Broadband Bottlenecks and Bureaucracy: What’s Holding the Internet Back? - Episode 642 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:11):
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and I've got Sascha Meinrath on the live here. He is the Palmer Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State University and Director of X-Lab [00:00:30] been on the show before. Welcome back Sascha.

Sascha Meinrath (00:33):
Thank you so much. Let's have some fun.

Christopher Mitchell (00:35):
Alright, so Sascha, this is something that we're recording. It'll have no editing. We're going to go live with it. And one of the reasons for this is I didn't do a show last week. I've been on the road, I've been struggling underwater and I didn't want to go again.

Sascha Meinrath (00:51):
You're busy. You've been very busy.

Christopher Mitchell (00:52):
Well, I respect the people that listen to this show and I don't want to just keep not putting stuff out. [00:01:00] And I felt like you and I could have a good conversation in which we agree on a number of things, we disagree on other things, and we can do it perhaps bringing more light than one would find elsewhere. So we're going to talk about a number of things. I think we're going to be pretty honest about some of the politics that are out there around telecommunications.

Sascha Meinrath (01:18):
Always.

Christopher Mitchell (01:18):
We're going to talk about BEAD, we're going to talk about what's going on with the federal government relating to broadband. And I always say that we're going to try to, neither one of us wants to turn off people who disagree [00:01:30] with our politics, but I feel like we're also not going to try to dance around the truths that we sometimes see. We're going to say what we see

Sascha Meinrath (01:37):
And hell, we disagree. You and I often. And the goal here is the conversation, the depth, the understanding, the different perspectives and why one might have a difference of opinion on the same issue. I love that about your show.

Christopher Mitchell (01:53):
Thank you. So the first thing is actually one in which I think it's just a quick update for people because I know that we're probably [00:02:00] not going to be superseded by the news before this launches. The NTIA is still waiting for the installation of Ariel Roth. You are much more of an insider than I am. She has just given birth. Again, I don't know if that changes the timeline of the Senate, but do you have any sense of when she is likely to be confirmed and then when she is likely to start the job there?

Sascha Meinrath (02:22):
So she had her confirmation hearing. I would put that in air quotes though nobody can see it, where she was asked a series of questions [00:02:30] to which she defacto dodged answering anything of substance,

Christopher Mitchell (02:35):
Which is not new. I hate theater. I really hate this whole thing and it's

Sascha Meinrath (02:38):
Terrible.

Christopher Mitchell (02:39):
We talked about this on Connect This! and I was in the minority, but I think some are worse, some are better. It is par for the course though, unfortunately.

Sascha Meinrath (02:48):
Yeah, well we had a watch party and it basically devolved into we really need to make this a drinking game for the, she had a couple of rote answers to dodge any question, and it was like it just came up again [00:03:00] and again and again and again.

Christopher Mitchell (03:04):
I do feel like on this also, we just have to say that Ariel Roth appears to be as qualified as most people are for this position, which is to say some industry experience, some friends on the hill and experience there has worked for people that are focused on telecom. And I'll just say that nonetheless, it's still frustrating for me that some of the unqualified people who have been put up for positions have received hearings, whereas the Biden administration [00:03:30] did not get it's pick right. People like Gigi Sohn raked over the coals. And so there is definitely an imbalance there that we see between the ability of Republicans to wield power and the inability of Democrats to wield power.

Sascha Meinrath (03:47):
Well, and this gets to the starting point, which is say on paper, she's probably one of the more qualified individuals that Trump has put up. And we should appreciate the fact that she's, at least if she makes decisions [00:04:00] that we disagree with, it's not due to naivete.

(04:04):
And yes, she just had the birth of a child and it turns out having a kid in the middle of your confirmation will probably still lead to her being confirmed much faster than Biden managed to get anyone confirmed. And that is, I think, par for the course. What we have seen is the wielding of power, extraordinary wielding of power [00:04:30] in ways that I fundamentally disagree with. But I can't fault this administration for moving quickly on these things. And that grants these administrations and the administrators extra time. They're playing the same game, but they got a whole other quarter in which to work. And that is again, a critique maybe we could return to because certainly we've seen this again and again, the perseveration by Democrats, [00:05:00] that the time it takes them to make decisions means that a four year Democratic administration can be dismantled, all the forward movement can be dismantled in a matter of months by the next Republican administration. And unfortunately, I fully anticipate that that's what's going to happen at NTIA. We are already seeing that the digital equity grants, the 3 billion for that are being held up purposefully, potentially rescinded, indirect [00:05:30] violation of statutory mandate.

Christopher Mitchell (05:33):
And I have a dog in this fight because multiple of those grants, including one that got so far as I believe to be obligated, were meant to go to organizations that plan to bring in some of the work that I do, especially around the tribal broadband bootcamp to help with trainings and things like that. And so we are sitting here trying to figure out is that money going to go out there? We to, what are we going to do to make sure that we're able to continue [00:06:00] operating when there's, I mean, there's literally more than a million dollars between USDA and the digital equity grants that are holding us up for years worth of work.

Sascha Meinrath (06:10):
Correct. And we, X-Lab has the exact same issue. We were part of a $12 million grant led by the city of Philadelphia that was publicly announced as one last fall, and yet the money just never made it out the door from the Biden administration. [00:06:30] So now we're in this purgatory limbo kind of SCHROER'S grant application process where we've been awarded it, it's been publicly announced. Will the money arrive is unknowable at this point.

Christopher Mitchell (06:45):
Yes. Okay. So I want to move on to the next topic, but timetable, the original question I asked you before I then derailed you into a different segment, what do you expect the timetable is for NTIA to get aerial Roth and make decisions?

Sascha Meinrath (07:00):
[00:07:00] I mean, if I had to guess, and it is a guess because again, she had a baby in the middle of it, I don't know how much time she will take. That will be a very personal decision on her part. But I would expect this quarter, I mean, she may be confirmed in absentia. I don't know what that even is. But again, Republicans move very quickly and I'm, awe is probably the wrong word, but I am often appreciative of the fact that they wield power [00:07:30] in ways that we are told by democratic leadership can't be done. It's impossible. And so I'm like, this word doesn't mean what you think it means very clearly because Republicans consistently put leadership in place and start making decisions right out of the box. And again, some of these decisions are of questionable legal grounding to say the very, very least, but that doesn't stop them from making it. Whereas Democrats [00:08:00] are like, we need to make this decision carefully to avoid lawsuit. And I'm like, you're going to get sued. It doesn't matter how you make the decision.

Christopher Mitchell (08:10):
Do it right, get it done.

Sascha Meinrath (08:12):
That's right.

Christopher Mitchell (08:14):
Follow the process as detailed as needed, but there's no reason to sit there vacillating one way, leaning back the other way, and then ultimately going in a direction which as you said, would result in the same lawsuit as if you had just made a [00:08:30] strong decision early and moved on.

Sascha Meinrath (08:32):
That's right. Well, and the creation of these multi-stakeholder processes yielding the consensus decision amongst that yields a milk toast in outcome two years from now that doesn't even address is non-responsive to the problem you're trying to solve. That makes me bonkers.

Christopher Mitchell (08:51):
It does. I'll say that. I do feel like you have a tendency to catastrophize. [00:09:00] And so when the Department of Treasury,

Sascha Meinrath (09:03):
Chris, look around you, has that been incorrect?

Christopher Mitchell (09:07):
Not a great moment to challenge you on this. That's right. But when Biden's Department of Treasury came out with the slur for rules, right? State and local fiscal recovery fund, the proposed rules, they were basically like, these are the rules. It's the final rule. We're not calling it the final rule, but we're not changing anything. And that rule is basically written by Comcast and the AT&T and whatnot, which was very limited in how states [00:09:30] and local governments could spend the money on broadband. The Biden administration listened to people and mayors and all kinds of our friends who went in there and said, this is terrible. And then they made a great rule. And so we've seen it happen. The great rule being that there was a lot of local decision making on what constituted reliability and affordability, and that allowed billions of dollars to go into needed infrastructure that is not allowed from other programs, which are written by [00:10:00] the big cable and telephone companies. So we've seen that there are people within the Biden administration that can get it right and act decisively.

Sascha Meinrath (10:07):
I mean, yes and no. So I would agree with you as far as it goes, that did empower local entities to make decisions and et cetera. But the actual mechanism, the jujitsu of this was to basically dodge making a federal rule to basically be like, oh, it's up to the state, it's up to the locality, et cetera, to not actually do the brave thing as a country [00:10:30] or as an agency or as the White House, but rather to delegate, which is to bifurcate some states and counties. Some localities will do well with this, others will not. And so where I would add a bit of different perspective would be to say like, look, yes, the end result is better than having a regressive federal rule. On the other hand, we did not end up with a progressive federal rule.

Christopher Mitchell (10:56):
Yes, okay. That I agree with. [00:11:00] I want to turn to,

Sascha Meinrath (11:02):
Yeah, man, we've got to disagree.

Christopher Mitchell (11:06):
Oh, I think we'll find something.

(11:10):
Recently in the news, Ezra Klein, John Stewart went off, and if you listen to that show, you would probably think that the sole reason that more of the United States does not have better Internet access was to protect a tree frog and make sure that people were making good labor or getting highly paid jobs with [00:11:30] good labor standards. And that is the only reason that the Biden administration didn't build a single broadband connection over the course of its administration. All of this is wrong and it's infuriating. And I'll say that you and I are going to talk about it, but I also recommend people look up the Rolling Stone article by David Sarda and someone else who also wrote it. I'm probably the lead author, actually, I don't have it handy, but we'll have it in a second and we'll link to it on the show page. But [00:12:00] the argument by Ezra Klein here, first of all, he's totally in over his head. I respect him and his work. I have disagreements and maybe if I talk with him, I'd never bring those disagreements up either. What I want to get at is that it's infuriating to hear this on multiple levels, but how do you respond to this whole thing that's coming out regarding people also criticizing the Biden administration as we do. But I think getting it substantially wrong,

Sascha Meinrath (12:30):
[00:12:30] And to me it's complicated by the fact Alan Davidson, Sarah Morris are both direct report former employees of mine. Sarah was on my team when we were working with then head of NTIA Larry Strick during the Obama administration and saying, Hey, you've got to put in place an empirical framework for deriving what works and what doesn't. What's the cost benefit analysis? What's the return on investment of the BO funding, the broadband technology opportunity program funding [00:13:00] from 15 years ago so that we know what to do the next time?

Christopher Mitchell (13:06):
Because what you're saying is some people I think view this as charity, which is like, oh, the government should do this thing and help people use the Internet, and that's a good thing to do. But I think what you would say is if you did a proper analysis, you would find that returns a larger benefit than it costs, and therefore there are good reasons for the government to do it for reasons that are not charity.

Sascha Meinrath (13:25):
Correct. And that breaks down into things like externalities. [00:13:30] So you raise property value and then you generate more income from property taxes, and it also generates via the opportunity costs. So people have well paying jobs. Yes, they're paying taxes on that income. If they don't, well, you can anticipate everything from opioid use to property crime to et cetera happens. And we have to pay for that too. So the overarching value individually to families, but to society as a whole of making [00:14:00] this investment is astounding. I mean, we're talking about, and you've seen all these numbers, $1 in saves $10 over time, what have you. The fact that we don't make that investment, whereas pretty much every other highly industrialized country has been like, this is a good investment. We're going to do this points to a real myopia, a real shortcoming in our national strategy around not broadband but

Christopher Mitchell (14:26):
Infrastructure. Agree. But let's talk about Ezra Klein and how he agrees with [00:14:30] Ted Cruz.

Sascha Meinrath (14:31):
Yeah, well, and I feel like they both have, I think a valid starting point, which I think no one in their right mind should argue, which is that getting this money out took too long.

Christopher Mitchell (14:47):
Getting the BEAD that was out took too long,

Sascha Meinrath (14:49):
Getting the BEAD funding out what took too long. And then the question is, and that's because it was allocated in 2021, and here we are in 2025, the money still hasn't left [00:15:00] the coffers. That's a real problem. And there's a lot of blame that can be placed. I think the question then becomes why did it take so long

Christopher Mitchell (15:10):
Labor standards, Sascha

Sascha Meinrath (15:11):
Labor standards? And again, this is where the blame game starts happening. And if there's good news, it's that there's a lot of blame to be passed around to a lot of different places. Well,

Christopher Mitchell (15:23):
I know, I think a lot of blame gets passed around to a few different people at the Federal Communications Commission over the past 10 or 15 [00:15:30] years who have ignored you. They've ignored Derek Turner in the free press. They've ignored everyone who said what would be nice is if we had a basic understanding of where Internet access worked in this country.

Sascha Meinrath (15:41):
That's right. That's right. Yeah. I mean, this is for me year. I started working on national broadband mapping in 2006, so we're nearing the 20 year mark, and every time we've had a win, I've been like, okay, how are they going to fumble this now? And that's exactly what we've seen. [00:16:00] But to the BEAD program itself, you had this confluence of fairly complex sausage making on the hill creating a series of steps. So this is where Ezra Klein gets it right. There are a series of steps and there's reasons for those. And this then creates a process that gets slow walked. Instead of handling a lot of these steps in parallel, like, oh, we've got these eight things. We're going to do 'em all simultaneously and get 'em done. [00:16:30] They were done serially. So first we'll do step A and once that's completed, we'll move on to step B.

(16:38):
And once that's completed, we'll do step C. And there's a lot of reasons why sometimes that makes sense. You don't want to overload states by being like, we need all of these things done all at once. But it really dodges this fundamental question and the fundamental intent, which was we want to do all this so that we actually create [00:17:00] state strategy so that we understand how this program fits in with the others. We want to do this because it will enable us to more effectively and efficiently spend federal funds and into that space. And this is where the blame is solely to the Biden administration. This was heavily mishandled. It was operationalized in ways that required states to provide data that simply doesn't exist. And so the states would go back to [00:17:30] India and be like, yeah, we don't know how to get this data. It doesn't exist. We understand why you're asking for it. It'd be nice if it did exist. What should we do into which NDA was like, we'll get back to you. And then they never would. And so then you had all this perseveration, all this problem of we want to abide by these rules that are themselves somewhat nebulous. We need clarification that's not happening. And then by the time you get to the end of one of those processes, then you start the next one.

(17:58):
And that just [00:18:00] drew this process out years, literally years upon years without in the end actually creating the documentation that you wanted. These five year strategic plans or action plans by the states are not worth the paper they're written on. Some

Christopher Mitchell (18:16):
Are better than others, but hard to argue that there's 50 good ones or 56 good ones.

Sascha Meinrath (18:23):
Almost all of them are predicated on the existence of the ACP, the Affordable connectivity program that hasn't existed since [00:18:30] three months after they were turned in.

Christopher Mitchell (18:33):
I did look back, the article that from Rolling Stone is Aaron Rugg Inberg, who was the first listed author, so probably deserves credit, and it is Liberals abundance is good for Trump and Musk and Bad for Dems. That's right. One of the things that drives me nuts about, I want to come back to what you were just saying, the FCC, so when the Biden administration got this rolling, they had this idea that they [00:19:00] needed to have perfect maps, and Congress specifically said that they needed to have maps, I believe, from the FCC, which is still, I kind of wish that didn't happen. But nonetheless, NTIA got that charge,

(19:12):
The FCC suddenly leaps into action, basically leapt off a cliff and as it was plummeting to its death, totally mismanaged the whole thing proving that the FCC has no business being anywhere near broadband distribution money at all. But what I would say is that from [00:19:30] the NTIA's perspective, they have two choices. One is to say, we're going to stick with these morons and we're going to wait until the FCC comes up with some sort of usable data that we're going to use. Or they could say, what's a reasonable proxy for where Internet access is and isn't the data that we have right now, and it would be better if we had better data, but it would be worse if we waited two years to get data that is not better and then move forward. And they chose that ladder. We have maps that are now, it's like the classic sort of [00:20:00] accuracy versus precision, right?

Sascha Meinrath (20:02):
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (20:02):
They're more precise and less accurate, and so we have not gained anything.

Sascha Meinrath (20:08):
Correct. Well, and it's a fundamental problem of the FCC falling flawed undergirding methodologies, right?

Christopher Mitchell (20:17):
Why do they do that, Sascha, why did they do that? Because this is exactly in the article that Berg and Soroto wrote, which is what I don't see a lot of people wrestling. Certainly Ezra Klein never brings up, which [00:20:30] is that the philosophy of the FCC and the Republican party and a few Democrats is that it is better to withhold the funding from 100 homes that do not have Internet access of their constituents in rural areas

Sascha Meinrath (20:46):
If

Christopher Mitchell (20:46):
Even one of those homes might have service. And you would rather withhold service from 100 homes rather than accidentally use government dollars to create competition for a provider that had already invested in [00:21:00] that one home. And the Democrats, not entirely, but largely would rather say, let's move forward and get investment out. And if we overlap a little bit, hey, that's how they fall sometimes. Well, we can't wait for years. And somehow the Biden administration just loved this approach and went with it.

Sascha Meinrath (21:19):
And there's a lot to unpack in what you just said. So let's start with the maps. The maps instead of using scientific methodology, don't. Right? So scientific methodology be like an open methodology, [00:21:30] peer reviewed, open data, have tools that are available, have it unencumbered by psychotically, complicated licensure. All of this is what science does. And in the face of, keep in mind, we are now up to about a hundred, sorry, $500 million in public funding spent on broadband mapping over the last 15 years, and we have defacto nothing useful to show for it.

Christopher Mitchell (22:00):
[00:22:00] Some states have gone backwards,

Sascha Meinrath (22:01):
Some states have gone backwards, but also even the states that have moved forwards and had these challenge processes themselves were psychotically institutionalized. They now have maps that can't be fed back into the national broadband map. This notion of truing up. So what happens next is the FCC collects a new data set of broadband data collection, et cetera. This six months of data comes in that map. Bifurcates, [00:22:30] the FCC map has different data than the state maps. They've forked the data, as we say in coding, and there's no mechanism for truing this up for making sure that one isn't over. So what's the canonical map? Who knows? None of this is addressed. This is bad leadership, which is to say, my radical position is like, Hey, why don't we use science on this? And into that we're like, no, we choose to use a far [00:23:00] less effective, far more expensive and less useful methodology that is exactly what failed in the 2010 map. So you can imagine this total disaster of a process and they're like, you know what? We need to do that again.

Christopher Mitchell (23:15):
Right? If Noah embraced the fccs approach to building maps, we would know less about where hurricanes were going the day that they arrived than we do today five days out. I use that as an example because figuring out where a hurricane [00:23:30] had land is so much harder than figuring out who has decent Internet access across the United States of America.

Sascha Meinrath (23:37):
Well, and this argument, right? Oh, I can't trust it to the government, they'll just screw it up. I'm like, dude, we have a worldwide leader in accurate and precise data collection at the national level, and it's called the US Census, and why are they so good? Oh, that's right. They use science. So I'm like, Hey guys, look, we already do this Well over here. [00:24:00] Let's apply those same standards to the FCC and into that space. They don't. And the reason, because that's what you asked me, why does this keep happening? Regulatory capture is that the FCC says, Hey, we've got all these scientists and I'm amongst them that go into the FCC. They're like, use science. And then you've got ISP representatives and lobbyists coming and be like, don't use science. Trust us. We've only lied every time before. And then the FCC says, okay, we need to find the common ground. We're going to [00:24:30] spin up a multi-stakeholder process, of which I have wasted years in rooms in these multi-stakeholder processes where scientists are saying, let's use science. They're saying, let's use mythology. And the is like, what's the common ground that we can all agree with? And what you end up with is mythology. You don't end up with something that's quasi scientific at all.

Christopher Mitchell (24:51):
So I would love to have hours to, but I want to give you one other thing. I'll give you one other point to respond to looking backward, but [00:25:00] then we have to look forward because I will say that for all of this and our frustration with how broken the Federal Communications Commission is the idea that the head of the Federal Communications Commission would now wear a golden pin of dear leader while using the federal communications power commission's power to go after any company that had said anything negative about the president. If I had said that last fall, people would've said, Chris is lunatic. He's letting his personal politics get in the way and nevermind the fact that no one actually knows [00:25:30] what my personal politics are because they're super complex and I'm discovering them on the regular basis.

Sascha Meinrath (25:34):
You're always catastrophizing,

Christopher Mitchell (25:38):
But we're in such a bad place, and yet we find ourselves constantly going back to talk about what was wrong yesterday rather than what's burning down tomorrow. So I want to make sure that we can talk about what's burning down tomorrow.

Sascha Meinrath (25:49):
Yeah. Well, and again, you don't need to take our word for it, right? The GA O2 years ago released a report, I'm just going to give you the title, broadband, A national [00:26:00] strategy needed to coordinate fragmented overlapping federal programs, which is to say, this is at the time Biden administration telling the Biden administration, Hey, we got to get our act together here to then ignore that as we did leads to the current situation whereby Republicans are like, and that's why we need to blow it all up and stop, which is probably the only answer worse than what [00:26:30] we have been doing thus far. At least at this point, we have a chance of just randomly doing the right thing. We're now in danger of lowering the probability of at least getting something right to near zero.

Christopher Mitchell (26:43):
Well, that is the question of what happens next. And I can't see a path forward. It's a singularity ahead of my predictions because it boggles my mind. I just did an interview with some wonderful people in [00:27:00] a rural part of the United States, and I have no doubt that they are strong supporters of the Trump administration or their families are. And they were just talking as though there's no way that the Trump administration will force us to stop these fiber optic projects and go to satellite. And there's a part of me that's like, I think who thinks that? And a lot of people that I've talked to, right? Oh boy. And so this is the thing is that it is so hard for me to imagine that the Trump administration, here's what I would imagine would happen. The Trump [00:27:30] administration may say, you know what? We want to change the threshold so that states have to put more money into satellite and less money into expensive fiber optic solutions.

(27:39):
And what would happen then is every Republican governor and every Republican that works in these areas, which is like this is mostly Republican areas that would be impacted, will say, no, we need the fiber. We want the fiber. We are your supporters. Please don't harm us by forcing us to have to wait still longer for decent service. And then the Trump administration would reconsider [00:28:00] because it is their base, and yet my heart and my head are at war over what is likely to happen at that point and how Ariel Roth and the commerce Secretary Lunik, how they react. And I feel like there's a lot of people who are like, well, of course they're going to figure out how to give more money to Elon Musk. And I'm just like, politically, it's such a terrible thing to do and I can't imagine either course. I literally cannot imagine either course being the one that they pick,

Sascha Meinrath (28:26):
Correct? Yeah. And satellite is a niche product. There [00:28:30] are specific locations and use cases where it makes sense, but they are very specific and they're very niche overall. Overwhelmingly the super majority of the time satellite is a false economy. And the way this plays out in DC is if I'm looking at the immediacy like this year, then satellite's more efficient. It's a better return on investment. I give you satellite, it costs very little, and this year the federal government saves money but reaches more people. [00:29:00] If I look at the costs over say, 30 years, well then you find out the total cost of satellite is egregiously more expensive and accrues on the backs of the people that are getting service provisioning. So it is a resource extraction from those communities. And that bastion of communism that is Bloomberg did the analysis. They're like, Hey, let's look and see what the all in cost of fiber versus satellite is over the lifespan [00:29:30] of that infrastructure. And it turns out it's not even close. Fiber is so much less expensive because unlike having to maintain satellites in space, once you put fiber in the ground, it's like it's fire and forget. It just sits there doing its thing for like 25 to 50 years

Christopher Mitchell (29:48):
And it results in local economic activity, whereas satellites do not result in local economic activity.

Sascha Meinrath (29:54):
Correct. And that's before you get into all of the privacy surveillance issues, before you get into the reliability [00:30:00] and the network infrastructure falling out of the sky, literally

Christopher Mitchell (30:05):
The politics.

Sascha Meinrath (30:05):
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (30:06):
So do you think when the Trump administration comes to this choice and they say, we'd like to give more money to satellite, and they hear back from all of the people who supported them saying, this will be terrible for us. You think that they're just going to power right ahead and ignore all those people on the ground?

Sascha Meinrath (30:22):
Well, again, this is where the Biden administration screwed up their operationalization. They were like, we want to know the cost per passing. We don't want to know the cost [00:30:30] per passing over time, which is the proper metric for determining a better infrastructure investment. Nobody builds a bridge and it's like, we need to know this thing's going to be revenue positive tomorrow. That would be crazy. We

Christopher Mitchell (30:45):
Understand. I mean, to give people an idea, the cost of connecting everyone to Internet access to a municipally owned fiber optic network in Seattle is give or take a billion dollars, and that might be a little bit low. So let's say 1.5 billion. I [00:31:00] believe the cost of building the floating bridge was 4 billion of rebuilding that. And you know what? And people thought that that was worth it, and we might argue and quibble, but nonetheless, we are talking about amounts of money that can be compared. Right? And so I wanted to throw that out there for people to understand that this is not the most expensive proposition, correct?

Sascha Meinrath (31:23):
It's a rounding error. If we had a national broadband strategy as we had proposed in 2009 [00:31:30] and built a whole white paper, worked with a series of CTOs in the White House that's led to in 2012, an executive order coming out from Obama on this, but in 2009, we formulated the plan that over the next 15 years would bring fiber to within 50 miles of everyone in the United States. And the way you did that for almost like it was a rounding error in the total cost is that you put it into the omnibus transportation bill that every time you rip up a road, which happens about one every 15 [00:32:00] years, you lay down big fiber and conduit along the side,

Ry Marcattilio (32:04):
Just conduit probably

Sascha Meinrath (32:05):
Like you do guardrails or reflectors or lines. It costs nothing in the total cost of that project, and then you just do that as a national policy. Every federal road, it's like you're repaving it. You're putting in these basic amenities and we were told can't be done. It's too slow to have universal open access fiber within 50 miles of everyone in the United States by 2025. [00:32:30] Too slow. We got this. Well, here we are 15 years later, and I'm like, yeah, that was an obvious outcome, and yet again, this shows just how the lack of a national broadband strategy is causing severe harm. We're as demonstrated by this podcast, we are the privileged folks that have good connectivity. If you're wrong,

Christopher Mitchell (32:57):
But I'll put on your feet now, I don't [00:33:00] know on your eyeballs, I've lost what I was trying to say there. I want to know what do you think happens when they get the numbers back within the NTIA and they have to make a decision on whether they're going to force states to wait longer to get less, or that you're just going to plow ahead and they'll announce that they're going to change everything, but really not much will change.

Sascha Meinrath (33:19):
That's right. Well, and what it does is it continues to harm the folks on the wrong side of the digital divide,

Christopher Mitchell (33:27):
But are they choosing path A or path B?

Sascha Meinrath (33:29):
I mean, [00:33:30] I think what we've seen demonstrated in no uncertain terms is self-harm is definitely on the table for this administration. You look at the tariff disaster that we have created, the trillions of dollars in damage that have already accrued and the certainty of severe damage to working class America in terms of increased costs of everyday items, clearly self-harm is the policy of this administration to think that [00:34:00] this would be the place where they draw the line, this is too much. You'd be crazy to make that argument and crazier to bet me a pint that they won't do that. As such, when has to plan for that and what we see again is this bifurcation. Some states and state broadband offices are like, we're moving ahead ourselves with our own funds because we can't wait for the federal government. If the feds come in, great, we'd love to belt and suspenders this, but if not, we are developing [00:34:30] our own state-based strategy for universal affordable connectivity, whereas other states are caught up in this mythology of laissez fair practices connect.

Christopher Mitchell (34:39):
Yeah, West Virginia of all states, it looks like West Virginia was the first to start reconfiguring their program to rely more on satellites, and there might only be one other state that is less likely to be harmed by a switch to satellites not be in Colorado. West Virginia is covered with hollers and ridges [00:35:00] that get in the way that makes sure people won't have a good experience, and yet they're among the first and they've been the most screwed of all the states for Internet. You have to

Sascha Meinrath (35:07):
Understand, Chris, the West Virginia plan, so satellite doesn't work with trees or mountains or what have you, so first you have to strip mine the entire state. Then once it's flat, satellite is going to work. Great.

Christopher Mitchell (35:20):
Well, they did have, I mean, it is fascinating. I mean, they hit the mountaintop removal to get at the coal, so they filled in the streams. My understanding is a [00:35:30] lot of the structures that were built on that infill haven't done super well.

Sascha Meinrath (35:33):
No, no. The fact that you've got arsenic everywhere, I mean it is a giant quasi radioactive sl heap, but satellite will work really well.

Christopher Mitchell (35:43):
Well, I just get frustrated because I'll tell you, let me say this because we're running out of time. We're out of time, is that what drives me nuts about this is not that people don't vote like me or not this argument, that people vote against their interests as I define their interests,

(35:59):
That [00:36:00] people have sorted to the point at which they don't even pay attention to local issues, and they're like, I don't like this person in Washington DC and I'm going to vote for who runs my city based on my feelings about this person in DC that I've never met and I've only learned about through media. And it is just like if there's one thing that I feel like I could change in this moment to try to make things better over the longer term, it would be that people would at least vote for the appropriate office based on their experiences within that.

Sascha Meinrath (36:28):
Yeah, I mean, basically [00:36:30] the future looks one of two ways. Here's the false dichotomy. One, we continue on the trajectory we're on, in which case the entire United States is on a very bleak trajectory towards falling further and further behind the vanguard of what it means to live in a civil society or be a technologically advanced country. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (36:50):
I want to let you finish that, but I'll just say I dispute the idea. I actually think I could live anywhere in the world, I think, right? I have an ego. I think if I really wanted to become a citizen anywhere, [00:37:00] they would welcome me. The fact that I have at least an upper and middle income lifestyle and whatnot. I think the United States is still among the top. I think there's a lot of things that, what

Sascha Meinrath (37:10):
Metrics are

Christopher Mitchell (37:11):
You? It's

Sascha Meinrath (37:12):
Not education. I'm not going to argue with not health outcomes. It's not even how long we live Chris, right?

Christopher Mitchell (37:16):
No. There are a lot of things at which we have challenges, but there's a reason people want to come here more than anywhere else. We're dying, Chris. We're literally dying. You are right, and I'll absolutely say that. I know the stats in terms of maternal death, and there [00:37:30] are all kinds of ways in which we have let poverty get in the way, but I think that there are millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people who said, if you could be poor in Europe or poor in the United States, where would you rather be poor? There is some reason that they would rather be poor in the United States, so I'll let you finish that, but I wrestle with that because I would rather be here,

Sascha Meinrath (37:50):
Of course, have ties the US populace that thinks the world is flat too. Again, when you look objectively [00:38:00] at a growing series of metrics, the us, it's not that we're blast in class, but we're middling along many of them, and we are absolutely like the healthcare. We could do so much better by outcome. We are dead last. There's no highly industrialized country paying more for worse outcomes than the United States, right?

Christopher Mitchell (38:19):
Yes, we can do better. There's room for improvement,

Sascha Meinrath (38:22):
Right? So that's the trajectory we're on. The problem we have in DC is you have Democrats working [00:38:30] to slow the rate of degradation and Republicans to accelerate the rate of degradation, and nobody's like, Hey, what if we change the trajectory? We need big, bold interventions to meaningfully change that trajectory. It's not enough to just slow the erosion. That to me, is a fundamental issue into this future. What we need is the kind of bold leadership and vision that is thus far alluded [00:39:00] us. We systematically grab defeat from the jaws of victory, like the BEAD program is an exemplar of this, and I don't see that happening in the next few years. The question to me is what happens in 2026 with Congress and what happens in 2028 when the hangover from all of these crazy policies is better understood? Right.

Christopher Mitchell (39:29):
Perhaps

Sascha Meinrath (39:29):
The damage [00:39:30] hasn't yet started.

Christopher Mitchell (39:31):
Well, I agree, and that's where I'd say for people who don't know what the bond market is or does, you're going to want to look it up. I don't think the election in 2026 changes the fact that the bond market is never going to be as strong as it was last year or as it was three weeks ago. There's been real long-term damage that will take a while to wrap our heads around, and that is deeply, deeply frustrating, but at the same time, I have to say a lot of people who care about where their money goes, they are moving it outside the United States. [00:40:00] That is a long-term problem. That is, most people aren't even covering that on the news in terms of the damage from these tariffs. We didn't get a chance to talk about the tariffs direct impact on telecom. There's a lot of other things that I would like to talk about. If people have anything that they would like me and Sascha to argue about, I'd be happy to add that to the list and see if I can get you back on sometime soon.

Sascha Meinrath (40:21):
Chum for the waters, as it were.

Christopher Mitchell (40:25):
Thank you, Sascha.

Sascha Meinrath (40:27):
My pleasure.

Ry Marcattilio (40:29):
We have [00:40:30] transcripts for this and other podcasts available at muni networks.org/broadbandbits. Email [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow Chris on Twitter, his handles at Community Nets, follow muni networks.org. Stories on Twitter that handles at muni networks. Subscribe to this and other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcast. You can access them anywhere you get your podcasts. [00:41:00] You can catch the latest important research from all of our initiatives if you subscribe to our monthly [email protected]. While you're there, please take a moment to donate your support in any amount. Keeps us going. Thank you to Arnie Sby for the song Warm Duck Shuffle, licensed through Creative Comments. This was the Community Broadband Bits podcast. Thanks for listening.