A group of Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups are teaming up to push for federal funding to ensure affordable Internet access nationwide in the next coronavirus stimulus package.<\/p>\n
Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Nydia Vel\u00e1zquez (D-N.Y.) joined a dozen of the groups, including Common Sense Media and Demand Progress, in a livestream Wednesday to make the case for new funding.<\/p>\n
“We have a digital divide in this country, there’s no question about it,” Blumenthal said.<\/p>\n
“In Connecticut, I hear about it literally every day because of this pandemic. The need for online learning at home has heightened and highlighted that digital divide \u2014 it is a disparity that is unjust and deeply unwise for America because we are depriving ourselves of significant talent that is very simply shut out of our economy and our society.”<\/p>\n
“The coronavirus pandemic has shone a bright light on the homework gap experienced by the 12 million students in this country who do not have internet access at home, and are unable to complete their homework,” Markey added.<\/p>\n
The dozen groups jointly delivered more than 110,000 petition signatures to Congress Wednesday urging for access to the internet to be guaranteed in the upcoming funding package.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe cost of broadband is so high and the broadband-providers\u2019 policies are so discriminatory that even before the crisis began and millions lost their sources of income, more than one-fifth of households nationwide didn\u2019t have home internet,\u201d reads one of the group\u2019s petitions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A group of Democratic lawmakers and...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24217,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24216\/revisions\/24217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}