[Air-L] The Markup Digital Inequality Investigation

[Joly MacFie]

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 at 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-be-paying-400-times-as-much-as-your-neighbor-for-internet-service

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-in-internet-deals

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-neighborhoods-in-your-city-are-offered-the-worst-internet-deals

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 at themarkup.org | themarkup.org
(425) 996-5894
Tips?: tips at themarkup.org
He/Him

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Joly MacFie  +12185659365
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