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Comment by dashundchen | Hacker News Reader

Yes, if you are funding a program to get broadband to underserved areas, including rural and low income populations, it's reasonable to require a plan for outreach so that those groups know they can connect. Why have a program if people don't know about it?

They didn't come up with program out of nowhere, it's been well studied those groups had less connectivity and broadband availability.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10688393/

I'm not sure what your point is here besides that you dislike inclusion. The point of the program is to level the playing field by offering broadband where it might not normally have been profitable to expand.

Outreach shouldn't slow anyone down. The cost of doing some marketing and data analysis is probably miniscule compared to the actual infrastructure build out.

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> it's reasonable to require a plan for outreach so that those groups know they can connect. Why have a program if people don't know about it?

It's not about outreach to those groups so they can connect to low-cost internet, it's about who builds out the network itself.

rayiner's comment mentioning "prisoners, LGBTQI+ individuals, women, and people of color" is not about the build out. It's about community outreach and measuring impact on who is getting connected.

It's all in the Notice of Funding Opportunity for the program.

The only reference to actually diversity in the actual build out are:

* Complying with CFR 200.321, considering MWBE are considered in subcontracting, which is standard in many federal contracts

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-2/subtitle-A/chapter-II/p...

* Non-discrimination in hiring, also standard in federal contracts

* Encouraging, but not requiring awardees to broaden their recruitment to underrepresented groups: > Ensuring that subgrantees prioritize hiring local workers and have robust and specific plans to recruit historically underrepresented populations facing labor market barriers and ensure that they have reasonable access to the job opportunities created by subgrantees

The set of people included in the regulations are a subset of all the underserved population. According to the study you linked, they should be a large portion of the underserved population. By cutting the additional regulations, you reduce friction. Let's say there is some (probably small) marginal deprioritization of the groups targeted if you remove those regulations. Even with that, if the states can more easily implement these programs, those target populations will probably benefit on net because investment is more likely to actually happen, and their location intersects with the same locations that qualify for being underserved.

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