Review: Gus Hurwitz on "Forgotten America" Podcast

Mon, 04/04/2022

Recently NGTC Director Gus Hurwitz appeared on Forgotten America, “a podcast about the many places that get flown over, driven past, or completely forgotten and the people who call these places home.” The goal of the podcast is to “diagnose the unique challenges faced by rural America and unpack and explore the solutions to those challenges.” Hurwitz spoke on the rural digital divide and the challenges of supplying rural america with high speed broadband access.

After laying out the general debate over what sort of speeds actually constitute broadband access, Hurwitz outlined for the audience some of the main political questions currently surrounding broadband access. The first broad area of disagreement concerns how broadband internet should be conceptualized - is it more akin to public infrastructure like highways, or a private-sector service like cable telectision? These paradigms matter because implicit within them are arguments about the role of government in expanding access into rural areas.

Hurwitz also explicated the economic challenges behind providing certain rural areas with broadband access. On the demand side, certain areas of the country are sparsely populated enough that providing communities with broadband access has traditionally not been economically viable. Here the major concern is distance, Hurwitz explains, rather than topography. The installation of fiber optic cables is expensive on a per-mile basis, so if a community is small and in an isolated area, the cost per individual to provide the amount of cable necessary to provide the community with broadband won’t be viable without government subsidies. This is why many of the underserved areas of the country have historically been found in the plains states of Nebraska, the Dakotas, Kansas, and Oklahoma.  Furthermore, particularly prior to the pandemic, many individuals in rural communities didn’t see the necessity of broadband access to their lives, and so that further diminished the demand side of the equation.

Hurwitz also explained how the ways in which regulatory agencies define “rural” have important consequences for how resources dedicated to providing rural connectivity are spent. Under some agency definitions, rural areas that are close to a larger community are not considered rural because of their proximity to a larger market, despite the fact that the costs to provide “last-mile” access to those adjacent regions is nevertheless cost prohibitive. This can lead to the odd result that rural areas that are near larger towns fail to receive funding, while areas that are not within close proximity to a larger community receive subsidies.

The conversation also touched on several philosophical questions behind the government subsidization of broadband access to certain rural areas. Should government resources be spent to provide connectivity to certain rural areas which are actually upper income (think certain mountain communities in the west) where the ability to get away from an urban environment is actually a luxury? A second question concerns whether government money should be spent to provide communities with high speed access where that speed of connectivity is not highly valued by a substantial portion of the population. This is made all the more interesting by evidence that has shown that, when people who say that high-speed internet is not important to them are actually provided with the service, it subsequently becomes a very meaningful part of their lives. Should governments provide the service that individuals say they want, or what evidence shows they will actually value — and at what point does that cross a line into a form of government paternalism?

Lastly, Hurwitz touched on some of the current debates within the provision of rural broadband access, and the corporate concerns that underlie some of the regulatory debates. One debate centers around the minimum amount of bandwidth that providers should be expected to furnish in order to receive government funding - some providers have argued that relatively high speeds should be required in order to “future proof” the financial outlays. Others have argued that this is essentially a mechanism for driving up the costs of providing connectivity to these areas, effectively excluding smaller providers from the markets because they are unable to provide those data speeds.

In sum, the conversation underscored how what might seem like a relatively simple proposition, “providing rural areas with broadband access,” is actually replete with subtle definitional distinctions that have multimillion dollar consequences for corporate actors, and real quality of life implications for consumers. 

 

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