The changing Digital Divide: Connected Nation's evolving mission — Part 2

"Our mission is to improve lives by providing innovative solutions that expand the access, adoption, and use of high-speed internet and its related technologies."

Part 2 of 2: The pain points that remain and the divides to come

The first part of this article described how a quarter-century of network buildout, culminating in the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, has largely closed the rural bandwidth gap that long defined the Digital Divide. Drawing on the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Internet Use Survey, it also mapped who remains offline: a residual population shaped mostly by age and income, concentrated among the elderly poor and, to a lesser degree, among rural households, though many non-users fit none of those descriptions. Offline living is on track to becoming very rare and may by now be as much a lifestyle choice as a form of privation.

But the Digital Divide remains a problem, in new forms. The concept needs to evolve, as many people simultaneously make progress and fall further behind an advancing frontier. Not everyone needs to be a tech-savvy early adopter, but there are ways that people and regions fall short that look problematic, and that policy or civil society effort should seek to address.

The screen-size divide

As the first part of this article showed, mobile-only internet use is concentrated among lower-income households. Behind that statistic lies a subtle divide between households that reach the internet not only through a smartphone with mobile data but also through a computer on a home broadband connection, and households for which smartphones and mobile data are the only gateway to computing and the internet. Smartphone penetration now clears 90%, well ahead of desktop and laptop computers at approximately 73%, so this is a large population.

As noted in industry commentary (e.g., "Smartphones and Digital Literacy," January 2026), smartphone ecosystems train users to navigate simplified, closed apps, whereas professional environments require foundational knowledge of file systems, operating systems, and productivity suites. Tsetsi and Rains (2017) are among those who argue that relying solely on smaller smartphone screens creates a new "device divide," leaving lower-income and minority users with an inherently limited internet experience compared with desktop broadband. Because small-screen interface constraints hinder essential, capital-building tasks like applying for jobs or conducting complex research, mobile dependence risks deepening existing digital inequalities.

In the workforce, individuals who are functionally "digitally native" on a mobile interface can remain unprepared for computer-based knowledge work. While smartphones and mobile data meet many online needs, they are oriented toward consumption activities such as entertainment, shopping, and social media, while computers' extra screen real estate and foregrounding of the operating system open up greater possibilities for production activities like making documents, spreadsheets, and software.

Society needs to be wary of backing into a stratified economy where employers take for granted that young people are our computer-savvy “digital natives,” when actually, for some, the convenience of smartphones is crowding out the skillsets of click-and-drag, navigating folders and desktops, and using Microsoft Word, Excel, and other computer applications on which offices still rely.

The affordability divide and internet insecurity

Even though most non-subscribers say they simply don’t need home broadband, and even though in Connected Nation’s (CN) Mind the Gap study, cost ranked only third among the reasons they gave, the close empirical relationship between subscribership and income strongly suggests that affordability is a problem for some.

Stated need and economic constraint are not the same thing. For an affluent household, the felt need can be slight, and the connection is bought anyway because the cost is negligible. For a low-income household, the same slight felt need is weighed against a bill that competes with rent and groceries, and “I don’t need it” becomes the description of a decision that affordability has already shaped. Internet insecurity — the periodic lapses in service that CN’s "Stuck in the Middle: Internet Insecurity in Rural America" report documented — is that same constraint seen over time.

Low-income people struggle to make ends meet on many different fronts, and must sometimes, unfortunately, go without some things that other people take for granted. Lack of home internet has now become one of the forms that poverty takes.

Programs are available to help the poor afford food (SNAP), housing (down-payment assistance, Section 8 housing vouchers, LIHTC), medical care (Medicaid, CHIP), heating (LIHEAP), and other necessities. The now-defunct Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) added broadband to the list, as indeed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Lifeline program still does on a very small scale.

Arguably, renewing robust subsidies for home broadband for income-constrained families would be disproportionately beneficial because of the positive externalities that broadband subscribership gives rise to. This is a policy space to watch in the coming years.

Of course, unaffordability of home broadband service can feed into the screen-size gap. A poor household that forgoes home broadband and computers to make ends meet is likely to raise kids who aren't comfortable using a computer.

To read the full article, please click the link here!