FCC Eyes School Internet Cuts While Notion Kills Email

Here is the part that should stop you cold: the FCC is seriously considering shutting down the program that has been connecting American schools and libraries to the internet for nearly 30 years. Not trimming it. Not reforming it. Ending it.

The program in question is E-Rate, a $2 billion-a-year initiative that subsidizes internet access and telecom equipment for schools and libraries across the country. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr just pushed through a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking — the formal first step toward changing or eliminating a program — on a 2-1 vote. The official reason? Kids are spending too much time on screens.

Carr argued that E-Rate was launched in 1997 with a narrow mission: get schools online. He says that mission has basically been accomplished, and that the program has since ballooned into something that encourages excessive digital device use in classrooms. He pointed to data suggesting more than half of students now log four or more hours of daily screen time, framing E-Rate as at least partly responsible.

That framing has not gone over well. The FCC's lone Democrat, Commissioner Anna Gomez, called the screen time argument a distraction — a way to dress up something far more aggressive in friendlier language. She specifically asked Carr's office to strip out language in the proposal that floats sunsetting E-Rate entirely. They declined.

And that language is worth taking seriously. The draft proposal explicitly asks whether E-Rate has already achieved its core purpose, whether Congress ever intended it to run indefinitely, and whether it should now be wound down or restricted only to rural or underserved areas. That is not a screen-time debate. That is a debate about whether the federal government should stay in the business of keeping schools connected at all.

The practical stakes here are significant. E-Rate does not just wire up a few struggling rural districts. It serves schools and libraries nationwide, and the discounts it provides are often the difference between a district affording modern connectivity or not. Gutting or eliminating the program would hit lower-income communities hardest — the ones least able to absorb that cost on their own.

There is also a real legal fight brewing. If Carr moves to dramatically curtail or end E-Rate, opponents are widely expected to challenge the decision in court, arguing the FCC is overstepping the authority Congress actually gave it. Those challenges could take months or years to resolve, leaving schools and libraries in limbo.

The NPRM kicks off a public comment period, and a final decision could come within a few months. The speed of that timeline — combined with the scope of what is on the table — makes this one worth watching closely. A program that helped define what modern public education infrastructure looks like is now genuinely at risk, and the justification being offered does not quite match the size of the proposed solution.

More than half of Notion Mail's users had already stopped opening their inboxes. Not because they abandoned email — but because they handed it off to AI agents and never looked back. That stat alone tells you everything about why Notion just announced it is shutting the whole thing down.

Notion Mail, the Gmail client the company launched in April 2025, will go dark on September 22. Notion made the announcement on X, framing the shutdown not as a failure but as a pivot. Their argument: the product was built on the premise that your inbox should feel more personal and intelligent. Now that Notion's AI agents have gotten capable enough to actually manage email on your behalf, building a dedicated inbox app starts to feel redundant.

To understand why this stings a little, you need to know the backstory. Notion acquired Skiff in early 2024 — a scrappy encrypted productivity startup with roughly 2 million users and a genuine reputation for privacy-first email. Skiff's original email service was shut down within a year of that acquisition, taking @skiff.com addresses with it. Notion Mail was essentially what rose from those ashes, built largely by former Skiff engineers and executives. Its shutdown now feels like the final chapter of a story that started the moment Notion wrote that acquisition check.

The privacy angle is also worth noting. Skiff built its identity around end-to-end encryption. Notion Mail, as a Gmail client, never offered that. So while it inherited Skiff's talent and infrastructure, it shed the feature that made Skiff meaningful to its most loyal users. That made Notion Mail a harder sell to the audience most likely to have cared about Skiff in the first place.

For current Notion Mail users, the transition is mostly painless — your email lives in Gmail anyway, so nothing disappears. The exception is drafts and scheduled emails, which users will need to manually export before September 21. Notion is also offering a migration path for anyone who had auto-labeling rules set up, letting them port those configurations into a custom AI agent with minimal friction.

Organizations operating in regulated industries have a tighter deadline. Anyone relying on Notion Mail for HIPAA-covered workflows needs to be off the product by June 30, 2026 — giving those users less than a month from today.

The bigger story here is not really about Notion Mail specifically. It is about what this moment signals for software categories that AI is quietly making obsolete. Email clients have always been a crowded, low-margin space. But the idea that users would stop opening their inboxes entirely — not because they found a better client, but because an agent just handles it — is a fundamentally different kind of disruption. Notion is betting its future on agents, not apps. Whether that bet pays off is still an open question, but shutting down a product because your users stopped needing to look at it might be the most honest product decision a company has made in a while.