Depop, the fashion resale marketplace beloved by Generation Z, will be acquired by Etsy for $1.6 billion, the two companies announced on Wednesday.

The cash deal, which is expected to close by the third quarter of this year, underscores the growing influence of clothing resale platforms. More shoppers are turning to the secondhand market for something cheaper and — potentially — greener as the overproduction of clothing increasingly adds to landfills.

The trend appears to have been accelerated by the pandemic as more shoppers looked to declutter wardrobes, earn cash by selling their old clothes or set up fashion customization businesses from their bedrooms.

Investor appetite is also on the rise. Last month, Europe’s largest secondhand fashion marketplace, Vinted, raised 250 million euros in a funding round that valued the start-up at €3.5 billion ($4.26 billion), while in the United States companies such as ThredUp and Poshmark have gone public this year.

Depop, which was founded in 2011, has been particularly successful in building a marketplace for younger consumers, who are adopting secondhand fashion faster than any other group. Ninety percent of its users are under 26, with 30 million users across 150 countries. The platform is particularly known for its vintage clothes and streetwear — and for creating a new cohort of online influencers famous for selling their wares.

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Veterans of the nation’s decade-long efforts to extend the broadband footprint worry that President Biden’s new infrastructure plan carries the same bias of its predecessors: Billions will be spent to extend the internet infrastructure to the farthest reaches of rural America, where few people live, and little will be devoted to connecting millions of urban families who live in areas with high-speed service that they cannot afford.

There is a political and economic logic to devoting billions of taxpayer dollars to bringing broadband to the rural communities that make up much of former President Donald Trump’s political base, which Mr. Biden wants to win over. But some critics worry that a capital-heavy rural-first strategy could leave behind urban America, which is more populous, diverse and productive, Eduardo Porter reports for The New York Times.

About 81 percent of rural households are plugged into broadband, compared with about 86 percent in urban areas, according to Census Bureau data. But the number of urban households without a connection, 13.6 million, is almost three times as big as the 4.6 million rural households that don’t have one.

Connecting urban families does not require laying thousands of miles of fiber optic cable through meadows and glens. In cities, telecom companies have already installed a lot of fiber and cable. Extending broadband to unserved urban households, most of them in low-income neighborhoods and often home to families of color, typically requires making the connection cheaper and more relevant.

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