Comcast will use the goodwill of Internet Essentials in tandem with its lobbying prowess to make the case that it should be allowed to buy Time Warner. The nation’s largest cable company spent $18.8 million lobbying Congress and federal agencies last year, the seventh-most of any corporation, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The company’s political action committee has raised $2.6 million so far this election cycle. It raised $3.8 million in the 2012 election cycle, the center reported.

David Cohen is Comcast’s executive vice president. He was the force behind the creation of Internet Essentials and is in charge of steering the Time Warner Cable deal through regulatory approvals and political opposition. He calls the 12 percent participation rate “very strong.”

Not all agree.

“As well intentioned and effective as Internet Essentials seems to be, I’d predict sometime in the future local, state and federal governments will realize that government intervention is needed,” said Blair Levin, who oversaw the FCC’s National Broadband Plan 2010, which laid out a road map for providing universal Internet access and reducing the digital divide.

The poor as bargaining chip

No other low-cost broadband program has received as much attention as Internet Essentials, which Comcast’s Cohen boasts is the largest effort to connect low-income families in the nation. Its high profile is the direct result of Cohen linking it to federal approval of two huge corporate purchases.

In 2010, Comcast said it would offer Internet Essentials for three years to help convince the FCC to approve the company’s $30 billion purchase of a controlling interest in NBCUniversal.

Cohen told the Washington Post in a 2012 article that he had conceived of Internet Essentials long before the Comcast-NBC Universal deal but that he “held back” launching the program until it came in handy.

The NBCUniversal purchase presented an opportune time because the program would be “the type of voluntary commitment that would be attractive to the chairman” of the FCC, which would be examining the deal for how it promoted the public interest, according to the article.

Internet policymakers, advocacy groups and even former FCC officials were surprised by Cohen’s remarks.

“Magicians don’t usually reveal their tricks,” one former FCC official said.

The FCC approved the deal in January 2011 and praised Internet Essentials as a socially responsible move by Comcast to close the digital divide.

“I want to take this opportunity to applaud Comcast for their work,” said Julius Genachowski, then FCC chairman, at an event where Comcast unveiled Internet Essentials in September 2011.

Internet Essentials is now back on the negotiating table. In March, less than a month after unveiling its deal for Time Warner Cable, Cohen again made the program part of the bargain, announcing to reporters in a conference call that Comcast would extend it “indefinitely” and offer it to eligible households in Time Warner Cable’s service areas.

Cohen said he has yet to determine how many Time Warner Cable customers would be eligible if the buyout is approved.

A total of 4.6 million households in the company’s service area earn less than the amount that would qualify them for the federal government’s free and reduced-price lunch program. But that number also includes childless couples, individuals living alone and seniors, who would not qualify for Internet Essentials, according to research by the Center for Public Integrity.

If the demographics in Time Warner’s service area are similar to those in Comcast’s current footprint, then about 1.7 million would-be customers would qualify for Internet Essentials after the merger, leaving 2.9 million low-income individuals and childless couples without a chance to sign up for the discounted service.

Using a low-priced Internet package to push through a merger or meet other corporate goals is not a good way to serve the public interest, said Seeta Peña Gangadharan,  a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute.

“When we have corporate programs such as Internet Essentials, there is a fear that the values that drive the program are tied more to a profit motive and expanding markets, rather than public stewardship and social responsibility,” Gangadharan said. “This was not first developed for digital inclusion; the program was attached to the merger conditions.”

Despite his comments in the Post, Cohen insists Internet Essentials was not created for the purpose of getting mergers approved. He dismisses such views as “conspiracy theories” and said his 2012 comment to the newspaper was “taken completely out of context.”

The idea for Internet Essentials was developed years before during his work on a committee advising the FCC on its National Broadband Plan and wasn’t ready to be launched, Cohen said.

“The timing to pursue the program had nothing to do with it,” Cohen said, his voice rising. “That’s got to be the most absurd thing we have ever heard.”

The mistake

Using mergers to narrow the digital divide has been part of the FCC’s approach to increase broadband adoption. The agency required CenturyLink Inc. and Qwest Communications International Inc. in their 2011 merger approval to offer a program similar to Internet Essentials for five years.

But so far the agreements haven’t worked.

“Requiring Internet Essentials and programs like it as a condition for merger is silly,” said Levin, the architect of the National Broadband Plan and a fellow at the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program.

Levin said “the mistake” he and the FCC made in developing a policy to connect more low-income individuals to the Internet was to focus on ensuring a broadband infrastructure was widely available, rather than  on creating the conditions that would encourage the adoption of it by those who don’t have service.

Most of the government spending on broadband has been targeted at wiring schools and libraries with high-speed Internet service. Under a program Obama announced last year, the FCC will increase its spending on educational broadband by $1 billion, nearly doubling to $2.2 billion.

And the FCC program transitioning subsidized telephone service to the poor to Internet broadband is just moving too slowly, Levin said.

The efforts are worthwhile, but poorer Americans need Internet connections in their homes to fully take advantage of what’s online. Schools and libraries close, forcing students to hang out at a McDonalds to connect to WiFi so they can complete their homework. And if you’re not a student, a high-speed Internet connection in a school doesn’t help.

While schools and libraries help, not having a home connection “will mean a person will have difficulty participating in a productive way with the economy and civic society,” Levin said in an email.

Cities such as Chattanooga, Wilson, N.C., and Glenwood Springs, Colo., have built their own networks to bring high-speed Internet service to their residents. But the giant telecommunications companies, including Comcast and AT&T Inc., have since persuaded 20 states to pass laws restricting or outright banning municipalities from building public networks, even as they don’t provide programs for low-cost connections to all of a cities’ poor residents.

Levin suggested the FCC could allow broadband providers to bid on providing Internet service to low-income neighborhoods, with the business going to the lowest bidder. He also recommends the government pay a portion of qualifying users’ Internet bills if they prove they go online to search for jobs, view educational programs,  apply for government services or other socially beneficial activities.

Expanding computer and Internet training programs by community groups would also help convince elderly people and others who don’t use the Internet of its value and shrink the divide, Levin said.

The Media Mobilizing Project, a community organizer and support group for low-income families in Philadelphia, works to publicize local and state policies that harm low-income residents.

“I’m not saying Comcast is a bad guy, but how do we transform Internet Essentials to let everyone, even if they owe money to Comcast, or have unreturned equipment, or aren’t part of the school lunch program and are 45 years old and out of a job, to get connected so they can change their lives?” asked Hannah Sassaman, policy director at the project and a frequent critic of Comcast. “One thing we’ve learned, broadband adoption is not accomplished through public relations ploys. It’s accomplished through working with people every day, in their day-to-day lives, to show they can get online for reasons they think are important.”

That also means including seniors, said Tom Kamber, executive director of the Older Adults Technology Services, a nonprofit group in New York City that offers digital training courses for seniors, whose broadband adoption rate languishes at 41 percent, “which is a catastrophe,” Kamber said.

“Once they get online to find out they can socialize and save money, they don’t want to give it up,” Kamber said. “It’s a health benefit by keeping them from becoming isolated.”

Kamber added, “I genuinely believe Comcast is going to take the next step to do something. Internet Essentials is extremely promising, but I would like to see more and I know they can do more.”

Kamber may be waiting for a while. For now, Cohen said, Comcast will keep Internet Essentials as is.

“There is always more that we can do,” Cohen acknowledged. “But we don’t want to lose the focus on the population who we started with.”

As it stands, the FCC is reviewing whether a Comcast takeover of Time Warner is in the public interest. If greater Internet adoption for a wider range of people, like Ed, becomes a condition, Internet Essentials may be in for a few changes.

Correction, May 29, 2014 at 12:00pm: A previous version of this article misstated the unit measurement in Comcast Corp.’s service area that have annual income equal to or less than what the federal government set for eligibility in the national free and reduced-price school lunch program. It should have been 7.2 million families as defined by the Census Bureau, not people.