National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and Public Knowledge (PK) submitted comments to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) about the questions for the 2025 Internet Use Survey. The survey (deployed as an addition to the Census’s Community Population Survey (CPS)) gathers essential information on how U.S. households access and utilize the internet, and the challenges they encounter. The data are vital for policymakers, digital inclusion advocates and practitioners, technology providers, internet service providers, and researchers, as they help them make wise and informed decisions.
Key Takeaways:
- Continue collecting data via the survey and increase its accessibility. We emphasized that the survey is an essential source of national internet usage data for the NTIA’s policy recommendations and mission. We also recommended that the NTIA retain in-person and telephone interviews as primary data collection methods to mitigate bias.
- Revise questions to better understand the barriers to broadband adoption and use. We recommend revising the questions to allow respondents to select multiple reasons for not having home internet. Additionally, we recommend removing the option of “don’t need it or not interested,” as cost is often a primary barrier.
- Retain and add questions to better understand reliability, affordability, and adoption. We recommended retaining and revising questions from the 2023 survey concerning device accessibility, reliability of internet services (including outages), and understanding changing internet uses like artificial intelligence, public safety, and digital accessibility.
Read the full comments to learn more about the information we recommend NTIA collect in the survey.