Two themes I’d like to emphasize in my remarks: one, the importance of harnessing technology to solve our common challenges, and, two, the importance of regional collaboration to unlock those solutions.
The 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Amazon can be sued over third-party sales on its platform, setting a potentially damaging precedent for the company. While Amazon sells goods itself, it also allows vendors to sell their products through its Marketplace platform, taking a cut in the process. In late 2014, a woman named Heather Oberdorf ordered a dog collar from a Marketplace seller, but it broke on a walk, sending the leash flying and permanently blinding her in one eye. The seller hasn’t been found, but Oberdorf sued Amazon, accusing the company of negligence.
In a city driven by the pursuit of power, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, who was put in charge of the agency by President Donald Trump in 2017, seems more concerned with how, if at all, he should use his. He believes in what he and others describe as “regulatory humility.” “My own position,” he said, “is that consumers are ultimately better off when the marketplace is unshackled, and when regulators can take targeted action against bad apples in the bunch without presuming that all apples are bad.
Despite these limitations, the digital inclusion indicators and metrics that we have analyzed do offer some insights on the steps that leaders and practitioners should consider in their community, economic, and workforce development efforts. They include:
Digital distress is defined as census tracts that have a higher percent of homes not subscribing to the internet or subscribing only through a cellular data plan as well as a higher percent of homes with no computing devices or relying only on mobile devices, no laptops or desktops. About 8.1 percent of the upper Midwest’s population (or 4.3 million people) lived in digitally distressed areas as of 2017.
As of 2017, about 1.7 million housing units in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin did not have access to 25/3 affecting 3.5 million residents. Michigan had the highest share (25.5 percent) of housing units in the region with no 25/3 access, followed by Illinois (17.6 percent) and Wisconsin (17.2 percent). Minnesota had the lowest share, with less than 10 percent of the total.
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