Universal Service in Action | Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

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Round-Up for the Week of March 2-6, 2026

[Remarks as delivered to the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society’s Telecom Act at 30: Universal Service as the North Star]

Thank you to everyone who has gathered here today at this historic anniversary. Thanks to the Benton Institute, who I worked with 30 years ago on this legislation. Charles Benton and I talked very frequently back in 1994, ’95, ’96, about how I would draft the legislation that was coming out of the Committee.

I was the chairman of the [Communications and Technology Subcommittee], and I thank everyone who’s in this room who has played a role over the years in the construction [and] implementation of this program.

I’ve gotta be very, very careful here as I look at Andrew J Schwartzman or Jim [Kohlenberger], John Windhausen, or Chip Pickering, or my staff who is here, Danny Vinick, who is here right now, who is absolutely working every single day to make this program ever better, Joey Wender…

[When] I got elected to Congress, I had never been to Congress. I had never been to Washington. My first trip to Washington will be to be sworn in as a Congressman. I’ve never been there before.

My father drives a truck for the Hood milk company, but I come from Boston, come on. It’s not like I’m coming in like, Mr. Smith goes to Washington from whatever state that was.

[Representative] Tip O’Neill asked me what committee I wanted to be on. I said, “I wanna be on the committee that does energy, environment, telecommunications, healthcare…” and that’s the [House Energy and Commerce Committee]. So he said, “Okay, we’re gonna make you the senior freshman.”

Wow, that’s great. On the committee. But there was another guy who was like, yet a year younger than me, who also got elected [on the] same day. And he wants to be on the Telecommunications Subcommittee. He wants to be on the [Energy and Environment Subcommittees] to work [on] climate change.

I was kind of proud of myself getting elected to Congress at 29 years old, 30. But I realized there was such a thing as a political predestination, and I was sitting next to it: Al Gore. [He] was gonna be president someday, you know?

And so we started to work in 1977 on all of these telecommunications issues, all the climate issues, all the clean energy issues back there. Even as I’m looking at this film up here, and I’m watching Al talk about that breakthrough, it took many years, many hearings in order to make that something that happened.

I’m very proud of the fact that when the President signed the 1996 Telecommunications Act [in] February of 1996, there were eight ink pens. And when President Clinton reached me, he kept in his left hand [the] digital pen that he signed it with. And he said, “Hillary and I think you should have the digital pen. It’s your bill.”

That’s on my wall, the digital pen, and an ink pen. It’s the first bill and maybe the only bill ever signed with a digital pen. But it reflected the dawn of the digital age because not one home in America had digital, had broadband at home. No one had broadband yet. Everyone here knows this better than anybody.

[That was] quite a moment. And at the time, the internet looked a lot different than it does today. Only birds “tweeted.” TikTok was a sound that a clock made. We had not moved to this modern era. Fax machines were being invented, and today there are no fax machines. So we just show how far we have come over that period of time. Artificial intelligence was the stuff of science fiction. But the framework we built did exist.

The Telecommunications Act was grounded in a simple but powerful idea that communications policy should expand opportunity. That if we open markets to competition—Darwinian, paranoia-inducing competition—and we set fair rules of the road and committed ourselves to universal service, innovation would follow.

Innovation did follow. The networks built under that framework helped power one of the most extraordinary technological revolutions in human history. Entire industries were born. Millions of jobs were created because of that law, and a digital economy emerged that has transformed nearly every aspect of our daily lives. In fact, in 2000, when President Clinton announced that they had a balanced budget, 40% of the funding from 1996 to 2000 came from the Telecom Act and all of the companies that had been unleashed; that’s how big that bill was.

So we had created a revolution. But if there is one program that captures the promise and success of the Telecom Act better than any other, it is the E-Rate Program.

Back in 1994, when I was Chairman, I had gone to my cousin Mary’s math class at the BeeBee Junior High School in Malden in 1993. And she was teaching a math class with one computer and 25 kids looking on. The math gene bypassed all males in my family history. So all the women are all brilliant in math, including my mother…And at the end of the class—this was in 1993—I said, “There’s something here. How many of you kids have computers at home?” In  Malden, a blue-collar community…Only four did.

And I said, “How many of you want a computer at home?” And every kid raised their hands.

When I was growing up—the son of a truck driver—I could take my book bag home and compete against the son or daughter of the school superintendent. I could compete. But in the modern era, if you don’t have a plan, these kids are about to get left behind.

I went back to my office, and I said to Jerry Waldron, who was my counsel at that time…I said, “Jerry, I want to build in something that ensures that we are getting this to schools and libraries.”

So we included something called the discount rate in the bill at that time, kind of a discounted rate for schools, libraries, and hospitals. [It] never made it through the Senate. [Senator] Bob Dole engaged in a filibuster, wouldn’t even allow the bill to come on the Senate floor, but the discount rate was kind of the beginning of [the] formulation of what it [would] be.

Then we actually lost the House and Senate in 1994. Now I’m the lead Democrat, but I had worked on a bipartisan basis with all of the Republicans on the Committee. And now we proceeded through.

Although this program then got more controversial because it was obvious that real money was gonna be attached to it. Real money, little tax on all the phone calls everyone wants to make.

[Representative] Newt Gingrich had said that he wanted to have a computer in every kid’s hands. But as we know, a vision without funding is a hallucination, right? You gotta have a funding stream. Computers just don’t wind up in every kid’s hand, right? No matter how poor they are. You gotta have a plan to get those resources.

I had to work with Republicans on the Committee: Tom Bliley, Jack Fields, and others, Chip [Pickering] and Trent Lott over in the Senate. And then Senator Rockefeller and Senator Snowe got very interested in the issue.

Now it’s 1995…we’ve already got the seeds of it. It already passed on the House floor once, [and] it has the discount rate. Then I decided I had to give it a name. I’ll be honest with you, I wanted to call it the Ed Rate, but my staff said no, we’re gonna call it the E-Rate. So I then branded it as the E-Rate, so that it would be something that would always be identified with education and ensuring that everyone gets the help [that] they need.

It wasn’t just the wealthy schools. It was every school. It was every library in America, because access to knowledge should never depend on a family’s income or a community’s zip code. Every kid, sons and daughters of milk truck drivers, the kids in the suburbs, everyone gets the same shot…because they have access to the technology.

It’s the fastest deployment of an educational technology in the history of the United States. And it’s the first time they’ve ever [been] deployed for poor and rich kids at the same rate, as the Vice President was talking about. By 2000, that’s the goal. Let’s move this. Let’s make sure that we wire schools. Let’s make sure that everyone gets access to it. That was the goal, which we had when we were doing that.

Today, the E-Rate has delivered more than 75 billion dollars to schools and libraries across the country. It’s still the largest educational technology program in the history of our country.

And it wasn’t out of the Education Committee; it was out of the Telecommunications Committee that we did it. Because the only time you ever get anything done is when the big guys want something. And the cable companies [and the] telephone companies, they wanted something. That’s the only time you get something for the little guy, and you gotta hold up with the big guys for the little guy.

I held, and I held, and I held in the Committee until we got the support, which we needed. Because it’s pretty easy to always support the big guys, right? But we gotta make sure that every kid is able to compete.

It helped to connect libraries. It helped to ensure that millions of students would have and could have access to the tools of the digital age.

Horace Mann is the father of public education in the United States. He’s from Massachusetts. Horace Mann said, “Education is the great equalizer of the conditions of men and women.”

And as a result, we had to make sure that the internet was there because that was going to become the educational tool to equalize.

Over the Boston Public Library, the inscription reads, “The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty.” Therefore, we had to make sure that it was on the desks in every library in America. Free. Anyone can go over.

You can walk into any library today, and there [are] immigrant, older, and younger people over by those computers. Working for free. And the same thing is true in our schools. For free. It’s there, supplemented by the E-Rate.

That’s our future. That’s who we are.

In my home state of Massachusetts, the E-Rate has helped connect students in Roxbury, in Chelsea, in Brockton, in Lawrence…all these immigrant communities have access to it.

That is universal service in action, and it does work. But the story of universal service did not stop with the E-Rate.

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to close their doors and move online, we faced a new and urgent challenge. Millions of students suddenly needed reliable internet access at home. Congress responded by building on the E-Rate model and creating the Emergency Connectivity Fund, which I authored.

Joey Wender—who is here—[and I] lobbied hard. We wanted one thing in that COVID relief package, and we got seven billion dollars to make sure that black and brown and immigrant and poor kids across the country would have access to a tablet, access to some educational tool, which would make it possible for ‘em not to fall again, further behind the suburbs, further behind.

It wasn’t perfect, but that $7 billion helped significantly to reduce the gap that otherwise would have opened. Because of that program, 18 million students were able to connect to the internet and to continue learning during one of the most disruptive moments in our history.

The Emergency Connectivity Fund was not just an emergency program. It was proof that when we treat connectivity as essential infrastructure, just like electricity, just like roads, just like clean water, we can close the digital divide quickly and effectively.

Today, as we mark the 30th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act, we should celebrate these successes.

The Act did work. E-Rate worked. The Emergency Connectivity Fund worked, and together they helped connect millions of Americans to opportunity. But anniversaries are not just about celebration. They are also about reflection, because even after 30 years of progress, the digital safety net we built still has holes.

Today, I want to talk about three major gaps in that digital safety net. Three areas where the promise of universal service remains unfinished.

The first gap is broadband affordability.

You can build the fastest networks in the world. You can run fiber down every road and place wireless towers across every community, but if families cannot afford to use those digital networks, the digital divide will remain.

That is why the Affordable Connectivity Program was so important. The ACP helped more than 23 million American households afford broadband service. For millions of working-class families, that monthly subsidy made the difference between staying connected and being left offline. Students could complete their homework, parents could apply for jobs, [and] workers could participate in remote training programs. Seniors could access telehealth services. Small businesses could reach customers online.

In short, the affordability that was made possible by the Affordable Connectivity Program turned broadband access into real opportunity for people all across our country. But today, due to Republican opposition, that program has expired, and millions of families are already feeling the consequences.

Unfortunately, after the ACP Program ended, the Federal Communications Commission also rolled back another important effort to close the digital divide. The expansion of the E-Rate Program to support wifi hotspots and school bus connectivity, which is what the emergency connectivity bill was all about in 2021, we have to move to where the kids are gonna be.

Those programs were designed to build on the success of the Emergency Connectivity Fund and ensure that we did not give up the hard-fought gains in closing the homework gap.

The Trump FCC recently made an unnecessary decision to repeal both programs. Removing them makes it harder for schools and libraries to reach the students who need connectivity the most.

The lesson here is clear. Universal service cannot exist if connectivity is available, but it is unaffordable. Again, a vision without funding is a hallucination. You’ve got to have the funding if you want people to have access.

In this case, access without affordability is an illusion. We can, and we must fix this affordability crisis and ensure that every family can participate in the modern digital world.

The second gap in the digital safety net is digital literacy and digital opportunity.

Connectivity alone does not guarantee opportunity. People must also have the skills and the tools to use that connectivity effectively. That is why Congress passed the Digital Equity Act.

The Digital Equity Act recognizes that millions of Americans, including seniors, veterans, people with disabilities, and residents of rural and Tribal communities, need support to navigate an increasingly digital world.

Digital literacy programs help people apply for jobs online, access telehealth services, start small businesses, [and] participate fully in civic life. They transform connectivity into capability. But today, the Trump Administration has effectively stopped implementing this program.

Communities across the country are waiting for [the] resources that they were promised. Libraries that stand ready to offer training programs are waiting. Local governments are waiting. Community organizations are waiting. Every month of delay means more families left on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Universal service must mean more than connecting wires. It means empowering people. That’s what it has to stand for. And we must move forward with digital equity programs with the urgency that this moment demands.

The third gap in the digital safety net is making sure universal service policy keeps pace with technological change.

The world that the Telecommunications Act helped create is evolving rapidly. Artificial intelligence is transforming industries, massive data centers are reshaping our energy infrastructure, and new communications technologies are redefining how information flows through our economy and through our democracy.

Thirty years ago, the central challenge was connecting Americans to the internet. Today, the challenge is ensuring that the next generation of digital infrastructure expands opportunity rather than deepening inequality, because it. Can. Happen.

As policymakers, we have to face this challenge. We must ask an important question: Who will benefit from this AI revolution?

By the way, [it was] unleashed by the 1996 Act. It’s nothing new to us. That’s what we were talking about. We were talking about artificial intelligence in 1996. We were talking about this digital revolution.

Google is only a name because it’s infinite capacity. That’s all Google means, right? That’s it. So it’s not new, it’s just now on steroids. Will it expand opportunity for everyone?

Will it concentrate power and advantage in the hands of a few companies and a few communities, or will it not?

That’s where universal service must guide our answer. Because just as universal service once meant ensuring that every American could access a telephone line, and later the internet, the next chapter of universal service must ensure that Americans have equitable access to the tools and opportunities created by artificial intelligence.

That means ensuring that schools and libraries and universities have the resources to teach the skills needed to participate in an AI-driven economy. It means ensuring that entrepreneurs and small businesses can access the computing tools and digital infrastructure needed to compete. It means ensuring that artificial intelligence strengthens civil rights rather than undermining civil rights, preventing discrimination and bias in the algorithms that shape decisions about jobs and housing and credit and healthcare and opportunity in our country. And it means ensuring that the benefits of AI innovation reach every community: rural, urban, wealthy, and working class.

If access to AI tools and AI-driven services becomes limited to a narrow slice of the country, the digital divide will not shrink. It is going to widen and widen rapidly.

Universal service policy must therefore evolve alongside technological change. We must ensure that our universal service programs remain strong and sustainable and capable of supporting communications networks of the future. Because the stakes are enormous.

Thirty years ago, the Telecommunications Act set a new course for communications policy in America. It unleashed competition, it sparked investment, and it embedded universal service into the foundation of the digital economy.

I built in a privacy bill of rights into the 1996 bill on the House side. The Senate knocked it out on the last night of negotiation…a privacy bill of rights across all technology programs.

Two years later, I passed something called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act for kids under the age of 13, 12 and under. And COPPA is the law under which you see companies get sued. That’s a 1998 law, and I’ve been working for the last 15 years to update that law.

Forty-five minutes ago on the Senate floor, a COPPA 2.0 [was] passed unanimously, with Senator Cassidy now getting a pass to raise the age to 16 to ensure that parents could force the erasure of any information to ban the targeting with ads of these kids. Because you gotta give them access, but you also have to protect them against what corporate tech companies will do in order to monetize this technology at the expense of kids.

That just happened. And now we move on to a battle in the House of Representatives on this issue as well, where the tech companies are poised to fight against putting those protections in place.

We know that there’s a Dickensian quality to this technology. It’s the best of technologies and the worst of technologies simultaneously. It can enable, it can ennoble, it can degrade, and it can debase. The E-Rate’s goal was to make sure the kids got enabled, they got empowered. But we can also see that private sector companies now are undermining the very well-being of all these kids.

In 2023, one in four teenage girls in our country contemplated suicide. In 2023, one in eight teenage girls in the United States attempted suicide. In 2023, one in five LGBTQ youth attempted suicide, and the surgeon general, in this study, pointed an accusing finger at social media and the role it is playing in our society.

We have to ensure we deal with this Dickensian problem. We need to make ever more robust the Universal Service Fund, and all that it is intended to provide as benefits for young people in our society, but we have to build [in] safeguards.

That’s a continuing obligation. We have to restore broadband affordability, expand digital skills, but we also have to pass my AI Civil Rights Act of 2026.

Every single major civil rights group in the United States has endorsed my bill for passage, led by [President and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights] Maya Wiley. We had a big press conference; it has to be the agenda for the future. We have to move the protections from the physical world onto the AI platforms, or else there will be discrimination in those algorithms against minorities, against women, against LGBTQ communities, and [in] housing, education, and employment.

The AI Civil Rights Act of 2026 is the agenda for the future, and it is to make sure we protect those kids against the discrimination which for sure will be built into those algorithms.

I thank you all so much. Universal service has been a North Star for 30 years, but we can never stop in our passionate, vigilant protection of all of the good things that this technology can provide to every young person. And that requires us to move forward with even more legislation in the future.

It’s a great opportunity, and I’m looking out here, and I just got afraid as I looked out at so many other faces [that] I know. And I can see all of you sitting here, Gigi and others…I’m gonna be careful, I’ve gotta be very careful.

All of you have played a vital role in ensuring that the Universal Service Fund serves everyone in our society, and I can promise you that I will be there, insistently, consistently, persistently fighting for this program.

There’s a nostalgia right now for a time that never existed. Instead of idealism, we need to fight for programs for the poor, for the disadvantaged, for the immigrant communities in our country.

The past is just a memory. The future is their hard reality. We have to make sure that we are there now in the fight the same way we were 30 years ago.
Thank you all so much for everything that you have done.

Senator Edward J. Markey has served in the U.S. Senate representing the Commonwealth of Massachusetts since 2013. Previously, Senator Markey served for 37 years in the U.S. House of Representatives. This speech was edited for clarity.

Quick Bits

Weekend Reads

ICYMI from Benton

Upcoming Events

Mar 11––The State of State Privacy (Information Technology & Innovation Foundation)

Mar 11––Broadband and Healthcare: Collaboration, Funding, and Policy (Benton Institute for Broadband & Society)

Mar 18––The Telecom Act at 30 (Technology Policy Institute)

Mar 26––March 2026 Open Federal Communications Commission Meeting (Federal Communications Commission)