CU Boulder conference to focus on ‘digital divide’

BOULDER — A conference designed to examine effects of efforts to extend high-speed Internet access to underserved areas and populations has been scheduled for Sept. 17 at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Titled “Closing the Digital Divide,” the conference will be held from 1 to 6:30 p.m. in the CU law school’s Wittemyer Courtroom — the same venue in which Federal Communications Commission chief Tom Wheeler in February outlined the government’s plan to regulate the Internet as a utility in an effort to make more-efficient broadband service available to rural and minority communities.

The concept of the “digital divide” emerged in the 1990s, when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration issued a series of reports titled “Falling Through the Net.” Two decades later, Wheeler noted that less than half of Americans making less than $25,000 a year have service at home and that nearly half of low-income Americans have had to cancel or suspend smartphone service on financial grounds.

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The conference’s three panels will examine the FCC’s ongoing efforts to reform universal service and will compare that effort to the state of access to broadband (both wired and wireless) internationally. Panelists will include representatives of the FCC, Internet providers, nonprofit and tribal agencies, academia and the legal community.

Registration for the free event is available on the Silicon Flatirons website.