Steps towards a workable national information policy

Johannes M. Bauer

Changes in government usually motivate stakeholders to generate wish lists and recommendations for the new administration. This transition is no different, with numerous think tanks and advocacy groups in op eds, white papers, panel discussions and conferences offering directions to the Administration, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

I have my own wish list and will have to say more about it in time: Renewal of spectrum authority, a more rational system of universal service support, policies that facilitate meaningful innovation in advanced and emerging technologies, consideration of distributional effects of policies, and safeguarding free speech against politically motivated intimidation are among them.

Today, rather than adding to the chorus of pundits, I want to comment generally on how policies that truly would serve the American people would best be developed. This requires strong efforts from those who care about the public interest to seek workable solutions. Such solutions must be rooted in a shared understanding of the role of good governance for a prospering digital economy.

During my recent tour of duty in the federal government, I have observed the strengths, shortcomings, and biases of Democratic and Republican visions of how regulation should be designed and how it affects the digital economy. Each view is incomplete and partial. Building policy on either one of these visions and their often-unquestioned policy prescriptions is bound to fail many Americans.

The Biden Administration, and many voices on the democratic side, saw larger, more active government as the solution. Adding policies, rules and regulations was often deemed the most appropriate solution. Pressure to act swiftly and top-down directives often quenched rational and critical discussions of whether the proposed rules were the most efficient solutions to a problem and how outcomes would best be evaluated.

The plan of the Trump Administration seems to be to disrupt government in erratic and haphazard ways and eventually shrink it. This is good for headlines and media coverage, and it creates division between those how respond with anger and outrage and those who relish the measures and the outcry. However, it is not the best path to good governance by a lean and effective government that the American people deserve.

Federal policymakers must address numerous communication policy challenges that require informed responses, not ideological fervor. Starting point should be the observation that the overall performance of the U.S. information and communications system is at best mixed. The overall picture combines excellence in some areas with inferior performance in others. There is no single point of failure, as U.S. Congress, the administration, and regulatory agencies are jointly responsible for the policies contributing to these outcomes.

It is true that the U.S. can boast tremendous success in digital innovation. Silicon Valley is home to the most valuable companies on the planet. Fixed broadband and wireless service providers have invested tremendous amounts of private capital into network expansion and upgrades, providing high quality digital connectivity to large swaths of the country. Private entrepreneurship is also driving an extraordinarily successful space communications industry.

However, that more than 20 million American households do not have access or cannot afford to subscribe to broadband of sufficient quality is a national disgrace. About five million live in locations without terrestrial but only satellite Internet access. Many more, including residents in these unserved areas who cannot afford the high start-up costs of satellite service and its higher monthly charges, are priced out of the market.

So, what should be done?

First, fixing broadband access problems is not rocket science. Targeted, efficient supply and demand side programs should be able to extend affordable access to all serviceable locations. Instead, the U.S. is struggling with an abundance of programs and initiatives intended to reach universal service. Even though the number of 133 programs published by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) exaggerates the program, a streamlining to a lower, requisite variety of programs sufficient to address the differing local challenges is urgent.

The universal service and digital equity goals of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 were well intended. But their implementation was handicapped by complicated rules and flaws in the overall program design. The pending proposals to eliminate or simplify labor, environmental, and other rules and to introduce technological neutrality are politically motivated and distract from that fact that the more serious issues with BEAD lie elsewhere. Changing the program rules when it has finally reached the implementation stage in more than half of the states could easily generate new inefficiencies.

One of the biggest problems is that BEAD allocated funds based on 2022 broadband access data, but connectivity has changed during the past three years. Consequently, the fund allocation is not well aligned with state needs. Allowing satellites to fill the gaps will likely create problems down the road. What is needed is not just a tech-neutral design, but a dynamic, forward-looking vision that allows transition solutions to reduce the wait of unserved households while safeguarding the ability to scale the connection for future bandwidth needs.

Second, and related, universal service policy needs a thorough overhaul, independently of what the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision will be later in the year. Both the contribution side and the uses of funds need serious overhaul and redesign. Some of the proposed models, for example to rely on appropriations or to expand the base for the contribution factor to include big tech companies, have both advantages and serious disadvantages.

Developing workable solutions will require pragmatic and workable approaches and a good deal of common sense. This will likely be complicated and the stakeholders that have historically prevented reforms (e.g., telcos benefitting from the current high-cost funding systems), will likely seek to derail the initiative. Nonetheless, these reforms must not be delayed further.

Third, U.S. Congress must renew the spectrum authority of the FCC to bring more spectrum to advanced wireless services and allow innovative approaches to the sharing of spectrum. In an intense global race to unlock the potential of next generations of wireless, this can only disadvantage American businesses and American consumers.

Fourth, securing the national information and other infrastructures from cyberattacks should be a high priority. I am encouraged to see the early emphasis at the FCC, even though security would benefit, like most other areas, from an all of government approach. Not in the sense that all government should be involved, as this has been misconstrued in the past. But an approach where the tasks are assigned in a rational way to assure finding the least cost, most effective solutions.

Fifth, the U.S. must develop a workable approach to AI. The administration rescinded the previous administration’s executive order on AI and is working on a new AI Action Plan. Whereas the rescinded order had many flaws, there is a risk that this administration will not properly recognize the need for a framework that allows the entire AI ecosystem, not just big tech companies, to flourish. Contrary to the widely held view that regulation is antithetic to innovation, such a flourishing innovation ecosystem requires appropriate, agile governance to curtail harm while granting the freedom for entrepreneurs to pursue innovation.

Finally, an increasing number of the challenges listed above require a regular and systematic evaluation of the outcomes of policy measures. Most policies are currently implemented without a plan for rigorous evaluation of their outcomes. There is tremendous fear of the political repercussions of evidence that a program is not as effective as intended. Paradoxically, not knowing the effectiveness of a policy is preferred to systematically learning about ways to improve, modify or terminate programs.

These are only a few of the pressing challenges. Others include a more robust framework for space policy, Congressional action to strengthen the protection of children online, an overhaul of Section 230, and, perhaps most importantly, a modernization of the Communications Act of 1934 as amended. Without such a legal update, the FCC does not have the guidance and instruments to effectively address the challenges of digital platforms and an AI-enabled economy.

One can only hope that the agency will not succumb to daily political pressure despite early signals from the White House to take the FCC on a short leash. The FCC is intentionally set up in a way that is independent of the vagaries of the policy process, as an independent agency to pursue its mission informed by expert knowledge. This does not mean that it should not coordinate with Congress and the White House, but it should not be beholden to their whims.

Congress and the White House repeatedly had sought to dictate policy by informal pressure and intimidation in the past. Strong FCC chairs were able to fend off pressure and to sustain an independent, professional course. Similar professional approaches should be pursued in other agencies and departments. Pragmatic, workable approaches to the key issues that weaken American information industries and harm consumers is what the country needs most.

March 24, 2025

The positions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the Quello Center or of Michigan State University.

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: Broadband public interest

Steps towards a workable national information policy