OAKLAND — The mission was supposed to be simple: At a moment when millions of students were being educated exclusively online, California’s leaders decided that high-speed internet should be available everywhere, even in places where residents struggle to afford it.
“A lot of it is just good old-fashioned redlining,” said Shayna Englin, a director with the Digital Equity Initiative, based in Los Angeles. “There are politics and relationships at play, who’s in the room for this complicated and massive set of data and decisions that all have to be made really, really quickly about a ton of money.”
Life Academy of Health and Bioscience junior Emeline Gutierrez talks about internet access during an interview on Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023, in Oakland, Calif. The state’s strategy for closing the internet gap was two-pronged: There is the “middle mile,” where broadband is expanded in a neglected area sandwiching two connected ones, and the “last mile,” which anchors these communities to the larger internet backbone built out along major interstate highways.
Such digital inequities are not reflected on California utility officials’ latest map of planned broadband access points, which are informed by data collected by the state from private internet service providers — the details of which are not viewable by the public.