Traditionally, the story of rural broadband in America has ended with a two-letter word: no. No, the local cable or phone monopoly isn’t going to extend service to this county or that town. No, the satellite broadband that does reach there isn’t going to get rid of its data caps or sluggish latency. No, states won’t let anybody but incumbent telecom providers enter the market. A new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts, however, suggests the future might be less bleak. No one connectivity technology or funding mechanism that will bring broadband to the Great Unwired. “One of the key findings in our report is that this is a multi-faceted challenge and there is no single solution,” summed up Kathryn de Wit, manager of Pew’s broadband research initiative. Put aside 5G hype; she added that wireless technology remains mostly a last-mile solution at the end of conventional wired connectivity, saying “there’s a lot of wire in wireless.”

Much of the advice here could be fairly summarized as “do representative government right.” As in, practice the consensus-building and accountability methods that would figure in any playbook for a public-funded, multi-stakeholder project. But if you establish measurable goals, have a governor or influential legislators champion broadband expansion, ensure that dedicated and visible staff oversee the program, and loop in both existing private actors (internet providers, electric utilities, tech firms) and local governments and advocates, good things can happen.

In 2020, lawmakers have lots of ideas about how to regulate tech companies. New bills are introduced every day, creating a sea of regulatory threats that’s difficult to keep straight as time goes on. A majority of these measures will never make their way into a committee hearing, and even fewer will be signed into law. But taken as a whole, they give us a sense of what a major tech regulation bill might look like this Congress. And as the 2020 election season takes off, that picture is more urgent than ever.

• Crafting a federal data privacy framework: The biggest regulatory target is all of the data tech companies collect from their users, so many legislators are pushing for a far-reaching federal law to regulate personal data, akin to Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 
• Updating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Some lawmakers fear that the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) isn’t tough enough to take on Big Tech’s abuses over children’s data.
• Rules for Digital Advertising. The Honest Ads Act (S 1356) was first introduced in 2017, but the discussion surrounding political ads has evolved tremendously in the three years since it was proposed.
• Deception and Interoperability: Sen Mark Warner (D-VA) has spearheaded a handful of efforts to get other lawmakers talking about tech regulation over the past few years, including measures that ensure platforms aren’t designed in deceptive or anti-competitive ways. In April 2019, Sen Warner sponsored the DETOUR Act with Sen Deb Fischer (R-NE) to target so-called “dark patterns” — deceptive practices used to convince users to engage with them in ways that benefit the company.

On Feb 28 the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve a new order paving the way for the expanded use of “white space broadband,” a promising technology that uses the spectrum freed from the shift to digital television to beam broadband into traditionally harder to reach rural areas. In 2017, Microsoft announced an ambitious plan to bring the technology to more than 2 million rural Americans across a dozen states by July 2022.

Consumer protection lawyer and wireless policy expert Harold Feld was quick to note while the new order is a good thing, delays by the FCC—and what he called a “deliberately sloppy” effort to repack remaining TV stations after white space spectrum was auctioned off—eroded much of the technology’s original potential. “The FCC basically threw everybody back together in a manner that in the more crowded urban markets meant that there isn’t a heck of a lot of space for TV white spaces to operate,” Feld said. He added that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai previously shot down more thoughtful repacking proposals. “If they’d done it the way we’d wanted to do it six or seven years ago, then it could have been a significant add on to urban broadband,” Feld said. “But you needed to have enough contiguous space in the urban areas to make that happen, which required the FCC to handle the repacking with care and precision—which they did not.” Once the technology no longer posed a threat to their urban dominance, incumbent broadband providers backed off their opposition to it. He added that the National Association of Broadcasters and Microsoft also sat down and crafted a spectrum sharing compromise to mitigate potential interference.

While white space broadband isn’t a silver bullet, it’s going to be a useful tool in the toolchest in addressing America’s stubborn broadband availability problems. And a lot of the advancements made during its meandering, decade-plus path to market should prove helpful in the development of other new technologies aimed at bridging the digital divide.