FCC’s Mignon Clyburn works to bridge America’s digital divide

Among the Washington lawyers, analysts and lobbyists who make up the five-member Federal Communications Commission, a former South Carolina public utilities regulator stands out.

Before Charleston, South Carolina, native Mignon Clyburn joined the Federal Communications Commission in 2009, she had never spent more than a week in the nation’s capital, she said. Instead, her background as a state regulator and a career at a small weekly African-American newspaper had her thinking about issues that affect citizens far outside the Beltway, a focus she describes as “community, community, community.”

And in doing so, Clyburn has spent much of her time not just on mega-corporate mergers and net neutrality but also on lesser-known programs, such as holding down phone rates for prison inmates and expanding a subsidy to include Internet access for low-income communities.

“It’s about giving the voices that are usually not heard a seat at the table on critical decisions that affect them every day,” she said.

Clyburn, 54, is the eldest of the three daughters of S.C. Rep. Jim Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives. When she was in fourth grade her family moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where her father worked as an adviser to Gov. John C. West and later as the state’s human affairs commissioner.

While she spent most of her school years in the state capital, Clyburn said she considered Charleston her true home.

“I finished at the University of South Carolina in 1984 and within 72 hours I was back in Charleston, which I adore,” she told McClatchy in an interview.

Looking back on her days at as a community newspaper publisher and regulator in South Carolina, she said becoming an FCC commissioner was a natural extension of that focus. Her current term on the commission ends in 2017.

The FCC regulates the country’s telecommunications, from the cable and wireless industries to what appears on the airwaves. It is designed as an independent agency, although the president has the power to select the chairman and name the commissioners, two of which can’t be from the president’s political party.

In 2016, one of the most pressing issues is the digital divide between well-off and low-income Americans.

“If there isn’t an affordable way for people to be connected you don’t have digital literacy for millions,” Clyburn said. She pointed out that more than half of low-income Americans still are not able to connect to the Internet at home because it’s too expensive.

Most recently she has tackled this issue by pushing the FCC to update the Reagan-era Lifeline subsidy, which she said “has been stuck in an analog time warp.”

Lifeline subsidizes about $10 of phone service a month for low-income consumers. Under Clyburn’s plan, which was passed by a party-line vote last month, those who qualify can choose to have that amount cover their broadband connections at home or data for their smartphones. Funding for the program is caught up in a partisan battle in Congress.

Conservative critics mockingly call the program “Obamaphone” and say it’s a wasteful government handout. The $1.7 billion Lifeline program has been plagued by fraud and abuse for years due to phone companies scamming it.

“This would address the needs of students who can’t compete because they don’t have Internet at home; seniors keeping in touch with their doctors; veterans, who are such a significant population in my state of South Carolina,” Clyburn said about those whom the program would help most.

Clyburn said her biggest fights were those that affected relatively small populations. When she leaves her post next year, she said, her proudest accomplishment will have been her crusade for a population that does not get a lot of empathy – incarcerated inmates, who until recently faced staggering costs to make phone calls to their families. Rates could run up to $14 a minute before the FCC voted to cap them last October so most calls would cost no more than 11 cents a minute.

“When people go home as strangers . . . no one adjusts, and this cycle continues,” Clyburn said. “I believe we’re not going to have true criminal justice reform without fair rates.”

Clyburn’s focus on these issues has also resulted in some controversy.

In 2014, she advocated for an FCC survey of editorial practices in newsrooms to monitor whether news organizations were looking out for the needs of women and minorities. If the data showed shortfalls, she argued, that would enable the FCC to enact policies that would increase minority ownerships of television and radio stations.

This provoked an immediate public backlash from critics, who saw it as an unconstitutional attempt by the Obama administration to control the news media, at worst, and an inefficient waste of money at best.

“The government has no place pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories,” Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, a native of Parsons, Kansas, wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial at the time.

Plans for a pilot study in Columbia, South Carolina, were scrapped soon after, and the program has not come up since.

Clyburn is the longest-serving FCC commissioner of the five, and she served as interim chairwoman of the agency for six months in 2013.

“I have seen more than one generational evolution when it comes to the open Internet,” she said.

Talking about the hot issue that has come to define the agency in recent years, she said she didn’t use the “n-squared” word – net neutrality, or the equal treatment of all Web traffic. “I say ‘open Internet’ because that describes what our goals are,” she said.

In 2014, online activists mobilized against proposed Internet rules that would have allowed companies to pay Internet service providers such as Verizon and AT&T a fee to move their content through a fast lane. A record-breaking 1.3 million public comments crashed the FCC website.

Attention from figures such as comedian John Oliver, whose viral video received millions of views, made the dry regulatory issue a national topic of conversation.

“Honestly, it makes you be a little more cool at the party as a regulator,” Clyburn joked about the overwhelming popularity of the topic.

When Clyburn was first appointed to the commission, there was concern that she would vote like her father and kill net neutrality. But she has been a strong proponent of the open Internet, and last year voted with the other two Democratic commissioners to regulate the Internet as a public utility, meaning Internet service providers can’t charge for fast lanes.

They may disagree on net neutrality, but Clyburn said she often called her father to talk about these issues: “He is, in terms of my speed dial, in my top three.”

“On some things he relies on me too, like when he said, ‘Now, what is this net neutrality thing, really? Explain it to me,’ ” she said.

This story was originally published April 23, 2016 at 8:01 PM with the headline "FCC’s Mignon Clyburn works to bridge America’s digital divide."