Op-Ed

To be a part of the modern world, high-speed internet access is no longer optional. We’ve been saying this since at least the 1990s, yet Missouri continues to lag behind other states. Somehow we have entered the third decade of the 2000s with more than 1.2 million Missourians still lacking access to broadband internet. This is more than any other state except California and Texas. Missouri Farm Bureau made broadband access a top priority the past two state legislative sessions.

Frustrated with limited deployments, high prices and slow speeds, some municipalities have decided to take matters into their own hands, installing community networks through muni-fiber. Some cities are installing a conduit system with dark fiber, which gives them the choice to lease to broadband providers or switch to a municipal network in the future. A low-cost, low-risk option, the system allows ISPs to place and maintain their own fiber-optic cables. The city manages the asset leasing and creates an open platform for local provider competition.

It was the biggest corporate merger in history, and it stunned the markets. On Jan. 10, 2000, America Online, the world’s largest internet service provider, bid $183 billion for Time Warner, the world’s largest content provider. But the merger tanked. Time Warner cast off AOL in 2009. Verizon acquired AOL in 2015 for $4.4 billion, less than 1% of its 2000 value, adjusted for the S&P 500 index. AT&T bought Time Warner in 2018 for 20% of the adjusted price AOL paid in 2000. The merger’s failure is often attributed to executive mismanagement and clashing corporate cultures.

What happens when a prime time TV show becomes a potential healthcare policy direction, plus a side helping of broadband adoption strategy? An episode of the NBC TV medical melodrama New Amsterdam inspired a five-city telehealth pilot project involving barbershops and hair salons. The show’s medical director had a brilliant idea to enlist barbershops in African-American neighborhoods to screen customers for hypertension (high blood pressure), which leads to an overwhelming majority of the 140,000 stroke-related deaths a year.

5G may seem like an unlikely battleground between China and the West. Yet the transition to 5G may mark the point, after decades of Chinese integration into a globalized economy, when Beijing’s interests diverge irreconcilably from those of the United States, the European Union, and their democratic peers. Because of a failure of imagination, Western powers risk capitulating in what has become a critical geopolitical arena.

We saw giant steps backward on communications, media, health, education, environment, voting rights, court appointments, money in politics, equal opportunity, women’s rights, labor rights… the list goes on and on.

Over the past few decades, the notion of a world without the newspaper industry has gone from grimly conceivable to a foregone conclusion. Once the cornerstone of localism and community, over the past two decades, the local newspaper has become nearly extinct. History is set to repeat itself in the broadcast television space. From 2014 to 2019, the total percentage of local advertising dollars spent on broadcast television fell from 14.3% to 11.2%. By 2023, BIA Kelsey forecasts, that percentage will drop to 9.7%.

In November 2019, the Federal Communications Commission approved the acquisition of Cox Media, the owner of the Dayton Daily News, by Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm. Apollo’s first move?

Only about a third of California households in rural areas are subscribed to internet service, compared with 78 percent in urban areas, according to an EdSource analysis of data from the California Public Utilities Commission. The divide between students who have access to internet and computers required to do assignments at home and those who don’t is known as the “homework gap.” And it threatens to slow down efforts to close the gap in educational opportunities between students in rural regions of California and their wealthier counterparts around the state.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai proposed the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, or RDOF, a ten-year, $20.4 billion program designed to support broadband deployment in those rural-remote areas left behind by the private market. RDOF will go a long way in bridging the digital divide if it is spent correctly. But there are major issues with RDOF that require attention. My concern is that companies that win this public support will build networks using antiquated or untrusted tech that are only capable of 25/3 service.