technological feature of the telecommunication infrastructure that generated substantial variation in the quality of Internet access … across households. The speed of a domestic connection rapidly decays with the distance of a user’s line from the network’s … social capital from 1997 to 2017, we show that access to fast Internet caused a significant decline in civic and political …

We study how the diffusion of broadband Internet affects social capital using two data sets from the UK. Our empirical … infrastructure that was designed in the 1930s. The actual speed of an Internet connection, in fact, rapidly decays with the distance … Internet caused a significant decline in forms of offline interaction and civic engagement. Overall, our results suggest that …