Internet is about to become a lot less affordable for more than 20 million households.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino. Back in December of 2020,

back in December of 2020, the depths of the pandemic, when so many Americans were working, learning, and completing basically all their daily tasks online, The Federal Communications Commission launched an

emergency program to help low-income residents connect to high-speed internet with a

$50 a month subsidy that was extended with the Affordable Connectivity

program which has provided $30 a month for internet service. 23 million

households currently get the subsidy but won't for much longer.

Plans to renew funding for the ACP have stalled in Congress and are expected to run out by

the end of the month.

Kelsey Griffith is a reporter, a tech group who's been covering the ACP and the people who rely on it.

The Affordable Connectivity program sort of came of age during a time when we were having this national wake-up call

about how important the internet was to our daily lives.

I think when a lot of us were forced into our homes and forced to spend a lot of time

there away from our offices and maybe the places that we typically would have

been connected a lot of people realize that they didn't have the

bandwidth, they didn't have the level of service that they needed to continue their

daily lives. So for many people this has allowed them to have internet access at home for the first

time and I think that's really important because we can't do everything that we

need to do on our cell phones you know we can a lot, but it's really hard to file a school paper.

It's really hard to do homework. It's really hard to complete tasks. It's really hard to apply for

jobs sometimes if you're doing this all in a small screen.

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