The Markup Digital Inequality Investigation
Useful methodology links... As I already joked on another list, 'The Markup' a very apt outlet for this research. joly ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Aaron Sankin <aaron@themarkup.org> Date: Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 10:43 AM Hi, I’m a reporter with a nonprofit news organization called The Markup <http://www.themarkup.org>. In partnership with the Associated Press, we just published an investigation revealing that four major, national internet service providers–AT&T, Lumen, Verizon, and EarthLink–have been charging customers in the same city the same price for wildly different home internet speeds. And the addresses that were offered the worst deals disproportionately tended to live in neighborhoods that were lower-income, less White, and historically redlined. For example, in New Orleans, we found AT&T offering an internet connection at one address that was hundreds of times slower than what was offered at another address in town–both for $55 a month. The slow speed offer didn’t even come close to meeting the current FCC definition of broadband. Our investigation is based on an analysis of more than 800,000 internet service offers made on real-world addresses in 38 cities across the country. This investigation builds on a 2018 NDIA report <https://www.digitalinclusion.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/NDIA-Tier-Flattening-July-2018.pdf> from Bill Callahan and Angela Siefer about “tier flattening,” a practice where ISPs eliminate low-priced speed tiers—thereby pushing customers who can only get slow connections have to pay the same as customers with better connections. Since the NDIA community has been active on this issue, I wanted to share our work with the listserv. You can read the story here: https://themarkup.org/still-loading/2022/10/19/dollars-to-megabits-you-may-b... Here is a link to an in-depth methodology detailing our full results and a step-by-step breakdown of how we conducted our analysis: https://themarkup.org/show-your-work/2022/10/19/how-we-uncovered-disparities... All of the data we used to conduct our address-level analysis can be found on our GitHub page: https://github.com/the-markup/investigation-isp And if there are any journalists on here, we’ve also published a guide with tips about how to use our data to localize our investigation to tell a story about the digital divide in your city, You can find that here: https://themarkup.org/story-recipes/2022/10/19/journalists-investigate-which... If you decide to share the story on social, please tag me or our newsroom account so we’re aware. Thanks! -- Aaron Sankin Reporter | The Markup aaron@themarkup.org | themarkup.org (425) 996-5894 Tips?: tips@themarkup.org He/Him -- -- -------------------------------------- Joly MacFie +12185659365 -------------------------------------- -
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Joly MacFie