By Sue Halpern
Early on in the pandemic, Larry Irving left Washington, D.C., and took up residence in a rental property on the edge of Shenandoah National Park, in Virginia, where, he soon found, the Internet service was not sufficient to run his consulting business. So Irving would drive to the local library each day and work in his car, piggybacking on the library's Wi-Fi. More than two decades earlier, as the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information in the Clinton Administration, Irving had popularized the term "digital divide" to describe the disparity between Internet haves and have-nots. "We did a series of studies that showed that if you were poor, if you were a minority, if you were elderly, and if you were rural, you were less likely to have access to the Internet," Irving told me. "Poverty was the constant."