The Pulse: Bridging the digital divide

David L. Cohen fit right in while delivering luncheon remarks to a crowd of business leaders in an ornate Center City meeting room. It was the subject matter from the Comcast senior executive vice president and chief diversity officer that at first glance might have seemed incongruent to the well-heeled audience.

"I've been asked to talk about a topic that is very important to me personally - and to Comcast - but that is not necessarily a topic we often hear discussed here at the Union League," he began.

Cohen, the former chair of one of the nation's largest law firms and former chief of staff to Mayor Ed Rendell, had come to discuss the digital divide - the gap between those connected to high-speed Internet at home and those who are not. He said government data showed that about 30 percent of Americans don't subscribe to high-speed Internet service. Roughly 7 percent live in rural communities that don't have broadband access, and about 23 percent live in areas like Philadelphia, where service is available but they don't subscribe.

The statistics rippled through the Grant Room, where the attendees looked to be part of the 93 percent of U.S. households with incomes above $100,000 who have Internet subscriptions, and not the 47 percent living below the poverty line (disproportionately Hispanic and African American) missing that connectivity.

Cohen was on a mission - not to enlarge Comcast's subscription base for business reasons - but to frame the closing of the digital divide while inside a club with the motto Amor Patriae Ducit ("Love of Country Leads") as one necessitated by both patriotism and a love of free markets.

"My remarks were shaped toward the importance . . . of information and familiarity with the Internet and Internet-based research for employment in the 21st-century economy," Cohen told me after the speech.

"It's not only important for the people who are applying for the jobs," he said. "It's important for business leaders and businesspeople, people trying to build a business and hire people to have a workforce that is digitally literate and that is capable of performing reasonably sophisticated work on the Internet in order to be productive employees in today's economy."

According to Cohen, the cause of the digital divide is a "complex web of issues," which include the "bucket of digital relevance and digital literacy skills."

"People don't know the relevance of the Internet to them," Cohen told me. "They don't understand what the Internet can do for them. They don't know why they need the Internet. They don't understand the Internet. They might be afraid of the Internet. They don't know how to use a computer. They might be afraid that their kids will be stalked on the Internet by child predators. So that's the number-one barrier to adoption, particularly among low-income families."

Not only do these obstacles exacerbate issues of income inequality and basic fairness, but as he argued to a room full of employers, they are also bad for business. Left unaddressed, millions of low-income Americans lack basic digital skills that will make them unqualified for well-paying jobs. Among those jobs, according to Cohen, are dental hygienists, police officers, electricians, paralegals, and registered nurses. Consider that more than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies require online job applications.

"By having a population that does not have those basic digital skills you are depriving them of the opportunity to participate in whatever the job-growth recovery is that we're experiencing post 2008-2009," he told me.

A front-page story in the New York Times in February chronicled the disadvantage faced by children raised in Internet-less homes when it comes to doing homework. For Cohen, this is where it gets personal. In the last five years, he has visited roughly 20 cities discussing the digital divide and Internet Essentials, a Comcast initiative that offers low-cost Internet service, computer equipment, and free training to families with at least one child eligible for the National School Lunch Program. An encounter with a woman in Chicago provided Cohen with continued inspiration.

"She came up to me with tears, literally tears streaming down her cheeks," he recalled. The mother of two middle-school boys told him that Internet Essentials made a difference in her sons' school lives.

"And I said . . . how did they do their homework before you had the Internet at home? And the woman looked at me and she said, 'That in part is why I'm crying.' She said, 'I'm so embarrassed. . . . Every night after dinner I would put my boys in the back of our car and we would drive to the neighborhood McDonald's. And I would park in the parking lot, and I'd hand my smartphone into the backseat, and they would share the smartphone using the free Wi-Fi in McDonald's to do their homework.' "

Last week in Miami, standing next to Julian Castro, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Cohen announced an expansion of Internet Essentials in Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Seattle to include low-income seniors in public housing and other families. Said Castro:

"An Internet connection is no longer a luxury in this 21st-century global economy. It really is a necessity."

Michael Smerconish can be heard from 9 a.m. to noon on SiriusXM's POTUS Channel 124 and seen hosting "Smerconish" at 9 a.m. Saturdays on CNN.