‘We’re Cut Off’: Rural Farmers Are Desperate For Broadband Internet

How can the Farm Bill help close the digital divide in rural America? There are a few areas that we could start with, and Sascha Meinrath, the Palmer Chair in telecommunications at Penn State University, says the first one won’t cost the government a dime. “The Farm Bill could include a mandate that says anytime a provider reports to a federal agency that they provide service at an address, they must provide that service within 30 days or get fined $10,000 a day until they do,” says Meinrath. In other words, force the ISPs to show verification that they are doing what they claim. “You would spend nothing, and all of your [broadband] maps would get super accurate, super quickly.” Beyond that, we could look to bring back the idea of common carriage. Up until 2005, we had common carriage in the US, just like the universal service with telephones. “If you had a telecommunications infrastructure, you had to carry the traffic of your competitors. For example, we all remember the dial-up modem days and all those CD-ROMs sent by AOL. The reason they could do that is because whoever your local phone provider was, they had to allow you to use their infrastructure,” says Meinrath. But the government got rid of common carriage in 2005, so ISPs started focusing on only the most profitable areas, leaving “nothing in other areas. And if you look, we have spent more on infrastructure than it would cost to provide universal service.” In the face of evidence and data, why have we set up a system that overbuilds in urban areas and nearly ignores rural spots? “The honest answer is because we’re idiots,” Meinrath says facetiously. “The opportunity cost to the country is an order of magnitude greater than the cost of just funding the build… It doesn’t make sense to the populace, not just rural, but the entire populace. And the only reason why we’ve done that is we have allowed ISPs to really dictate our policy, even when it is a vast detriment to society.”