A “Public Infrastructure” Perspective on Special Access

As I discussed in an earlier post, the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) recently released a paper by its Director of Research, Mark Cooper, which made the case that the FCC’s decision to deregulate special access in 1999 was premature and has resulted in large-scale economic harm, including an estimated $150 billion over the past five years. Cooper’s analysis focused on two elements of harm: 1) the direct cost associated with non-competitive excess-profit-extracting pricing and; 2) the indirect economic costs associated with this pricing regime.

As it turns out, a few days after Cooper presented an overview of his analysis at a New America Foundation event, a paper was published by Economists Inc. Written by EI principal Hal Singer and, according to its cover page, funded at least in part by USTelecom, the nation’s ILEC trade association, the EI paper approached the issue from a different perspective, as explained in its executive summary:

This paper seeks to model the likely impact of the FCC’s recent effort to preserve and extend its special access rules on broadband deployment, as telcos transition from TDM-based copper networks to IP-based fiber networks to serve business broadband customers. The deployment impact of expanded special access rules can be measured as the difference between (1) how many buildings would have been lit with fiber by telcos in the absence of the rules and (2) how many buildings will be lit with fiber by telcos in the presence of the rules. With an estimate of the cost per building, the deployment impact can be converted into an investment impact. And with estimates of broadband-specific multipliers, the fiber-to-the-building network investment impact can be converted into job and output effects.

The executive summary also highlights the study’s key findings:

In the absence of any new regulation (the “Baseline Case”), an ILEC is predicted to increase business-fiber penetration… from 10 to 20 percent over the coming years…Next, we model a scenario where special-access price regulation extends to the ILECs’ fiber networks. Assuming this scenario reduces an ILEC’s expected Ethernet revenue by 30 percent—the typical price effect associated with prior episodes of price-cap regulation and unbundling—the model predicts that ILEC will increase business-fiber penetration from 10 to 14 percent (compared to 20 percent in the Baseline Case)…Thus, the special access obligations under this scenario result in a 55 percent reduction in an ILEC’s CapEx relative to the Baseline Case….Thus, expansion of special access price regulation to Ethernet services is predicted to reduce ILEC fiber-based penetration by 67,300 buildings nationwide—a result that is hard to reconcile with the FCC’s mandate to encourage broadband deployment.

Singer then considers the spillover effects of this reduced ILEC investment in fiber infrastructure. Using “a jobs multiplier of approximately 20 jobs per million dollars of broadband investment” and “a fiber-construction output multiplier of 3.12,” Singer estimates the resulting economic harm of FCC special access rules to be an annual loss of 43,560 jobs and $3.4 billion in economic output over a five-year period.

It’s worth noting that Singer’s estimate of $17 billion in economic losses over a five year period due to imposition of special access rules is considerably lower than Cooper’s estimate of $150 billion in economic harm from the unregulated status quo in today’s special access market. While Singer and others will likely take issue with Cooper’s assumptions and estimates, the latter’s paper seems to, at the very least, make a strong case that the economic benefits and harms associated with different special access regulatory regimes don’t only flow in the direction analyzed by Singer, and that policymakers would be wise to carefully consider a full array of harms and benefits associated with alternative regulatory approaches.

An opportunity to explore new policy, funding, ownership models

My sense is that both of these studies raise valid points about the types of economic harm associated with different approaches to (de)regulating special access (and other telecommunications) markets.

I also believe that valuable perspective on this issue can be gained from a review of of ASR Analytics’ estimates of economic benefits resulting from BTOP investments in fiber infrastructure (some of which I discussed in a recent post). Not only does the ASR study do a good job of applying prior knowledge and accepted methods in analyzing broadband-related economic impacts, it also suggests to me that, rather than getting caught up in the details of the Cooper/Singer and related debates, a more useful approach is to take a step back from the quantitative details of these dueling studies, and consider broadband public policy from a “public infrastructure” perspective.

In a follow-up post I outline a research project designed to build on the knowledge base developed by ASR’s study of the Comprehensive Community Infrastructure (a.k.a., “middle mile fiber”) component of the BTOP program.

In addition, I’ve prepared several other posts that try to explain some of the threads of scholarship that inform my own view of how—especially in cases lacking sufficient competition—special access and last mile access networks can deliver the most social value if treated as public infrastructure.

An annotated list of links to these posts is provided below. I’d encourage anyone involved and/or interested in policy debates related to issues such as special access, community broadband, network neutrality and universal service to review these posts and perhaps also explore the sources they refer to:

a) the relevance of Modern Monetary Theory (a.k.a. Functional Finance) to policymaking related to federal financial support for investments in telecommunications and other infrastructure;

b) the demand-side analysis of infrastructure resources laid out by Brett Frischmann in his 2012 book, Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources, and the Internet- and telecom-related policies it suggests;

c) the analytical framework developed by author Marjorie Kelly in her book Owning Our Future, which highlights key differences between what Kelly refers to as “generative” vs. “extractive” ownership models. One post reviews Kelly’s key concepts and considers AT&T as an example of extractive ownership of telecommunications infrastructure. A second post considers how Kelly’s framework applies to the role of community-owned broadband networks in the Internet access sector, and suggests research questions related to this that I believe are worthy of further investigation.

Primary takeaways

Digital inequality shows larger impacts on youth academic performance as compared to time spent on screens.
Digital skills play a significant role in mediating unstructured online engagement (social media use, playing video games, browsing the web) and youth academic, social, and psychosocial development.
Unstructured online engagement and face-to-face social interaction are complementary and continuously interact to create and enhance youth capital outcomes.

A familiar story: concerns of screen time

Today’s discussions of adolescent well-being have coalesced around a clear narrative: teenagers spend too much time online, and their academic performance, mental health, and social lives are deteriorating as a result. A steady stream of academic papers, books, and op-eds, alongside a growing number of policy proposals––school phone bans, age-gated social media use, restrictive screen-time limits––rest on the same underlying claim, aligning with a contemporary, digitized version of the displacement hypothesis:

Screen time, particularly the unstructured, free-time spent on social media, gaming, watching video content, or browsing the web, is said to displace the productive face-to-face activities that build adolescents into capable adults.

The implied and often practiced solution is restriction. In response, this dissertation tested this claim directly, and placed it within the broader context of adolescence.

Across three years, I followed 653 Michigan adolescents from early through late adolescence: in grades 8 or 9 (survey one, 2019) to grades 11 or 12 (survey two, 2022). Notably, these students, studied over time, were part of a broader pooled sample of 5,825 students across the same eighteen highschools. The study window captured the year before and the year after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders, functioning as an unprecedented stress test for theories of adolescent social, academic, and digital life and, importantly, as a benchmark to compare the effects of pandemic-related change and inequality to those effects from screen time alone.

Across four studies of adolescents, consisting of six cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, findings are not consistent with the displacement narrative, nor the broader concerns about the time youth spend on screens.

Findings are, however, consistent with something the current public and (most) academic discussions have largely overlooked or ignored: the gaps and inequalities that determine whether adolescents can access and use the internet meaningfully in the first place.

What the displacement hypothesis overlooks

Displacement and related research and policy concerning the time young people spend online assumes a “zero-sum” model of adolescent day-to-day time. An hour online is an hour not spent studying, reading, sleeping, or interacting face-to-face (i.e., time spent on more productive or developmentally “better” activity).

Indeed, this makes sense logically. However, as an empirical claim, this model requires time spent online to behave differently from all other ways adolescents allocate time; it must produce uniquely negative outcomes and be inherently harmful across digital contexts, rather than the typical mix of trade-offs corresponding to, and often overlooked among any other social or developmental context.

Yet, online time does not differ from other youth activity. Instead, I find it has a mix of pros, cons, and even some “uniquely digital” benefits which youth utilize for social and academic gains. When I compared unstructured digital media use against traditional face-to-face interaction and activities, both produced similar patterns: some negative associations with academic outcomes, some null, and some positive.

Trade-offs within traditional face-to-face activity (for example, social time with friends and family, or time spent in after-school extracurriculars) are treated as ordinary developmental experiences that must be experienced for the betterment of development. The identical trade-offs involving digital time tend to be overlooked or ignored, and online engagement is perceived as altogether harmful.

A growing body of evidence, including this dissertation, do not support that distinction. Indeed, the developmental context is routinely misread, leaving out the context of the experiences and time spent on digital, as well as face-to-face activities, interactions, existing inequalities, and changes inherent to development. As such, I proposed a novel framework to understand these contexts:

Digital capital exchange

Rather than treating screen time as a unified harm, this dissertation advances an “exchange”-based framework, grounded in James Coleman’s theories of youth capital and digital inequality scholarship, particularly following Eszter Hargittai, Jan van Dijk, and Alexander van Deursen (see this list of all dissertation references for full works).

The core proposition is that adolescents’ online engagement is not an alternative to developmental activity but another, albiet modern domain through which young people accumulate and mobilize online resources––particularly digital skills––that work alongside existing social networks and experiences to be exchanged for human capital (measured as: academic achievement, aspirations, STEM interest) and social capital (peer networks, community participation, extracurricular involvement).

Online time is not the mechanism; instead, it is digital skills that I find to be the most vital component in youth capital exchange and enhancement. Unstructured online engagement contributes to online skills; those skills, accumulated and mobilized alongside existing peer, family, and community networks, translate into the outcomes researchers and parents care about, i.e., academic achievement, aspirations, and face-to-face interaction and social networks.

This digital capital framework treats online and in-person contexts as complementary rather than antagonistic, and it situates adolescents’ digital lives within the structural conditions––connectivity quality, device reliability, autonomy of use––that determine whether exchange can occur at all.

Methods (in brief)

Paper-and-pencil surveys were administered to students in classrooms at two time-points: spring 2019 (N=2,876) and spring 2022 (N=2,949), across the same eighteen predominantly rural Michigan schools, grades 8–12. Official, nationally-ranked standardized reading, writing, and math test scores (PSAT 8/9, PSAT 10, SAT; College Board) were then anonymously linked to students’ survey responses with the help of participating districts.

Cross-sectional path analyses modeled pooled and wave-specific samples (pooled N=5,825); two-wave cross-lagged panel models tested reciprocal, longitudinal relationships on the 653 students who completed both surveys. Multi-group analyses of the cross-lagged panel models compared relationships between girls (N=345) and boys (N=308). All longitudinal models included time-invariant socioeconomic covariates as well as time-varying covariates to reduce omitted-variable bias.

Key findings: an overview

To summarize, to the best of my ability, eight chapters across 376 pages, I present two primary findings:

First: digital inequality predicted larger and more consistent declines in human capital than screen time did.

Unreliable home internet and technology maintenance problems––experiencing and/or dealing with broken or outdated devices and software, restrictive school-issued hardware, issues with connecting to or maintaining internet access––decreased youth GPA and standardized test achievement. And, these effect sizes were substantially larger than any negative direct effect from unstructured digital media use.

Across all four empirical studies, digital inequality emerged as the most substantial predictor of academic and developmental decline.

Second: digital skills mediated the relationship between online time and adolescent academic and social outcomes.

Unstructured digital media use, particularly online gaming and web browsing, predicted higher internet and social media skills for adolescents, which in turn predicted stronger academic achievement and self-efficacy (human capital), and social interaction and extracurricular participation (social capital). The positive indirect effect of screen time through skills offset or exceeded any small negative direct effects across several outcomes (supporting our existing peer-reviewed work: Hales & Hampton, 2025, and which you can read more about here).

These exchange processes were amplified when peer and family networks were modeled alongside digital skills, consistent with the premise that online and offline contexts operate together rather than in competition. The effect was not universal: social media skills amplified rather than offset a negative association with consistency of interest, one of the two subscales of grit. The exchange framework describes a contextual and conditional, domain-specific mechanism, not a blanket defense of time spent online.

Implications

If digital inequality, and not screen time, is the primary predictor of adolescent academic and developmental decline, and still warrants concern regarding access quality and experience even with the broader adoption of digital devices across the United States, the current policy emphasis on restriction is pointed at the wrong target. The evidence supports a different set of priorities.

Stable, reliable home (fast) broadband should be treated as an educational prerequisite rather than a consumer amenity. Unreliable connectivity exerted larger downward pressure on human capital than any measure of screen time, and that pressure intensified during the pandemic-era reliance on digital infrastructure. Technology maintenance, device repair, replacement, technical support, and the flexibility to install software and explore the web autonomously, matters as much as initial access, and school-issued devices that restrict autonomous use appear to hinder skill accumulation rather than support it.

Restrictive parental mediation of internet use was negatively associated with grit and self-efficacy at magnitudes comparable to the positive contributions of face-to-face activity. This challenges the assumption that digital restriction functions protectively. Instructive mediation, teaching adolescents to verify information, navigate platforms critically, and mobilize online resources toward meaningful ends, is the posture the data supports.

Finally, the technical skill-building that occurs through gaming, self-directed exploration, and deep web use is skill-building, not wasted time. Closing the persistent gender gap in these domains likely requires legitimizing technical play for girls, rather than restricting it for everyone.

None of the above is an argument that screen time is benign. It is an argument that screen time is the wrong focus, particularly when studied mostly in isolation. Context matters substantially, whether that is time spent on other activities during adolescence, the period of adolescence itself, digital inequality, resources gained from such online use, and how all such factors interact. The factor that predicts whether a given adolescent can convert online engagement into capital outcomes is structural: access, infrastructure, skills, and the autonomy to use them. These factors are distributed unevenly, and its uneven distribution, not hours logged, is what separates adolescents who thrive from those who fall behind.

The full dissertation is available through Michigan State University’s ProQuest archive, or see the embedded full-text PDF below. I’m happy to share papers, preprints, or the underlying framework with anyone interested and working in this area––don’t hesitate to reach out via my contact form. Thanks for reading.

Tags: infrastructure MMT policy public infrastructure special access

A “Public Infrastructure” Perspective on Special Access