We are now in the third generation talking about getting broadband out to all our citizens. We are nowhere near getting the job done. It’s a market failure. It’s a government failure. And it’s a national embarrassment. Big telcos and their allies at the Federal Communications Commission and Congress tell us all is well and we’re on track. Pretty long track! Make that claim in many of our inner cities like Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Newark and you will get laughed out of town. Try to sell that pitch in rural America where nearly 30% of people are still waiting. Visit tribal lands where over 40% (and I think that’s a low estimate) lack access to fixed broadband. Check in with marginalized communities including people of color, seniors, low-income Americans, individuals with disabilities, and you’ll see the same sad story. This is the year when we must decide whether it is the road past or the road ahead that we will take.  Understanding how we have so mishandled broadband in particular and communications generally can help inform our decisions for a better future. It’s a make or break year for America that will define the next generation of broadband access—and perhaps of democracy itself.

[Michael Copps served as a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission from May 2001 to December 2011 and was the FCC's Acting Chairman from January to June 2009. In 2012, former Commissioner Copps joined Common Cause to lead its Media and Democracy Reform Initiative.]

The Rural Broadband Cooperative is a group with a goal of bringing high-speed internet to a sparsely populated area about halfway between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. In their part of rural Huntingdon County, access to high-speed internet was mostly limited, expensive and unreliable. The cooperative turned to fixed wireless broadband. Different from DSL or satellite services, fixed wireless broadband taps into an existing underground fibre optic network nearby and turns that into a radio signal. Compared to building expensive infrastructure like telephone or cable lines, this is much cheaper. From a radio tower, the cooperative relays the internet to users who have radio receivers at home. They connect that signal to a router, and voilà: high-speed internet.

Historically, privacy was about protecting aspects of your life from being shared with people in your life you didn’t want to know that information. The use of data to manipulate me into purchasing something I don’t need is a very different kind of harm than the old privacy concerns about unwanted disclosure. In the context of corporate data collection, a continued focus on unwanted disclosure is only a small piece of the puzzle. The real concerns from corporate data collection are manipulation and discrimination. Our data may be exploited to harm us without the data ever being shared outside the place that originally collected it. We need rules that prevent harmful types of collection and harmful types of uses of data about us, regardless of which company is doing it. We need rules that protect users regardless of whether the data was collected “directly” or shared. Only this will really protect users from manipulation and discrimination. It will also level the competitive field.

[Charlotte is Competition Policy Director at Public Knowledge]