When it comes to being able to connect to high-speed internet in rural Colorado, “universal service” is still an aspiration, not a reality. With upward of 600,000 rural households in the state, an 87% service rate means somewhere in the range of 80,000 to 90,000 households are living with subpar internet, according to state officials’ estimates. Tony Neal-Graves, executive director of the state’s broadband office, knows there are plenty of barriers to reaching the state's goal of 92% rural access by June 2020, starting with collecting reliable information about who has broadband and who doesn’t. His hands are tied by how broadband services are regulated in this country. “There is a big debate that I think needs to go on nationally at the federal level of whether or not you want to regulate broadband access as being a utility,” he said. “Because that’s how we got phone service to everybody. It was regulated. This isn’t.” With that in mind, the main role the broadband office plays is working with service providers in rural areas. Neal-Graves and his team encourage providers to apply for federal grants, provide them with data and write letters of support to back their funding requests.

Gov. Charlie Baker (R-MA) announced that Westfield Gas & Electric, which is managing broadband construction projects in 20 rural towns, has secured $10.2 million as part of a funding authorization from the Federal Communications Commission, through the Connect America Fund Phase II. The money will support the delivery of high-speed internet to residents in several Hampshire, Franklin and Berkshire county towns, including Shutesbury, Cummington, Goshen, Chesterfield and Plainfield, which combined have more than 12,400 households. The money will be available to Westfield Gas & Electric over the next decade and will supplement construction projects that have already received more than $19 million from the state’s Last Mile Infrastructure Grant program. The FCC requires speeds of 25 megabits per second for downloads and 3 megabits per second for uploads in broadband projects, but the participating towns are building their networks to provide 1 gigabit-per-second speeds for both downloads and uploads.

A Q&A with Detroit director of digital inclusion Joshua Edmonds.

When Joshua Edmonds was named Detroit’s (MI) director of digital inclusion, he became the first local goverment employee in the country with the title. Other cities have similar roles, but Edmonds is the first with the weight of director. When asked what the role of director of digital inclusion entail, Edmonds said, "It’s expanding technology to the community. In Detroit, almost a third of households don’t have Internet... This digital divide is a today problem with massive implications for tomorrow. When Amazon is on its HQ2 search, and it wants cities with a strong tech workforce, it’s hard to say you have that when a third of residents lack Internet. My role is to say, how do we start conversations and position the city to be proactive about the digital divide, rather than reactive?"

The most consequential stories for tech in 2020 pit the industry's corporate colossi against the US government, foreign nations, and the human needs of their own customers. The big battles ahead include: Securing the 2020 U.S. election; Defining the limits of privacy; Coping with the antitrust onslaught; Defending a global industry in an age of "decoupling;" and Flipping tech from harm to "wellness."

YouTube said it is rolling out new protections for children viewing videos on its site, an effort to satisfy federal regulators who in 2019 fined the company tens of millions of dollars over alleged privacy violations. The changes, which include limitations on data collection and advertising, are a step toward addressing concerns from advocacy groups who have complained the Google-owned company has run afoul of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which forbids tracking and targeting users 12 and under. As part of those changes, YouTube said it will seek to better distinguish which content is intended primarily for children, relying on a combination of self-identification from creators and software. That content cannot run with personalized advertisements, under the new rules that YouTube said it is instituting globally starting Jan 6. YouTube said it will assume any viewer of child-friendly content is underage, treating that data as subject to COPPA rules. It has been limiting other features too, such as comments on children’s videos and live chats. But some privacy experts said the changes may not offer children enough protections from a company that has accrued reams of data on its users and is incentivized to compel viewers to stay on the site for as long as possible.

In the urban rental sector, where landlords around the country are trying to accommodate their residents’ needs with bike repair facilities and produce banks, one Philadelphia (PA) property developer is testing out telehealth.“The concept of landlords providing wraparound services for tenants, in particular, low-income tenants, is a no-brainer,” said Brian Murray, CEO of Shift Capital. The social impact-minded landlord and developer owns approximately 100 affordable housing units in the Kensington area and now its renters will be eligible to tap into a new discount prescription and telemedicine service offered by a Washington (DC) startup called Health+. At a rate of $10 per month per unit, Health+ comes at a minimal cost to Shift, Murray said, and could facilitate an “enormous” payoff by helping renters meet healthcare needs while maintaining their jobs — and their economic stability, thus reducing tenant turnover.