Smartphone Saturation as Civic Infrastructure

Pew’s 2026 survey shows that 98% of U.S. adults have a cellphone and 91% have a smartphone, meaning handsets are effectively universal public infrastructure for information, services, and political communication. That ubiquity changes how policy should treat outages, privacy, platform gatekeeping, and the regulation of mobile‑first services and agentic AIs. — If smartphones are de facto civic infrastructure, policymakers must address handset access, platform accountability, and resilience the way they do roads or power.