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Round-Up for the Week of September 21-25, 2026

(Dr. Prasad's closing remarks from A New Compact for Connectivity: Internet Infrastructure in the Public Interest as prepared for delivery)

Thank you all for a fantastic day.

I had high expectations for our panelists and for all of you, but this far exceeded them. I am more excited about this conversation now than when we started this morning.

Thank you for bringing genuinely new ideas—DE covenants, sociotechnical traceability—and new energy to some old ideas—the postal service entered the chat.

I will not begin to try to summarize everything we heard today. We’ll make our colleague Zoë Walker do that.

But as I stand here between you and the door, I will try to say something new.

Part I: Public Interest

I want to start by stealing an idea from Amelia Acker. We called this event Internet Infrastructure in the Public Interest.

In her essay and her talk, she talked a lot about how the word “public” can be a slippery concept. We use it to mean different things, and those different meanings imply very different relationships between the public and the infrastructure on which we depend.

So I was listening today for how public and public interest came up in our conversations. The first is public interest as an obligation.

What we think people need from essential infrastructure. And we have a long list we highlighted: Universal access. Affordability. Reliability. Nondiscrimination. Privacy. Resilience. Those are the ends. What we think the public has a right to expect.

We also heard about public interest through ownership. That is not another item on that list of ends. It's a philosophy about how we secure those ends. Maybe regulation and competition aren't always enough. Maybe sometimes the most reliable way for a community to ensure that infrastructure serves its purposes is to own it, finance it, or control it directly. That’s Preston Rhea’s argument about municipal data centers; it’s frequently Gigi Sohn’s argument about public broadband. 

And then Sandeep offered something bigger still: the public interest as a project. A collective vision made manifest.  He made an argument for state investment and ownership for sure, but there is something else in there that we lose sight of and that I found particularly energizing: What are we collectively trying to make possible, and what then do we need to do? 

Because a new compact for connectivity shouldn't only be about correcting failures in the system we inherited. We should seize this opportunity to decide—collectively—what we want our communications infrastructure to make possible, and then have the ambition and capacity to build it.

Part II: Another Heavenly Day

Which brings me to what else is happening today. Believe it or not, we are not the hottest ticket in Washington. President Trump and President Xi are meeting down the road today, in what may or may not be the AI Summit that determines our future.

AI is also the specter hanging over this conversation. 

Who will control it? What will it do to work? What will it do to our information environment? How much electricity will it consume? How much infrastructure will it require? Which country will lead? What happens if we move too slowly? What happens if we move too fast? Or as David Clark put it, “blah, blah, blah, AI, blah, blah, blah.”

I have no answers. What I have is a maybe-orthogonal association with a Beckett play. 

The play is Happy Days. Our main character, Winnie, begins the play buried to her waist in a mound of dirt. 

A bell rings. She wakes up. And she announces: “Another heavenly day.” She carries on. She goes through her routines. She talks incessantly. She is adapting to her circumstances.

And then the second act begins. The mound has risen to her neck. And Winnie keeps adapting, absurdly chirpy as her situation becomes more dire. 

Supposedly, the play is about mortality and decay, about the human condition—our pretense that we can create order while we crumble into the ground.

Perhaps because I saw a production where the mound was a trash heap, making a point about feckless inaction on climate change, but for me the play's absurd horror is the progressive foreclosure of Winnie's possibilities for action.

Her world changes around her. Her freedom to act shrinks and shrinks. And she responds by adapting to each new reality.

Sometimes I worry that this is how we are beginning to talk about technology.

AI is coming (apparently for all of us!) 

The industry is consolidating. Private equity owns it all. 

The courts have redrawn the boundaries of agency power.

Congress won't act.

The FCC has tied its own hands.

The Administration threatens states not to do anything.

Another heavenly day. The mound rises. Our imagined possibilities for action get smaller. And we adapt.

That is the horror scenario.

Not simply that technology changes quickly. It's that we begin to believe we have no role in determining the terms of that change. 

Nothing I heard today makes me think we need to accept that. In fact, I heard precisely the opposite. 

I heard people reopening questions that had supposedly been settled. I heard people proposing institutions that don't exist yet. I heard people asking what existing authorities haven't been used to their full potential. I heard people thinking about what we can build, not merely what we need to defend.

So here’s my exhortation to not be Winnie: We are not buried up to our necks; our possibilities of action are not foreclosed. So let’s act accordingly.

Part III: Lessons From the Past for the Future

Fortunately, we don't have to invent the process from scratch. It turns out we can learn things from people who came before us. Crazy idea, right?

Six months ago, many of us met in this very room (thank you again to our kind hosts at KFF) to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

We talked about the ideas behind that law. We talked about how it passed. And we talked about the implementation process. 

I took away four lessons.

First: start with principles.

John Windhausen, one of the principal Senate staffers who drafted the 1996 Act, described a law organized around a few unifying ideas: promoting competition while recognizing continuing monopoly power, expanding universal service, fostering emerging services, and deregulating where genuine competition developed.

That's part of what motivated Scott Jordan’s essay and our first conversation today. I actually think the principles may be the easier part.

Universal service. Nondiscrimination. Openness. Affordability. Reliability and resilience. Accountability. We’re off to a good start there. 

Second: build evidence—not just research.

There is a distinction. We need evidence that helps us act. What works? Under what conditions? At what cost? What happens when we try it? What can scale? What can't?

In the run-up to the 1996 Act, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) work documenting and naming the digital divide helped turn an emerging problem into something policymakers could see and act upon. And the evidence-building did not stop when the bill was signed; implementation itself became a continuing process of learning and adjustment.

We need to do the same, not simply describing what is broken, but demonstrating what could work and how.

Third: get everyone in the room. 

We heard Senator Markey make this point when we gathered here in March.

Major reform doesn't happen because somebody writes an exceptionally persuasive editorial.

The people who pass laws have to be invested. The people who will have to implement it need to be there. The companies that will build and operate the infrastructure need to be there. Workers need to be there. States and communities need to be there. And the people who have spent decades living on the wrong side of the digital divide need to be there.

That is part of what today was about, but we need to do a lot more of this.

Fourth: Name who actually has to act. 

“Congress should fix this” is not a strategy, though it is somewhat cathartic to say. 

One of the lessons from the long road to the 1996 Act is how specific the work eventually became. Different industries wanted different things from Congress, and lawmakers had to assemble those interests around a set of shared principles before legislation could move.

So we need to start naming the people and institutions with the power to move things.

And that is where all of you come in. There is an enormous opportunity here for people who want to step into this work.

If you're a congressional staffer: this is a field in need of people willing to become experts in it.

If you're a legislator here in DC or at the state level, big questions are waiting for people willing to take ownership.

If you're a provider: help us figure out what a framework could look like that encourages investment and innovation without losing sight of the public interest.

If you're a researcher or technologist: help us build the evidence and pressure-test the ideas.

If you're an advocate: make sure we don't lose sight of whom all this infrastructure is supposed to serve.

And if you have a good idea that doesn't fit neatly into any of those categories: come talk to us.

Let’s do the intellectual work that puts actual proposals on the table. Let's make sure those proposals have been attacked by smart people who disagree with them and made better as a result. Let’s build evidence behind them, make sure there are people on the Hill who understand them and there are states that have tried pieces of them.

Industry, labor, technologists, advocates, and communities would all be in the mix, to know where we agree, and where we don't.

I want us to be ready for the next political opening for communications reform (which is hopefully before AI kills us all). 

That’s the plan. Today is neither the beginning nor the end of this conversation. We're going to do this again. We're going to take pieces of what we heard today and work on them. We're going to invite more people in. We're going to disagree—I imagine we’ll do a LOT of disagreeing. We're going to discover that some of our brilliant ideas are terrible. We're going to make the ideas better. We're going to come together, and we’re going to get to work. 

Join us.

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Dr. Revati Prasad is the Executive Director of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

Articles from A New Compact for Connectivity: Internet Infrastructure in the Public Interest

• The Internet is Essential Infrastructure. We Should Govern It Accordingly.
• Asking the Right Questions for the Next Social Contract
• A Call for a New Communications Act
• Broadband Heresies: Or, what Twilight, Harry Potter, X-Men, and The Incredibles can teach us about telecommunications policy
• How Public is the Public Cloud?
• Public Municipal Data Centers

Quick Bits

• CPUC Approves Permanent Disaster Protections for California LifeLine Customers
• Colorado Takes Action to Protect Taxpayer Funds Following Broadband Grants Inquiry
• State broadband officers are exhausted with BEAD

Weekend Reads

• The Big Threat Has Been Climate Change. Now Comes AI
• At U.N., tech leaders urge global effort to limit AI’s risk to humanity

ICYMI from Benton

• Gates Foundation: AI Could Help the Poorest Catch Up, or Leave Them Further Behind
• Pairing Harms and Remedies in the Meta Settlement
• GAO Says Public Broadband Investment Hasn't Reached Its Fullest Potential Yet

Upcoming Events

Sep 25-26—TPRC54

Sep 30—September 2026 Open Federal Communications Commission Meeting

Oct 7-9—AnchorNets 2026

Oct 8—23rd Annual IP3 Awards

Oct 22—AccessTECH

Oct 29—October 2026 Open Federal Communications Commission Meeting

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that all people in the U.S. have access to competitive, High-Performance Broadband regardless of where they live or who they are. We believe communication policy - rooted in the values of access, equity, and diversity - has the power to deliver new opportunities and strengthen communities.

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