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Welcome to CDT's Tech Talk where we dish on tech and Internet policy while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. I'm Brian Wasilowski and it's time to talk tech. As our society becomes ever more digitized, connectivity becomes more important to our daily lives. High speed broadband access is now essential for participation in the digital economy, as well as a range of social and civic activities. So what does it mean for those without access? Today, we're talking about the broadening digital divide in America. First, we hear from Doctor. Nicole Turner Lee of the Brookings Institution, who shares stories from her research on the very real challenges many Americans face who have limited or no access. After that, we look at how public private partnerships are being developed to help bridge the divide. Scott Turnbull of US Ignite shares his thoughts on what these partnerships could look like and how communities can come together to address new connectivity concerns in the digital age. Roughly 20,000,000 Americans still lack access to high speed broadband service, and rural areas are hit the hardest. While this digital divide is narrowing, less connected communities are too often left behind in the digital revolution. Today's guest is doctor Nicole Turner Lee, a fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. She has a forthcoming book that looks at these issues titled The How the Internet is Creating the New Underclass.

Welcome, Nicole. Hey. I'm so happy to be here. We're so glad to have you. How's that book coming? Oh my goodness. How is the book coming? I'm on the last leg of my seven city tour Yes. Which I will do in this excruciating heat headed down to Alabama to look at Internet access in the South. And then after that, you know, I'm getting back to finishing up that manuscript. So your listeners should expect a really interesting portrayal of the American digital divide, in the year 2020.

Alright. Well, that's not too far off. We have a lot to look forward in 2020. Right? Say 2020. I don't know. I'm old, but 2020 sounds really future. Right around the corner, and we are looking forward to that book. Thank you. So you're writing about being on the wrong side of the digital divide. What does that exactly mean for folks who don't know? And what are some of the effects of being on the wrong side of the digital divide? You know, this is an interesting concept. For about twenty five years, I've been involved with this issue,

starting back when I was a digital evangelist working in the community. That's a great title. I know. I I it's like a preacher. Right? But I'm evangelist working in the community. Title. I know. I I it's like a preacher. Right? But I'm all about digital. Right? So I mean, I'm a Christian too, but I'm just saying. But back in the days, I used to work in the space of the community technology center movement. And it was all about how do you bring tele center resources to people who are underserved. At that time, we actually had the digital divide. Larry Irving, a good friend of many of us, came up with that term when he was at the Department of Commerce. Here he was talking about who's online and who's not. This binary construct of having access to this this burgeoning Internet. Today, being on the wrong side of the divide really matters. And why does it matter? Because we no longer live in an analog world. Sure does. Things that we do are no longer in line. It's all online. It's no longer, as President Obama used to say, the Internet is no longer a luxury. It's a necessity. You know, there's still conversations on whether or not it's a human right, but I would say that this technological innovation that's now branched into our ability to leverage our mobile phones to get transportation, or health care or to get our kids grades. It's really reshaping how we live, learn, earn, socialize, communicate, love in our society today. And that's really important that you're on the right side of this debate because the further that you're away from it, the more you going to be left behind. Talk about that a little bit. What does it mean to be left behind? What are some of the impacts that you see? Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I think that there is, and the Federal Communications Commission has played this out. There's the being left behind on the infrastructure side. So what does it mean to live in a community where you do not have access? There are no resources for high speed broadband service. You're basically in what I call a digital desert. Mhmm. Or it's it's so silent. I'll give you a personal story. I was taking my kids to camp up in Goshen, Virginia. Okay. I don't even know where that is. I don't know either. I had to use my Waze app. This is the point of my story. Right? I'm using my Waze application, my GPS application to get there. Certain point, it blacks out. My kids start freaking out because before us are a bunch of cows in a bunch of green pastures, and we don't know where to turn next. We gotta go back to the nearest town where we had three or four bars on the phone, get the application again, and then, you know, this time I was smart. I screenshot it. Right? Well done. Yeah. But without an atlas, we had no idea where we're going. So I said to my kids, I said, imagine living in this world where you don't have access. You cannot take advantage of the basic things like a GPS application, a textbook that's now converted into an ebook. There are areas in this country, 55,000,000, adults in this country or individuals in this country who live in rural areas like broadband access. That's a problem because we cannot get the resources out to those communities fast enough for them to be connected. So there's an infrastructure divide. There's a divide on the stance of who has access to a device and who does not. The inability of people to access the, platforms that are available via the Internet really are dependent upon your ability to have something to access it with. If you're a person without an Internet enabled tablet or phone or some other device or any kind of residential broadband connection, you're out of the loop. So there's an infrastructure side, there are sides that are related to consumers. And now we have and this is what I talk about in my book, which is why I call it this new underclass. We have this information economy fueled by data. And that data determines where services and products go. And if you live in a community, let's say here in DC, where you live on the other side of the river, and you're not able to get access to things like Uber Eats or other Yeah. You know, exploratory robots, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. You're gonna live in a community where, again, you're in a digital desert. Because the cost of digital exclusion means that you cannot pay the convenience and the lower prices of an a ride sharing service. You have to go back and rely upon traditional modes of transportation. So this divide is now playing itself out in a compared to what Larry Urban talked about, in a less binary way. It's actually multifaceted. A less binary way. It's actually multifaceted now. And that digital divide is something, again, where where you sit, are you silenced because you have no infrastructure? Are you silenced because you have no way to connect to the conversations that are happening online? Are you silenced because you cannot benefit from the, conveniences as well as the savings and discounts that come from being in a digital society?

That's the new digital divide. Yeah. No. That's that's the best definition I've heard. I was I was going to ask you, but you've already essentially answered this. What sort of communities are most impacted by this? Yeah. A lot of people, I think, first go to, oh, rural communities. That makes sense. You can't get the cables out there or the fiber out there because they're more remote. But you're talking about also urban settings, places where there are population densities,

but different types of digital divides. You got it. Do you wanna go a little bit deeper into some of the things that you've seen from your tour of cities, either in rural settings or in cities? Yeah. It's interesting. I'm actually seeing, like, multiple layers of digital digital access play out. So I was in Staunton, Virginia, for example, is one of the cities that I went to. You have, small business America who would like to export out their products outside of Main Street, but can't do it because they don't have enough, broadband service to actually do it externally. So as one person said, you know, I'd kinda see the last mile of broadband service on my farm. And that's about all I can do. So I gotta go into town, and I've gotta get online at some cafe, and I gotta order products and equipment, etcetera. You know, it makes it really inconvenient. Then there are areas, like, in Stanton when you cross the tracks where African Americans settled after, reconstruction. Four generations of families will live in this one household that I visit. The, family was very the Mulgrave family. And the young gentleman that came out was the youngest of the brothers, told me, at the end of the at the middle of the month, I run out of data on my phone. And as a result, as a day laborer, I cannot get work Oh, wow. Because he can't afford to keep his phone access up. So those are devised that exist even within the same community. You take places like Washington DC or you take places like, New York. When you start to go into certain, census track areas where the density of poverty is a little higher, you have less competition. So people have to rely upon maybe two to three providers versus six to seven providers. I mean, this divide is playing itself out in ways that I find very fascinating as I go out into different parts of the country. I was in Syracuse, the city of Syracuse. Syracuse University has robust, network backhaul. You go just two blocks where the very first public housing development was actually established in New York State. Oh, wow. In San Diego. Them from the university is a highway, pretty much. And you talk to those people in that public housing development, and they say they don't have any broadband. Or Wow. In fact, the city of Syracuse is a study. It's like one out of every four person is lacking broadband service. So and I think that's the statistic, but it's very glaringly deficient in terms of what we're seeing in the city of Syracuse. And this is an urban center. Yeah. And so I think what we're looking at as we go forward that these pockets within communities exist, again, where this necessity is not available to people. And in my view, it perpetuates the very trajectory of poverty that we're trying to break people out. You know, when I was growing up, the Internet was seen as the barrier to entry. Right? To be online meant that you could be online in your pajamas. You could be online and you could be black. You could be online. You could be poor. You could be enrolled. Didn't matter who you were because it was one of those divide those communication portals where no one could see you and no one could actually identify who you are. And that's a little different now because Very different now. Yeah. But, you know, that was twenty something years ago. But it didn't matter where you were in this world that you could actually, through Internet access, find yourself a gateway to opportunity. Today, that's different. And I think that's

different. And I think that's complicated by the divides that I mentioned. Yeah. It does sound like a far more complicated challenge. Can we talk a little bit about possible solutions? And now I feel that we need to talk about it down a lot of streams. Let's think first about broadband access, one of the things that you talked about.

How do we get greater broadband access in places where there isn't access? Is it building out networks? Is five g potentially part of the solution? You know, I think you just hit the nail on the head. It's It's about what are the solutions versus what are the divides. Think we're at a state in our, history from regulatory and legislative directives to stop picking winners and losers as to where we deploy broadband. If there is a young person, and I've met these folks on my tour, that is interested in wiring up a city of 500 people, let them do it. I met a guy who uses a fixed wireless solution to bring wireless service to the 500 residents. His story was interesting. He said, I have funded it by myself. I've leased everything except my wife to be able to build this network. I am the builder, the customer service agent. I'm the troubleshooter. But guess what? 500 people have access in this country as a result of this young man in Nebraska. So I think to your point, we've gotta figure out ways that we actually come up with solutions that fit what the nature of the problem is. In areas like, Washington DC, where we have a lot more, competition and we've got various ways to get online, whether it's through residential broadband, five g as a potential option, we need to find ways to encourage that. The more these networks are able to hold the capacity of these new devices, whether it's the Internet of Things, whether it's these new cloud enabled platform, platforms and applications, the better. We're no longer in a space where you can pull up at a gas station and put in 87 if what's being required is 93 in terms of the fuel octane level. Right? So we need to figure out ways to build bigger and faster broadband for people. So that's the first thing. I think that goes to the infrastructure issue. Okay. And I think Congress as well as the regulatory agencies like the FCC who are responsible for this RUS need to figure out ways to actually pull funding to get this done. I think the second thing when it comes to consumers, we cannot assume that people can afford this deal. Yeah. We have more people. If you ever drive on or you're ever on a metro train, more people who are on their devices doing whatever they please and whatever they want to. But it doesn't necessarily mean that everybody has the same affordability index when it comes to being online. We have programs like the Lifeline program that was created, through Ronald Reagan in 1986 that provides a small scale subsidy to, low income people to be able to get online now. Used to be just telephone service and it went to wireless service and now there's broadband. I'm suggesting in my book, for example, the $9.95 may not be enough. But if we cannot change that discount in terms of what we give people, why is it that we cannot exempt from people's data caps access to .gov? That would be great. And that could be used. How about that too? I mean, I've been looking at that and exploring that. Let me tell you why. We could do it for Netflix. Why can't we do it for content that is going to improve the quality of life for people? It means that a young person can go to a workforce development site and take a training class online without feeling that that's going to count against his or her minutes. Why can't we do that? So I'm pushing in there and I think we need to be much more creative given that the technological space has allowed for that creativity. I also think that we have to figure out who's responsible for covering the poor. The universal service fund has primarily been developed and funded through telecommunications companies. Through companies reduce. We've got more platform players that actually make much more money in advertising revenue. We need everybody to cover the poor. This is a social responsibility of this country to ensure universal access. Particularly when governments decide that they no longer have storefronts. Right. You have to get your benefits online. Who is taking that up? And that's a question I also put into my book. I'd also think in terms of solving the divide, we need to also think about, you know, where are there applications that should make more sense to for us to put more emphasis on. Internationally, company countries are beating us when it comes to the use of mobile, phones for health care Absolutely. And banking. We've gotta figure out ways to integrate some of these technologies into the resources that people have in their pockets, in their purse, so that we, again, can improve quality of life for people. So that third bullet is really my way of telling policymakers, get out of the shell of doing things the same way.

And one of the things that you I mean, you just brought it up here too is the device aspect. As you've been traveling, I mean, obviously, a lot of this would sounds great too, so the connectivity piece. But you need the device to access that Internet. You could go to libraries. Still, a lot of great communities have those. But as you were saying, a lot of it is, you know, personal and connected to

devices, get the laptops, get the tablets that are working that could be models for other communities? You know, we're seeing a lot of that through the public private sector partnerships. Some of that's working. Comcast Internet Essentials program has been out there. I think Charter has something on the private sector side. We're seeing a group of community technology center, folks that I grew up with, those evangelists out there integrating those services. We're seeing libraries like New York and in, places like Texas, cities in Texas, where they're actually giving out WiFi hotspots for people to take home. So they can enable a device that they may have access to. You know, the key thing is we need a comprehensive strategy. We said this in 2010 with the National Broadband Plan, that we in The United States, we're gonna take this seriously. Again, we're moving from an in line to online economy. And it has implications across the board. As you all are involved in the CDT, it even goes deeper with regards to people's privacy Absolutely. And use of their data. We gotta do something different. And so that's why I call this book The Digital Invisible. It's almost like when we had the war on poverty in this country, at a certain point, the most impoverished fell off the roles. But they became America's biggest deficit Because at that time, we had no solution for how to reintegrate them into the economic structures. And so I'm suggesting that digital is the same. Let's not assume just because we have access to these devices or multiple devices and life is just smooth because we can listen to music and we can talk to our friends and connect on our social media, that it's all good. It's not all good for the small farmer. It's not all good for the small kid that lives in rural America. It's not all good for that kid that lives across the river here in the District of We've got to figure out ways to democratize these systems and create equity so that we're not actually trying to clean this up later

when companies and governments and civil society organizations are trying to go online. So well said. Can I ask you to give me one more story? You've been traveling. I love to hear these stories. Why don't you I mean, that was a pretty inspiring way to end, but I'm not gonna let you end there because I have you here. Tell me the best story you've had from your road trip or the story that has moved you the most. So you actually wanna hear the best story ahead. It's kind of a funny story. Absolutely. It's not a it's not a sentimental story. It actually relates to CDT's mission. Okay. Great. So I'm walking out of this public housing development in city of Syracuse,

and I meet, these two ladies, two African American ladies, Dottie and Jane. I'm just gonna name them. And, I I always start my tour by asking people, hey. I'm I'm not a casework. I'm not the police. I just wanna know what your Internet access is like in America. You know? And because they're looking at you like, who is this lady? You know? Why is she knocking on my door? Unless I just wanna know what Internet access what your Internet access like in America. So Dottie and Jane is sitting on this bench and Dottie says, my Internet is good. She said, I wore Amazon. I ordered my new wig the other day and it's gonna be here tomorrow. And Jane said, well, I'm not like Dottie. I can't order like her because I'm always getting my identity stolen or something's happening or they're trying to use my credit cards. I don't really trust the internet like that. And Jane turns there and says, Dottie, that's because you don't read the privacy policy. You need to get a little better reading the privacy policies. It tells you in there to take your credit card off that purchase when it's time to move on to the next purchase. And that story to me really not only entertained me, you know, afterwards I gave a big hug, but it also advised me to the fact that people know what's going on. Yeah. They're not passive observers to this whole Internet economy. They're actually actively engaged in ways and they're navigating just like many of us here on the policy side or folks on the business side. You know, what are the implications of this new economy moving forward? And they're probably the same people that are having conversations, reading their Facebook feed on, you know, the reading their Facebook feed on, you know, the face app and and and the foreign operatives taking the control of your image. Think when we get to that stage and the maturity of the Internet, it's time for a conversation, a national conversation dialogue. And that's what I'm trying to put out there with these stories. Let Washington know that these are real people with real effects of policy making. And so I'm really excited about it. I wish I had six years to write the book and sort of follow people through, like, one family through as a sociologist in training. But that wasn't gonna happen because the story needs to be told. It needs to be told before somebody else does it. But, but that's why I entitled it, Digitally Invisible, because I think those stories just give me life. Every time I go, I I honestly am so full being out of the beltway,

talking to real people about what their experience is. Well, we look forward to seeing your book in 2020. It's gonna be amazing. Now you invite me to You'll be back when I come out. Back now you're here. Oh, you will be back. I think there's no way you're not gonna be back. The Digitally Invisible is the name of the book. And also, you can find a lot of writing from Nicole on brookings.edu. Google her name. You're not gonna be sorry. There's also great photo essays up there. Wonderful work. Thank you. Photo essay coming out too. Oh, which one's that one gonna be on? Have, it's about your county, Maryland. Wonderful. The other one was on Virginia, which beautiful, which you talked about. Nicole, thank you so much. It's been beyond a joy. I know it. It was always a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Communities around the world are working to find innovative ways to address the digital divide, and there's by no means a one size fits all solution. Scott Turnbull from US Ignite is with us today to tell us what his organization is doing to help communities as well as share some success stories. Welcome, Scott. Thank you. It's great to be here. Well, first, tell us all about US Ignite. What is it? What do you do? Thank you. So US Ignite is a nonprofit. We were started in 2008,

that could use those to prove the value of it. So for those who don't know, what is a smart city? What's a smart city movement? Yeah. That's great. There's a lot of,

to make this happen. Is that correct? They make better decisions. They make, informed decisions. They have context to who you are and what your life is. That's great. So I would imagine that really great connectivity is an important part of this. And fiber networks being an essential part for at least smart cities. Is that true and why? Absolutely.

where does US Ignite then step in to make this happen? What's your role in making sure that or helping encourage cities and communities to use fiber? Yeah. So we,

I need to ask and I I don't think I told you I

That makes perfect sense. So what is kind of the next wave of connectivity? We talked about fiber, but I mean, I keep hearing everything about five g. Can that help address some of these connectivity issues or

it's not what I see in it anyway. Sure. Let me put it that way. We didn't touch too much on rural areas. Have you seen any kind of more rural communities,

No. That's great. So before I let you go, if someone is interested, you know, community leader, city leader, interested in being part of US Ignite and really wants to bring fiber to the community, what what what should they be thinking of and how should they reach you? Well, we can only be found at us-ignite.org,

These are Wow. Big gains. And these are big things that you're promoting to, promoting solutions for. So great work. Thank you for joining Tech Talk. It was a pleasure. We'll have to have you back on in again and get some local updates. Thank you. It's a real pleasure. That's it for this episode of Tech Talk. A very special thank you to CDTs intern, Yunyun Yun Wang, for her help with researching and writing for this show. Also, for more great content, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and like us on Facebook. I'm Brian Wasilowski. Thanks for listening.