposed to family by family verification which is also more expensive by the way for ISPs so we are recommending and this is why Connect Home is part of what we call an auto qualification model every by definition every resident would satisfy the income level and so therefore whatever offers are available and there's I think six or seven national offers for Connect Home every single resident can take advantage of that offer immediately and there are more like Cox for example has done this in time bound kind of auto qualification periods where anyone who comes through a threshold school with a certain level of free reduced school lunch students no matter no qualification required if you show up that night you get to take advantage of it what that does is it motivates local communities to take ownership buy in, leverage the trust they already have with the families and we've seen it just a huge spike when that's the case so I want to put that out there too Yes, again let us know who you are John Oregon with the Pew Research Center and I want to introduce the notion of training resources being available to these adopters. Work I did prior to my time at the Pew Research Center looked at Comcast Internet Essentials customers, asked them whether they had formal training on how to use the internet and computers and that had a big boost in the incidents of them using the internet for job search for educational applications and so forth as opposed to those who had either no training or just informal training from family members so the formal training matters a great deal and a lot of that takes place at the community institutions we've been talking about Go ahead Good morning, my name is Chike Aguio, I have the honor of taking over as CEO of everyone on from Zach and one other I think notion I'll put out there is connectivity being the journey and not the destination again as you think about creating the incentive on the ground to make books adopt, very few families tell us that they want to connect to the internet because they want to connect to the internet they want to connect to the internet because I want my kids to be able to do their homework I want to be able to apply for a job, you'll hear things like hey I'm a young person, I'm really interested in music and I would love to learn how to do that or I would love to learn how to code so one of the things that we've done is partnering with folks like workforce development providers who work online, like education providers who work online eHealth is another area so how do we actually frame the internet not simply as a good end of itself which I'm sure all of us believe and conduit to get to goals that people actually care about in their daily lives we've generally derided the red herring of relevancy as a reason that folks don't get online but there's a slight kernel of truth in that you have to make it matter in someone's daily life and when you show that and you can show it pretty quickly that's when you get folks signing up so again how do we actually make it the journey and not the destination and again do that every single day we're talking about low to moderate income families with kids 6 to 13 years old so I'm kind of I got 11 and 13 years myself this project based learning and homework that Jamie was describing earlier I mean it is absolute reality every single night in my household every single night that kind of learning has to be taking place and it's expected by teachers so that I think too speaks to the point that it's destination is really real for families and it's not that go ahead Vicki do you want to add something more? I wanted to kind of ask I guess I'll throw it out to Zach but I'm curious for John who's done survey research with Comcast and for the folks from Cox why do we think it is that only 6% of the income eligible families in the survey have been reached by low cost options now what can be done about it and specifically how could the lifeline policy what do we need to see in the lifeline policy to make sure that number grows significantly you know I don't speak for Comcast but having been in this field for a while it goes to what our representative from Cox was saying it takes persistence, patience and investment at the community level to provide that level of trust so that people rearrange their budgets do something different and take advantage of a new offering so I think that's true for whatever offerings are out there I think that was probably the experience with BTOP when the government was making these sorts of investments so it's a longer term and just more protracted and difficult process and I think a lot of people appreciate let me respond to that and then I also want to catch you in the back as well Can I go first? Oh yeah, sorry, so is that Amy? Yes, I'll respond to the first part of it and then I'll turn it over. So I think the reason why that could have been the case I think it's a fairly small sample size but it's also true as Chairman mentioned today that both the companies and the technologies are moving very quickly right so the snapshot in time that I feel like that represents is a completely different reality than the offer today and Amy can talk about that today you know both in terms of the way that some of the stated reasons why folks don't adopt have been, we've been saying that you have, this is not new to you Amy right, you have heard this for four or five years and it's a process, it's also a relationship that we as nonprofits are building with ISPs we don't label them as the bad guys, we work with them, negotiate but we have a very strong quality assurance level of consumer advocacy that drives everything, if you don't hit the specs on what the service needs to be then you don't get to play with and so that, we've seen Cox respond and others respond in really positive ways the other reason I'd say is that it matters where on the low income spectrum you are if you're, the connectivity cliff is $35,000, $30,000 a year in annual income between $20,000 and $30,000, much more likely to see higher take rates than between, I mean it makes sense right it's also true in participation in these eligibility programs, SNAP for example is great, very low participation among the total eligible population, so it's 135% of the poverty line as an eligibility standard most are below 100% of the poverty line who participate so you get to that place where people literally are making choices about do I sell my SNAP benefits to keep the lights on this month and there's no money for additional, so on the spectrum it matters. Back of the napkin math hearing the 16 million number I think that was shared a few moments ago, you know we are a relatively small piece of the pie our number of eligible families is slightly more than 300,000 across the entire US, so we're relatively small but I think we can learn from even though how small we are you can learn how we are reaching those families so the number one is through the schools but we've also in the last year I didn't mention earlier we've invested in very targeted grassroots marketing we invested a whole smart tools for marketing campaign that specifically we had an agency that had experience in working with the low income segment develop this campaign that included a variety of assets that we placed in targeted communities so bus shelter ads on buses, you know reaching the families where they are in the communities and then taking that and partnering that with the live enrollment events in the schools that's how we believe we're going to continue to reach more and more of the eligible population great and I want to make sure we catch you in the back so we know from John's research with Comcast and we know from the BTOP stuff that it's trusted intermediaries I'm really sorry but I don't think it's I don't think what we've learned is it's real people and real people are expensive so paying those local organizations, the libraries the schools are important but it's also the community centers and the senior centers the people where there's somebody that you trust but we have to pay that person to do that job and that's I think that's where the whole crux of it is that's how we increase the 6% actually yeah you go ahead and then we'll catch you thank you Cox for being here as well I'm Ernesto Villanueva I am an executive director in the Chilvest elementary school district where the sixth district in the state of California and I think I go back to what is a common theme which is relationships and I think about we have a term we have promotoras, local advocates and local people that go basically door to door and I think about how it when I think of Cox and I live in that same community I have a very different relationship to Cox you know my bills are paid and I don't have to make those very difficult decisions that I had to make when I was a child my parents had to make and so I think when we go back to that trust piece I can understand kind of letting someone in the door that maybe I owe money to already isn't going to be the first action that I take or the applications I remember going through the applications at one of our schools at Harbor site and one of the things that we found and it's not necessarily Cox but hopefully people in the room is that there were people who permanently deemed themselves as low income that didn't qualify and they were kind of that stuck in the middle and so I appreciate the comment earlier because I see myself very much in this data and so I go back to relationships and trust I look at streamlining the process and I'll end with this is how do we include the local trust that exists already how do we maximize and capitalize that in a way that partnership doesn't seem or it feels warmer from the point of view of a person who was being open about their current situation pride also plays a factor and if you're telling me I have to say that I'm poor and I have little resources saying it to someone I don't know is really hard to do and so using other people that I trust is also something that I wanted to share. Thank you Ernesto. So Maribel we'll go to you and then I'm going to close up but after Maribel I wanted to call someone who might be able to talk about the news from PUD is Stacy Pies here? Okay great so Stacy I'll catch you right after Maribel thanks. I'll try to be very quick but so you touch on pride that's a reality with Latino families immigrant families specifically but the other reality is immigration and deportation so we're very cognizant of that and such a wants to issue so who am I opening the door to and who is asking for my information right so putting that aside we understand those realities when we travel around the country and because of that we announced over 230 bright spots in Hispanic education I'm not sure if you're familiar with that but it's available it's national catalog and we talk about trust we wanted to understand who was already doing this work in the community level because they're there and it's a matter of us leveraging the infrastructure that exists in those relationships I actually just met Maria from the promotoras yesterday and it's about how do we leverage those existing partnerships where the community does trust them in fact right how do we leverage faith-based organizations churches because that's where the families are so the bright spots are online and they focused on everything from early learning to post-secondary education college access so I really encourage all of you all to leverage these bright spots that are already in fact across the country Stacey can you introduce yourself to all of us and I know you're not with HUD but Secretary Castro made an announcement or is about to make an announcement today so you may have some intel you all are the first to hear outside of Kansas City I am Stacey Pies I work for Google in the DC office working on our Google Fiber and other internet access products and we're very excited and really pleased that I could come here today and tell you about this announcement that's taking place in Kansas City with Secretary Castro you know for Google Fiber just like all the other ISPs here in the room digital inclusion is a really big part of our broadband service I think the people who can benefit the most from the broadband service are those today who probably can't afford or may not have the understanding or the resources to access it so the announcement that's taking place this morning in Kansas City is an extension of our work that we've done with Connect Home initiative the Housing and Urban Development and White House initiative that Zach referenced a little bit earlier and our announcement with Secretary Castro is that we are launching an initiative to connect select public housing around Google Fiber cities starting with Kansas City and we are going to do that at no cost for the public housing authority and no cost to the residents in those locations filling it out first in Kansas City and then we will be going city by city working with community leaders to determine which public housing groups we should start deploying the Fiber 2 in all of our Google Fiber cities so I can share some statistics with you we'll have some time after the break as well so in Kansas City we're looking to connect nine properties and we plan to reach more than 1300 families in the metro area working to extend the work that we've already done in the city of Austin we believe working with the partners that we have today to invest in computer labs and digital literacy classes as well as access to devices which a number of folks have mentioned this morning will grow the program beyond just the connectivity we're really excited about it we think it's a huge path forward and one of the things that we think is so great about it is not the same as but complementary to the work that the other ISPs are doing around the country and we can all learn from each other about the successes and where we need to work on improving the process it's great to be able to help break that news here at New America we have just about ten more minutes but what we want to do in this last part is shift to the discussion of some of the privacy implications that come with online access today and what that means for low and moderate income families so I want to introduce to you Claire Gartland who is consumer protection fellow at the electronic privacy information center many of us know it as epic and Claire will speak for a few minutes and then we'll have one more speaker thank you so as was mentioned I'm going to be speaking about the privacy issues based by low income internet users so as this panel has shown internet access is essentially a basic need for modern life and we should not have to give up our privacy to access it so there are a number of privacy risks facing low income internet users specifically related to free internet access I'm sure everyone's heard the adage of paying for the product you are the product there are also privacy and security risks related to mobile only internet access but I'm going to focus on another emerging privacy challenge facing low income users known as big data discrimination so we've heard today quite a bit about a digital divide between those with internet access and those without but there's another type of digital divide on the internet and that's between rich users and poor users and this rises out of ubiquitous online tracking, consumer profiling and targeted advertising and it's known as big data discrimination and it poses a significant threat to low income users so in 2014 the White House released a really interesting report on big data and one of the notes that they made stated that data analytics have the potential to eclipse long standing civil rights protections in how personal information is used in housing, credit, employment health, education and the marketplace and Americans relationship with data should expand not to diminish their opportunities and potential unfortunately studies have shown that low income internet users are already facing the threat of big data discrimination or discriminatory profiling based on information collected about them online. This kind of discriminatory profiling can result in higher priced goods and services secret and unfair credit decisions, what's called web lining or digital red lining and discriminatory targeted advertising so the FDC recently released an interesting report titled big data a tool for inclusion or exclusion that has a lot of great examples about some of the discriminatory big data practices that I'm going to mention but due to the time limitations I'm only going to mention a few so the first is that low income populations may be harmed by differential pricing receiving higher priced goods and services due to a lack of competition based on location data so for example staples.com was found to show higher prices on its website to internet users from poor locations that had fewer brick and mortar stores competing with the online retailer in another example credit card companies like Capital One showed different offers with different credit card deals based on the location data for the viewers and guesses that the company makes through predictive analytics and big data about the viewers income so the second risk posed by big data discrimination is that low income populations may be subject to secret unfair credit decisions and this is due to the fact that big data is no longer being used just to serve targeted ads it's also being used to predict consumer behavior particularly financial behavior and to customize financial product offers so one example of this kind of use of big data in credit and financial product marketing was highlighted in a report from a couple of years ago actually two reports one by the FTC and one by the senate commerce committee about data brokers and the types of marketing lists they sell to different consumers to target people for financial products and some of their lists target financially vulnerable populations and lists shockingly had titles such as or categorized people into categories titled credit crunch city families, tough start, young single parents, ethnic second city strugglers so another example Facebook recently applied for a patent that would allow lenders to make credit decisions based on a user's Facebook activity so essentially if too many of your friends on Facebook have poor credit histories you could receive an adverse credit decision as well and then I'm just going to conclude with one example I think I'm maybe running out of time about how targeted advertising can work to further stereotypes and economic disparities so Latanya Sweeney who's a really well-known computer science professor at Harvard and former chief technologist at the FTC discovered that online searches for ethnic sounding names disproportionately triggered targeted ads for background checks and arrest records and the effect that this could have on job applicants or college admission applicants could be absolutely devastating and we need to be aware that these are happening understand how they're happening, gain greater transparency into data broker practices and find ways to prevent this. Mary Madden is with Data & Society and she'll be giving just a few minutes worth of remarks and we'll open up to maybe one or two questions and then we'll take a break so Mary happily Data & Society they have because they're kind of embedded here at New America and we're happy to have her. Yes I just had to walk downstairs to come here today so thank you so much for having me and I am the person who has to be the most time crunched here so I will try to be cognizant of that. So thank you for the opportunity to share some thoughts and reactions to this important piece of research I've known Vicki for many years and greatly respect her work I haven't met the other Vicki yet but I am happy to meet you today and really grateful that you're doing this work. I think we're at a critically important time in the evolution of the Internet when I first started studying the social impact of the Internet at Pew well over a decade ago we largely understood online life to be supplemental to one's offline activities and it was still an option then to complete many functions of daily life without Internet access but today as the findings from the study so powerfully illustrate families understand that this high quality access is an essential gateway for educational and social connectivity and parents realize that these opportunities that their children will have for future economic mobility will be affected by the access to the digital resources that they have today and yet as much as we value our connectivity Americans also feel increasingly conflicted about the privacy related costs associated with online life so in my research at Pew we found that contrary to assertions that people don't care about privacy in the digital age Americans actually hold quite strong views in the post-nodent era about the control they have over their personal information and having freedom from surveillance in daily life so even as many enjoy the benefits of being able to share digital content they also want the ability to shield certain information about others whether it's financial health related or information about their children that they wish to protect. Cynthia one of the nine-year-olds that was interviewed for the study today understands that privacy is important and she's quoted in the report she noted the way her parents have cautioned her about privacy and security risks when she said they have to help me so that I don't get into problems that hurt my family like applications that ask for your identity. The risks that Cynthia and her family are worried about are not unique to low-income families but there are growing concerns as Claire just noted about data-driven analysis and decision-making that do have differential impacts on the poor. However, privacy-related harms are notoriously difficult to prove but increasingly easy to create in a world where employment education and even policing decisions are being affected by input from our own social media activity and that of our network so it's not just about what we choose to post ourselves but what our network posts and the effects those network effects are quite different and it's changing the way we think about privacy-related harms and vulnerabilities. It's also true that mobile devices do present unique harms and so this reliance on mobile-only access has implications for the ways in which people are vulnerable when they download leaky apps or rely on unsecured wireless access. So I've been told that I need to stop but I didn't want to close today without mentioning that the research that I'm currently conducting at data and society is trying to wrestle with some of these questions and so we are specifically focusing on understanding the intersection of socioeconomic status, technology practices and attitudes and our survey that we're conducting now includes a sample of 3,000 adults with an oversample of low-income families. I wanted to share just a few quick points and I promise I will finish up just about what we're seeing in some of the preliminary findings which is that there is a disconnect between the confidence level that parents have in their own abilities so we talked a lot about parents working together with their children and the access that they have to resources to support privacy and security-related education. So they are very concerned about privacy-related risks for their family they don't feel that they have access to these resources. So to John's point about access to formal training and education, I think it's critically important so you make sure that privacy is not a luxury good in the future. Thank you. Thank you Mary. I felt to mention there is one person I'm hoping to call on very quickly, Danny. Vice with Common Sense Media Danny is still with us. There he is. Okay, yes, thank you. I know that privacy is an issue that Common Sense Media has been grappling with as well. Thank you. And I wanted to hear a little bit of your response. I am Danny from Common Sense Media but I'm going to turn over to Ariel Fox Johnson also from Common Sense Media. Okay, great. Hi. We just want to sort of echo a lot of what everyone has just said. Privacy shouldn't be a luxury good. Parents should have the tools that they feel that they can use and access to protect their kids. Privacy Online and Common Sense does a lot of work in those efforts. It's important here that we should think that as we're expanding broadband and opportunities for people, we can expand privacy protections at the same time. It's not a zero sum game and broadband should be a good opportunity and positive things for kids as broadband gets expanded. Not just another opportunity for digital discrimination or new red lighting or problems but I think we can all work together and achieve good things here. Thank you. And I hope that Vicki had mentioned there's one other person we wanted to check in with. Yeah, just before we go to our break and then we're going to have a number of really interesting sessions after that but we have Karen Hansen here from NTIA and you spoke briefly before but can you talk a little bit about what's in the broadband opportunity council report that might help expand funding for digital inclusion and even what you would hit as a priority items in that? Yeah, thank you so much. So I'll start with the past to get to where we are today. The BTOP program has been mentioned and it was really unprecedented in its size. It was $450 million that went to public computer centers and sustainable broadband adoption grants. So 20 million training hours, 4 million people trained. A lot of capacity was developed in libraries and cities and public housing authorities and many of the grantees have found ways to keep a lot of those activities going but clearly a lot of them also had to cut back. So one of the things that we're doing across the government and President Obama and the administration is very supportive of broadband, not just as the means in and of itself but as the gateway to health impacts, social impacts, economic impacts. The broadband opportunity council was created last year and it's an interagency group of 25 different federal agencies. All of the usual suspects that you might think of who have taken the steps of looking at where in their programs they can make it more explicit that broadband is a priority, that digital inclusion is a priority and that it should be integrated into the funding streams of ongoing federal programs. We realized there's probably not going to be another recovery act, there's not going to be another $450 million of dedicated funding but the Department of Labor has ongoing funding of workforce investment programs and they're going to be issuing guidance to their job centers that broadband connectivity and digital literacy programs are eligible in terms of funding. That's just one example. There's also and I think especially for this group could be of great interest the broadband research agenda. There's one of the action items we are going to be convening in conjunction with the National Science Foundation groups of researchers and practitioners to really explore where the unanswered questions are and where we need to prioritize research not just from the federal government's perspective but from private philanthropy from others who are interested in this. So we will certainly welcome you the researchers and anyone else who's interested to participate in that process but I really do encourage you to look at the broadband opportunity council report NTIA is the co-chair. I see my colleague here from IMLS and we're really committed to making sure that the whole of government is doing everything possible to make more opportunities available for communities across the country. So thank you. Just to put you on the spot for one second but what do you think about the EBS idea? You know that's not my area of expertise but I think Zach did a great job of being a provocateur. You look forward to hearing what others say about it. Thank you. Thank you Karen. So I think what I'll do is actually go back on my word and say we won't take questions right now because I think a lot of us want to take a break but there's going to be a lot more discussion and opportunities. So let me just say a big thank you to you all and let's give us all a round of applause.