In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a photo of two little girls in the parking lot of a California Taco Bell went viral. They were doing their schoolwork on laptops in that inconvenient location because the restaurant provided free Wi-Fi, which they didn’t have at home. The girls came to symbolize the digital underclass that’s emerged since the rise of the internet. There are millions of American kids like them, says Nicol Turner Lee, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her analysis of what is often called the digital divide is contained in her new book, “Digitally Invisible: How the Internet Is Creating the New Underclass,” which she discussed with Marketplace’s Lily Jamali. Turner Lee and Jamali discussed digital invisibility and the importance of community first design solutions. 

The Wisconsin Governor’s Task Force on Broadband Access released its fourth annual report. In 2024, the Task Force continued to emphasize its goals established in the 2023 report, which are that:

• By 2028/2029, all homes and businesses will have access to high-speed broadband service that reliably provides a download speed of at least 100 Mbps and an upload speed of at least 20 Mbps.
• By 2028/2029, all community anchor institutions (CAI) will have access to high-speed broadband service that reliably provides a download speed of at least 1000 Mbps and an upload speed of at least 1000 Mbps.
• Where practicable, a strong emphasis and priority should be placed on reaching “future proof” speeds beyond 100/20, up to and including 1000/1000 Mbps for as many homes, businesses, and community anchor institutions as possible.
• Fiber technology should be prioritized, but not exclusively required, for public investments where practicable. Also, terrestrial fixed wireless solutions should be pursued in harder to reach areas or as an incremental short-term solution.

Hawaii’s broadband landscape has challenges like no other U.S. state. So how do you deliver broadband access to 100% of the residents and businesses in the most remote of the 50 states? “100% is hard to get to, but we’re going to make a really good try to get there,” said Garret Yoshimi, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer of the University of Hawaii. Yoshimi is not Hawaii’s state broadband director. But—as State Digital Equity Coordinator Burt Lum said—Yoshimi is the man to talk to about the Broadband Equity, Access, and Development (BEAD) Program and other efforts to expand broadband across the state. As an island state, Hawaii faces challenges most U.S. states don’t. Bringing high-speed broadband across the Pacific Ocean is not simple. Despite Hawaii’s unique challenges, Yoshimi is optimistic. “We’re trying to make sure that anybody interested in subscribing to the internet can have access on a statewide basis,” he said. “We think we have sufficient funds based on our best guesses and our financial models. That’s not true in all states. Several of them will likely fall short of getting to 100%. But we believe we have sufficient funds to do that.”

The broadband industry needs more workers. Specifically, it needs tens of thousands more construction workers and broadband technicians to complete a coming wave of government-funded deployment projects or else critical broadband expansions could be delayed. Some original research conducted by Continuum Capital found that the U.S. is short by about 58,000 tradespeople to build about $80 billion in government-funded fiber projects over the next five to seven years. Researchers interviewed 350 people across all 50 states who were selected for their knowledge and experience in the broadband market. According to the research, upcoming broadband expansion projects will require about 186,900 workers. But in order to meet that total workforce demand, the U.S. will need 28,000 additional construction tradespeople, and it will also need about 30,000 additional skilled broadband technicians.

A federal judge said on August 5 that Google broke the law to kneecap competition in web search in ways that entrenched the company’s power. The next steps, which involve proposing legal fixes to undo Google’s behavior, are essentially about imagining an alternative future in which Google isn’t Google as we know it. We have the internet we have, and it’s hard to imagine something different or if you’d like it more, but here are six possible alternatives:

1. It’s possible that Google could be forced to let other companies access its search technology or its essential data to create search engines with the technical chops of Google—but without Google.

2. Google pays Apple many billions of dollars a year—$20 billion in 2022—to make Google the standard way to search the web on Apple’s Safari browser. The likeliest scenario is you’d need to pick whether to use Google on your iPhone or something else. But technologists and stock analysts have also speculated for years that Apple could make its own search engine.

3. Could prices go down for the products that advertise next to your searches (which is most products)? In theory, if alternative search engines get popular, there would be more competition and lower prices for the insurance providers and other companies trying to grab your attention when you search.

4. The company could break up into Baby Googles. This one seems unlikely, but the government could ask the judge to split Google into parts to fix its illegal monopoly power.

5. Google might know less about you. If Google had less information, it could be better for your privacy, and it might help other companies, including news organizations that don’t have Google’s wealth of data.

6. You might be able to download almost anything from Google’s Android app store. That might mean that you would be able to buy an Amazon Kindle e-book from its Android app, which you can’t do now. Games such as “Fortnite” that have been absent from Android phones might be available, too.

Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA), the Democratic nominee for president, has chosen Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as her running mate, elevating a former football coach whose rural roots, liberal policies, and buzzy takedowns of former President Donald Trump have recently put him on the map. Gov Walz emerged from a field of candidates who had better name recognition and more politically advantageous home states. Minnesota is not a top-tier presidential battleground and is unlikely to prove critical to a Harris-Walz victory. But he jumped to the top of Harris’s list in a matter of days, helped by cable news appearances in which he declared that Republicans were “weird.” The new, clear articulation of why voters should reject Trump caught on fast and turned the spotlight on the plain-spoken Midwesterner behind it. Gov Walz was thought to be someone who could match up well in a debate against Senator JD Vance (R-OH), whom Trump chose as his running mate. And after two weeks of vetting and deliberations, Vice President Harris connected best with Gov Walz in comparison with the other choices. Over and over in the selection process, loyalty had been emphasized as one of the most important criteria for Vice President Harris. This suggests that Gov Walz convinced her he would support her not only in winning but also in helping her govern. Gov Walz is in his second term as governor and spent 12 years in Congress, where he was the rare Midwestern Democrat representing a largely rural district. He served for 24 years in the Army National Guard and taught high school social studies in Mankato (MN) before entering politics. While his background was tailor-made for moderate voters, his policies as governor have been firmly liberal, reflecting what his allies call “prairie populism.”