August 2017

[Commentary] The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) built on the efforts of another New Deal project. The Tennessee Valley Authority was among the very first creations of President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. The TVA had several purposes, including navigation improvements and flood control, but among its biggest was generating electricity for some of the poorest sections of the country. Everyone knows about the high-speed internet deficit, so why hasn’t anything like a TVA for the internet been created?

One answer is that Congress has been controlled by politicians who have vilified all government programs and who do not want to create new ones. The bigger problem is that the very people who would benefit from rural broadband keep voting for those same politicians and things are even worse at the state level. Dozens of rural communities have tried to set up internet co-ops, on the model of the REA, but in response nearly two dozen states have passed laws making it nearly impossible to do so. Most of these states are controlled by the same kind of anti-government legislators who run Congress and all of them have been lobbied heavily by the same telecommunication companies that have abandoned rural internet users. But as long as rural Americans keep sending those politicians to Washington, or to the statehouse, rural America is going to remain stuck in the dial-up age.

[Steven Conn is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio]