Fiber, The Coming Revolution -- Talking Tech w/ Susan Crawford
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 Tim Hoagland –– CDT’s Lead Designer, Digital Strategist, and resident Podcast Engineer, and I sat in for Brian this episode –– and it’s time to talk tech.<br><br>This episode brings us Susan Crawford – author, and a professor at Harvard Law School. She digs into her most recent book, "Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It."<br><br>More on the book: http://bit.ly/2DdiwP7<br><br>More on Susan: https://twitter.com/scrawford<br>More on our host, Tim: twitter.com/motus_compos<br><br>Attribution: sounds used from Psykophobia, Taira Komori, BenKoning, Zabuhailo, bloomypetal, guitarguy1985, bmusic92, and offthesky of freesound.org.
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Transcript
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.
CT. Tea. 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 Tim Hogan, CDT's lead designer, digital strategist, and resident podcast engineer, and I'll be sitting in for Brian today. And it's time to talk tech. Last episode, we chatted with CDT's privacy and data team, breaking down the tough decisions we made putting pen to paper on our private our draft privacy legislation. If you haven't read it or heard it yet, make sure you take a look or listen. But today with us, very excitingly, we have, Susan Crawford, author and a professor at Harvard Law School. She's here today to tell us about, her most recent book, Fiber, the coming tech revolution and why America might miss it. Susan, thank you so much for joining us today. It's great to be here. Thank you. Let's start off, let me start off by saying this book is, wonderfully approachable. I got a chance to read it. You'll be doing an event later with, Chris Calabrese, our VP of, policy, and he's gotten a chance to read it. We compared notes and such, but lovely. But this topic can be dense. Would you, dig into a little bit why you wanted to write this or how this book came about?
Well, Internet access has been really interesting to me for a number of years. I mean, I happen to be a young lawyer when the commercial Internet first showed up. And actually, I got involved with CDT back then too. And especially in my work at the beginning of the Obama administration, I began to learn that, Internet access in The United States is a, not great and b, there's a huge digital divide between rural and urban areas, between poor people and richer people. And then I was fortunate enough to travel quite a bit to Korea and Japan and Sweden and other places that have extraordinary fiber optic Internet access everywhere, really, 100% penetration. And there I decided that there was a story there that Americans needed to understand. The story of what could be how great fiber optic technology is, and I'd love to explain that. And, also the story of about 800 scrappy locations in The United States that are working towards taking their destiny in their own hands and calling for, fiber optic. It's called last mile technology. So actual fiber strands running into homes and businesses in those communities.
What well, you posited the question. Let's give you the the space for it. What could be? If your best, intentions were made, clear some of the stuff that you you've written about in this book, what what would that future look like?
Well, imagine being able to have just a pane of glass between you and the rest of the world for anything you wanted to do with no delay and no worry about how much it was gonna cost, things like data caps and overages would be irrelevant in this future world because fiber optic has essentially unlimited capacity as far as we know. Mhmm. And when deployed, allows you to be present essentially in another location with no latency, no jitter, no worries. And you don't have to think about whether it's gonna work or not. It just does. And that's what I experienced in these other countries. And although we're the country that came up with the idea of the Internet protocol and certainly the place where the first generation or so of Internet innovation started, we should be looking the rest of the world in the rearview mirror when it comes to Internet access, but we really aren't. We think we're exceptional here in The United States. It turns out that we're becoming increasingly more like a third world country when it comes to Internet access. I was I mean, especially when you think about,
that reality in much different parts of stretches of our country, that's well known that that the, the the Internet reality isn't the same for everyone. What let's take a step back here and and give the basics of some of the the the fiber that we're talking about. What is fiber optic infrastructure? Why is it important, etcetera? You've given that kind of high level stuff. Let's talk about about the the what exactly.
Well, fiber is amazing. Mhmm. So it's completely synthetically printed glass in essence. So every layer of many thousands of layers of, very thin glass tubes are, created in a very precise manufacturing resulting hair thin strand of glass as pure as you can possibly imagine. What that allows for is, light carrying information to be shot through that glass and never need to be encouraged as it travels dozens of miles. So without amplification, without boosting, without anything, light just keeps going through that glass. Sure. And and
importantly, it not having to travel through airwaves, which is a a different, technological, difficulty. Right? The idea here being that there's a physical space and not one that has to be shot over
airwaves. Well, the the real difference is that there's no rain or trees or anything like that inside the glass. That it's, it's just space. And as far as we know, as photonics get incredibly, advanced Mhmm. You can have different colors of light carrying different modulation schemes or weights of hiding information in that light Mhmm. Through that glass, which means, as far as we know, once the glass is in the ground, it's virtually it has virtually unlimited capacity to carry data. So you can imagine your old copper wire that maybe your parents had DSL running over. Sure. Yeah. Think of that as a two inch wide, strand. And in comparison, this would be a 15 mile wide river of data Oh my goodness. Flowing in both directions, which means, you can be present. You can have eye contact with other people. Really no limit to the amount of data that can be, sent in both directions. Wow. Latency would be a thing of the past. That's the idea. Yeah.
So let's you mentioned a little bit, and this is one of the reasons why this book is so important. It talks about how we might inevitably miss some of this, this tech revolution, the utopia, that you so wonderfully posited in that first question.
Why are we behind the eight ball here? Or how are we behind the eight ball? Well, this didn't happen happen because of magic. It happened because of a failure of policy over the last twenty years or so Mhmm. And particularly in the last fifteen years. We deregulated the entire high speed Internet access segment Mhmm. And left it to the companies to decide who to serve with what technology. And as a result, we've got about five major, US ISPs, Comcast, Charter, AT and T, Verizon, and CenturyLink. And this stuff is expensive to build and so they've systematically divided markets. They don't compete head to head most of the time. You're lucky here in Washington. There's more competition here than in many parts of the country. Wow. And, the phone companies have mostly become wireless carriers, not so interested in having wires anymore. Mhmm. So for a lot of metro areas, your only choice is your cable provider, which is probably a local monopoly. Mhmm. And they have no particular incentive to charge you less or to upgrade to fiber. Mhmm. So that's the basic story that because there's been no oversight and no competition, the companies have been left to decide who to serve and on what terms. And that means that for a lot of people, it's unaffordable, unaffordable whatever service is available. For a lot of people, there is no service available. And for even for those who can afford to pay a very high monthly subscription price, it's second class service depend compared to what you might be able to get in Paris or Hong Kong or Tokyo or Seoul. Wow. Yeah. My goodness. I mean, certainly against the the idea that competition helps,
benefit the user most. Right? The consumer the most. How do these things play into you you touch on, different topics like health and education Mhmm. In particular.
How are those those sectors or industries really hurting with without it? And and how would it best benefit from it? Well, again, this amazing idea of eye contact and human presence is really the killer app for these networks. Sure. That you could be in the classroom, not just kind kind of lurking in some distant place Sure. Really feel like a first class citizen there. That you could be with a doctor, remote operations become absolutely possible. A lot of mental health assistance to people in very remote remote areas with this eye contact and empathy and compassion is a real thing. And the ability to just be able to work where you live rather than live where you work is an enormous leave where they grew up and may maybe want their kids to be able to stay there. Sure. Without tremendous communications capacity, all of that becomes extremely difficult. And what ends up happening is that you have some parts of the country living several decades behind what people, for example, in China will be experiencing. Wow. That's
incredible. It's and it's, it's particularly, potent now as we start to think about I think the the technology and privacy conversation happening on the Hill right now is is also part of a conversation about why are, in particular, the the example that there aren't enough, IT jobs being filled, cybersecurity security jobs, etcetera. Why why isn't our education system better serving some of those things. Right? Thinking about how education can be benefited by this kind of technology. You mentioned different, communities, different cities, things places that are doing it well, and places that are are struggling, in particular in this book. How are small communities across the country finding different ways to be more competitive? How are they building, investing in this fiber technology?
There's some amazing stories that I lay out in the book. Take, for example, about two hours outside of Minneapolis, there's a area that's it's pretty remote, pretty rural, but there are are 18 townships there and 17 little towns. They've all banded together to provide fiber to the farm. Wow. And they issued general obligation bonds, backed by the towns. And they're very proud of themselves. And a new medical school is moving to the area. They're very hopeful that their kids will stay there. That's a big part of the story. Oh, interesting. Yeah. It's called RS Fiber and it's one of my favorite stories. Also, a lot of people know about Chattanooga and I spent a ton of time there working on this book. Mhmm. And this is it's really part of decades of self improvement that Chattanooga's been going through. Yeah. They were once the dirtiest city in America. They have beautiful hills outside the city, but they're they had lost a lot of industry and their downtown was just horrible. And so starting twenty years ago, they redid their, riverfront and rebuilt their downtown and then encouraged their electrical utility to go into the fiber business. So today, Chattanooga has the best Internet access in America, 10 gigabit connections, symmetrical, and not very expensive and, available across the city. And they're seeing a lot of new businesses move in and a whole new flavor to that city. So that's it's exciting. Now, the work isn't done in Chattanooga. They've gotta make sure that their high school graduates can take those jobs. And they are now pivoting using what they learned and working together on fiber Mhmm. To taking on inequality and terrible health outcomes and worries about education. This is part of a whole range of things that cities can do to help people lead thriving lives.
That's a perfect, segue to the very last question that I wanted to ask, which is in a a a section of this book gets to, inequality and how fiber can help, places address inequality in large, in in large swaths of different domains, whether it be, social, etcetera, etcetera. How how, give us either, any another example of a a place that's doing that well or or just an overview of how that, places might be able to do that. Well, one way of thinking about inequality that's really moving to me is, thinking about what it takes to have a a decent life.
How do you show respect to every American? We've done that in the past by ensuring that everybody got inexpensive phone service, a basic education, all these elements of just living a thriving life. Mhmm. Today, a crucial element to living in the twenty first century and living this respectable decent life, getting the education that you need and the health care you need, does involve having a fiber connection that's reasonably priced and ubiquitous. And that's possible. It's present in many countries in the world. In fact, China plans to have 80% of its homes connected to fiber optic in the near near future. And they will have a giant market to play with, a giant middle class that has this affordance and can be working on the new jobs of the future and the new industries of the future. Those aren't gonna come from The United States. So rather than thinking about inequality as redressing income distribution and, making sure that, amounts of money are spread more evenly across the country, I prefer to think of it in terms of respect. What's basic? What does everybody need? Mhmm. And for me, a key element is terrific and cheap and symmetric Internet access. That's
incredible. It really is. And this, this little conversation, albeit, a bit rambling on my part, is a wonderful little slice of this book. I encourage you all to read it. Where can we find this book, Sue? You can find this book anywhere and particularly at your local independent bookstore. Yes. We wholeheartedly approve that message. Once again, thank you, Susan, for spending time with us today, and we look forward to your continued research. I'm sure we'll we'll see more.
Thanks. Thank you.
And that is it for this episode of Tech Talk. Find these episodes on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Play, as well as Stitcher and Tuned In. Remember to check out Susan's book wherever you can find it online or more importantly your independent bookstores. I'm Tim Hoagland. Thank you for listening.
