Op-Ed

The dearth of broadband Internet connectivity is the bane of many rural areas, exacerbating demographic decline by contributing to out-migration of millennials and loss of business opportunities. Merely installing high-speed fiber-optic networks across rural America, while vital, will not be enough. Significant public and private investment in K-16 education is required to build a new digital economy future for rural America.

Digital distress areas have a harder time using and leveraging the internet to improve their quality of life due to the type of internet subscription or devices owned. Digital distress is defined here as census tracts (neighborhoods) that had a 1) high percentage of homes not subscribing to the internet or subscribing only through a cellular data plan and a 2) high percent of homes with no computing devices or relying only on mobile devices.

‘Zero-Rating’— the commercial practice whereby an internet service provider (ISP) doesn’t count the use of an app or service against your monthly data cap — has come under renewed scrutiny earlier in Feb when a study by digital rights organization Epicenter.works found that countries that allow its use see average data prices increase over time. The thing is, rather than spreading knowledge, zero-rating offers are often vectors of misinformation. At first sight, zero-rating offers look like a sweet deal for consumers and a noble effort to connect the world, but beyond appearances, they’re j

Privacy laws should treat companies at the internet edge the same as the internet service providers that are largely prevented from accessing these vast swaths of personal data. The task for Congress is to create a straightforward set of privacy rights and company obligations that applies across the internet continuum, enhancing consumer understanding and confidence.

In 1996, Congress required incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) to unbundle and resell portions of their networks to upstart companies at discounted and government-set rates. These network-sharing rules applied exclusively to ILECs in an era before there was substantial competition from facilities-based rivals. Twenty-three years later that expected competition is here. (ILEC’s share of residential local voice markets fell from nearly 100 percent to only 11 percent of US households by the end of 2018.) Yet, these old-school regulations remain in place.

I’ve been asked tonight to reflect on my career and talk about how I’ve been able to succeed in the field of telecommunications, media and technology policy.  So, I guess I’m at that point of my career where I’ve accomplished enough to impart wisdom to the next generation of lawyers…. or maybe I’m just really old. So tonight, I’d like to talk about three qualities that have allowed me to have a successful career: Flexibility, Humility, and Connectivity.   

Since the 1930s, policymakers have known that rural communications is a “market failure” — something that happens when private companies cannot or will not provide a socially desirable good because of a lack of return on investment. At that time, electricity and telephone companies were simply unwilling to enter rural America: The population was too sparse and the geography too vast. As a result, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration in 1936 to provide loans and grants to rural electric and telephone companies.

Rural electric cooperatives (RECs) have some specific characteristics that make them uniquely qualified to undertake significant and meaningful strides in conquering the digital divide. Beyond their community focus, RECs possess important skills and assets that make expansion into broadband very favorable. Those skills and assets include:

The Federal Communications Commission recently proposed a new rule that will allow unlicensed users to access the 6 GHz band — a frequency on the radio spectrum — for Wi-Fi connectivity, causing a disagreement between broadband companies that would benefit from the rule and utility companies that currently rely on the frequency to communicate. The FCC reserves portions of the 6 GHz band for communications between licensed electric, water and natural gas utilities companies.

Nearly three-quarters of the downloads hitting Microsoft servers from nonmetropolitan counties are so slow they don’t meet the Federal Communications Commission definition of broadband. Microsoft’s county-level data shows a big gap between what the federal government says is available and what people actually use. The main takeaway from this is that accurate data to measure broadband access and use remains elusive.