The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), awarded over $35 million to more than 50 rural organizations across 33 states as part of a sustained federal effort to increase access to high-quality care in rural communities. The awards reflect investments in key areas including telehealth, health workforce training, health research, technical assistance for vulnerable rural hospitals and HIV care and treatment. The awards include:

• $8.8 million awarded to 30 organizations across 23 states as part of the Telehealth Network Grant Program (TNGP). Awardees will promote rural tele-emergency services by enhancing emergency care consults from health care providers via telehealth through increased access and training.
• Nearly $2 million to support the Telehealth Focused Rural Health Research Center (TF RHRC) Program. TF RHRC awardees will carry out a comprehensive evaluation of nationwide telehealth investments in rural areas and populations, and conduct research to expand the evidence base for rural telehealth services.
• Nearly $1 million to establish the new Rural Telementoring Training Center (RTTC). The RTTC will train academic medical centers and other centers of excellence to create technology-enabled telementoring learning programs to disseminate best practice specialty care to primary care providers in rural and underserved areas.
• Nearly $5 million to support the Rural Health Research Center (RHRC) Program. Each awardee will conduct rural research to assist providers and policymakers at the federal, state and local levels to better understand problems faced by rural communities. The research will inform population health improvement efforts, including health care access and delivery.

Rolling Wi-Fi-enabled school buses into neighborhoods and distributing personal hotspots to families were part of Washington's Central Kitsap School District's rapid response to getting families online once schools closed in the spring. But such programs have limitations and don’t always provide students the high-speed connections they need for Zoom classes and completing assignments — especially if there are multiple students in the home. While the problem permeates much of rural America, the lack of broadband can even be an issue for students living in tech hubs.

Across the country in California’s Santa Clara County, Lorena Chavez is working as part of a coalition to expand free community Wi-Fi. The effort began six years ago, but in that time, the attendance area for only one of seven high-need school communities was connected. A second community was connected this in Aug, and a third should be hooked up by Dec. “We’re Silicon Valley. You think we have everything,” said Chavez, a school board member in the East Side Union High School District, in San Jose. “It’s crazy how some of these discrepancies exist in our community. Now this is a basic need, like water and energy, to survive in COVID.”

The lack of internet service is not limited to students. According to Common Sense Media, 400,000 teachers in the U.S. lack internet service. But the University of Virginia/EdTech Evidence Exchange survey showed that teachers are expecting their reliance on technology to increase — not only this fall with many schools still operating remotely, but also over the next three years as they continue to address learning loss related to the pandemic.

When it comes to keeping monopolists in check, the government has played the leading role, from President Teddy Roosevelt battling the railroad at the turn of the century to the Department of Justice taking on Microsoft in the 1990s. Lately, though, it’s been other corporations and, in some cases, individuals standing up to the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon, all of which have been accused of wielding monopoly power unfairly. For years, antitrust regulators and lawmakers around the world have weighed whether to take action against big technology companies accused of abusing their power. Most recently, the Department of Justice and state attorneys general have announced investigations into large technology companies. The House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee has subpoenaed documents from technology companies relating to allegedly anticompetitive behavior and has been posting them online following a hearing last month featuring the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. With little to show for all the investigations and public hand-wringing, the private industry is moving forward with lawsuits instead.

In the last few decades, the received wisdom among global elites has been that technology tends to make the world flatter, smaller, more open, and more equal. This now seems increasingly false, or at least simplistic. Countries are vying for dominance in technologies that could give them a strategic advantage: communications, energy, AI, surveillance, agricultural tech, cybersecurity, military tech … and now, amidst a global pandemic, medicine, and manufacturing. The urge for nations to amass technological prowess and use it as an instrument of geopolitical power is what we mean by technonationalism. The thesis is that the post–Cold War order was already splintering, and COVID-19 is finishing the job. The biggest driving force in this trend is China’s rise as a tech superpower and the US’s consequent belligerence as its supremacy comes under threat.