Two birds, one stone: Closing the digital divide and facing down Mark Zuckerberg

Congratulations are due to Congress and President Biden's team for the passage of the landmark infrastructure bill. Now it is time to probe where the execution might need additional help. After all, anything that makes it through a politically complex process is far from ideal — the outcome is a compromise that never solves the whole problem. Consider the $65 billion allocated for broadband internet that had rare bipartisan support and has one of the biggest gaps to close. My Digital Planet research team estimates that the true cost of connecting all Americans is closer to $240 billion — a whopping $175 billion shortfall. Which Americans should be left out of the deal? If our lawmakers are creative enough, perhaps no one. Ask Mark Zuckerberg's company, Meta, which can get everyone on a fast ramp to the internet in three moves. First, the Zuckerberg team developed its Bombyx robot to crawl along power lines, wrapping them with fiber cable. This avoids the single biggest cost of laying fiber-trenching, or digging holes to lay fiber under the ground. The second innovation is Terragraph, which uses wireless technology to deliver broadband internet. This is ideal for urban areas and lowers the cost of closing the broadband gap when deployed at scale — and Meta can be asked to do so. The third route to closing the budget gap involves levying a tax. A 19.5 percent tax on targeted ad revenues earned by digital companies would be sufficient to cover all of the $175 billion shortfall in the infrastructure bill over the bill's eight-year timeframe.

[Bhaskar Chakravorti is the dean of global business at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.]