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Christopher Ali, "Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity" (MIT, 2021)
00:52:04
An interview with Christopher Ali
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Dr. Christopher Ali
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Marshall Poe
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Michael Johnston
Welcome to another episode of New Books in Sociology. My name is Michael Johnston. Today I have Dr. Christopher Ali with me and we'll be talking about his new book, Farm Fresh the Politics of Rural Connectivity, that was published in 2021 by MIT Press. Welcome to the show, Chris.
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Dr. Christopher Ali
Thank you very much for having me.
- [02:15]
Michael Johnston
Excellent. So a little bit of a Blurb here about Dr. Christopher Ali. He is an associate professor at University of Virginia in the Department of Media Studies. So again, a great big welcome to Dr. Christopher Ali for joining me today on the show.
- [02:32]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Great. Thank you so much. Again, I'm really excited to Be here to start off.
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Michael Johnston
How did you become involved with this project on Farm Fresh Broadband focusing on rural broadband?
- [02:44]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I think that all of my work, all of my research, all of my scholarship is somehow connected with the idea of local communication. How do we communicate at the local level? And then what are the policies and regulations that govern how we communicate at the local level? So my first book, my first single author book was on local television, and then I did work on local newspapers. So the, the book Farm Fresh Broadband originally started as a book about how farmers communicate. And, and then as. As book projects do, you know, as I got into the weeds event, started looking at the regulations around it, I realized that one thing we, that we. Where we had not seen a lot of scholarship is is this phenomenon, this thing called rural broadband in particular, why don't rural communities have access to the same types of broadband networks that we do in university towns in major metropolitan areas? And so that was really the drive for the book, is to understand why. And particularly, you know, as a political economist, I'm always wondering where the money is going. And so, you know, one of the things that I quickly found out is that for the last 10 years or so, we've been spending, the federal government has been sending, spending $6 billion a year subsidizing rural broadband deployment. So one of the big driving questions is, where is this money going? And shouldn't we have solved the digital divide already? And I think that's really what the book hopefully unpacks for the reader.
- [04:09]
Michael Johnston
Yeah, one of the interesting things that I found, beginning at the beginning of the book, you write a bit about electricity and telephone and how it developed across the United States of America. Is there any way in which the. In any way in which rural broadband could or should or maybe ought to parallel this development of electricity and telephone across the United States?
- [04:35]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Absolutely, it should. Absolutely. The trajectory of broadband deployment should follow the trajectory of rural electricity. And we say this a lot. In fact, in March of 2021, President Biden said the words broadband is the next electricity. So then it allows us to think, okay, what exactly does that mean? And then that's where I think that first chapter of the book becomes really beneficial. So giving us that history lesson of how did we connect rural communities in the 1930s and 1940s with electricity, and then the 1950s with telephony? And the answer was that the Roosevelt administration, in 1935, created the Rural Electrification Administration and gave it a boatload of money and a mandate to Connect the countryside. Right, Connect, particularly at that time, farmers. And they were tremendously successful. And what they ended up doing was kind of bypassing the major power companies, quote, unquote, big power, and instead organized and funded local electric cooperatives. So that kind of local focus was so absolutely crucial. And then they were so successful at doing this that in 1949, rural telephone came under their. Their watch. And then they did the exact same thing. Organized, galvanized, championed local telephone cooperatives. And an interesting. So an interesting thing here is that, you know, jump ahead 80 years or so, and who are the ones doing the majority of the fiber optic connections in rural America? Rural local electric cooperatives and rural telephone cooperatives. So the fact that we endowed these and championed them the 1930s and 40s, we should be doing the exact same thing here. And one of the big takeaways from my book is that local broadband is the best broadband. We need to make sure that local and regional companies and cooperatives and municipalities have the resources they need to connect rural communities with not the technologies of yesterday, not we're not talking dsl, we're not talking satellite, but with technologies that will be future proof.
- [06:33]
Michael Johnston
And much of America is rural, after all. Right.
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Dr. Christopher Ali
I mean, if you look at 92% of America is rural.
- [06:39]
Michael Johnston
Yes. Which is surprising, but at first glance. But it only makes sense. And looking at particularly current practices, with edge cities and rural environment becoming more popular as Internet rises, if people are able to telecommute to work, it only makes sense to further feed rural broadband to these areas.
- [07:04]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Absolutely.
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Michael Johnston
One of the things that you also wrote about is independent with telephony, particularly individuals on farms who would create these party lines early on in the history. Could you talk a bit more about those? They are fascinating.
- [07:18]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Yeah. I mean, they're great. And so much of the history of rural communities in this country is about local innovation, kind of that DIY do it yourself ethos. And so for both electricity and telephony, we saw farmers experimenting with connectivity. Chicken wire, for instance, is an interesting electric conduit. But when it came to telephone, what they would do is, you know, they would pass one line through an entire village, let's say. But if you picked up your phone, you could hear what everyone else was saying, and then it became dubbed the party line. And oftentimes every, you know, you would just get a ring and you'd pick it up to see if it was for you. And, you know, sometimes people listened in to these party lines, but it was a. It was a way in which rural communities, rural villages, not even rural towns, because those were too big and those were usually served by a provider. But they could get some form of connectivity. And again, rooted in local grassroots communities doing it for themselves.
- [08:23]
Michael Johnston
But this same practice cannot be done. Could I have been done with electricity and cannot be done with world broadband, Is that correct?
- [08:30]
Dr. Christopher Ali
It absolutely. It cannot be done. The infrastructure for broadband is just too demanding. Right. And of course, you know, one thing you could do in a rural community, and this is often what happened, is the party line would only connect folks within the rural community. It wouldn't actually go outside of this kind of local intranet unless you had. Sometimes people had two phones, one for the local community and one that would allow them to dial long distance. With broadband, you have to have a connection back to the Internet backbone. Right. Otherwise it's kind of useless. I mean, you could, you could chat, I guess, and you could share information around, but you wouldn't be able to access the quote unquote Internet. And so you need to, you need to connect with a middle mile and a backbone provider, which means you need to enter the private market.
- [09:15]
Michael Johnston
Yeah. You know, I have a student in class who was telling me that she still uses dial up in northwestern Iowa. And I was so surprised to hear that. But, but you know, in some ways, as I read this book, I'm thinking, well, you know, it's possible, it really is possible to still live in a community that has not adopted broadband, has not contracted with others. So, you know, you mentioned four ways a real broadband policy is failing us. Maybe that has something to do with why, you know, certain areas of the United States are still without quality, consistent, you know, that work.
- [09:51]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Absolutely. And I'll just say 2.1 million Americans still use dial up, including 60,000 farms. So, you know, you are absolutely right. And I'm sorry about your student. I too have students who are using dial up here in rural Virginia. So it's around the country. Right. It's not, it's not just the most rural regions of Alaska, so to speak, or the hinterlands. Right. It is where we live and work and shop and go to school. But yeah, so I talk about the four failures of broadband policy and really what this is, what is an examination of, is where has policy failed to connect communities like where your student lives. Right. Why are they still using dial up? And I say that the four failures are a failure of, meaning a failure of mapping, a failure of money and a failure of management. So by meaning, this is a debate that's actually going on in Congress. Right. Now, which is the actual definition of broadband? Right now the Federal Communications Commission defines broadband as 25Mbps download, 3Mbps upload, which is fine if you're living by yourself and you actually get those speeds. It is woefully inadequate if you live in an apartment with a partner, with kids in a dorm room, in a sorority, in a fraternity. Like anytime you've got more than two people, it is not going to work. And the other thing is that we define it. When you subscribe to a broadband provider, they don't have to tell you their actual speeds, they just tell you their advertised speed. So they're giving you the hypothetical maximum that the network can do, right? So yeah, you might be able to get 25, three. If it's two o' clock in the morning and no one's on the network, does that really count as meaningful broadband? In my mind, the answer is no. So that kind of meaning is the first failure. We need to think bigger. Other countries have looked to, for instance, Canada does 50 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up. I've argued for a minimum threshold of 100 Mbps download, 100 Mbps upload, particularly to take into account the fact that, you know, zooming tele, education, telehealth, these are upload demanding speeds like binging Netflix or playing video games as download. Right? Download is about consumption. But if we think about production, that's upload. We need to make sure we have adequate upload speeds in order to zoom into a class. Right. If we're doing, if we're doing telescool. So again, this kind of failure of meaning, failure of mapping is the fact that we actually don't know. And by we, I mean the Federal Communications Commission doesn't know how many people actually don't have access to the Internet. Which is crazy. Right? And so the FCC says that somewhere around a little over 90% of the country has access to a broadband network at 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up. Most studies say that, most independent studies say that that number is off by at least 50%. Right? Which means that it's probably around 50% of the country that has access to a broadband network. Microsoft released a study that said that 120 million Americans, so a third of the country who have access lack it at broadband speeds. So we have a huge number of un and under connected that are completely getting miscounted. And the reason why we have this failure of mapping is because when the FCC asks Internet service providers to tell them, okay, here are the communities that we serve, here are the households, they actually don't have to report this by the household or by the parcel. They have to report it by the census block. And in a city like Manhattan or D.C. a census block is just a couple of streets because it's so dense. But let's say in Iowa or in rural Virginia, a census block could be hundreds of square miles. And so long as one building within a census block is served with broadband or can be served with broadband, within 10 business days, that entire census block is considered 100% served. And you know, if we think about rural communities, you know, there's generally going to be one building, it's usually a McDonald's, to be honest, or a library that has broadband, which means that the entire community is considered served, which means they are ineligible for future federal support. And why this is so important is because broadband in rural communities is a market failure. The market, the private market does not see the return on investment it needs to be able to deploy in, for instance, northwestern Iowa or rural Virginia. And that's why we have policies and subsidies to do this. So the failure of mapping means that we end up just kind of double funding places that already have broadband or miscounting people that say, the map says you have broadband, but they say, actually no, I don't have it at all. So that's a failure of mapping. There's also a failure of money. We have for the last 10 years dramatically favored the largest telecommunications company, just dramatically. And we've given them, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars for the promise, for the hope and a prayer that they would connect rural communities. And they, if they have, they've connected them with subpar technologies, like for instance, DSL digital subscriber line, which is a kind of souped up telephone connection or fixed wireless. And fixed wireless can be really beneficial if it's served with fiber optics on the back end. So fixed wireless means that you get your Internet to your home wirelessly from a tower. Right. But what often will happen is that how the tower gets connected to the backbone is still using a telephone line, not a fiber optic line, which means you might have fast speed from your house to the tower, but then everything slows to a halt when you try and access the bigger Internet. Right. So that's what we saw. Again, for those listening who are fixed wireless champions, yes, fixed wireless can be great for rich rural America when it's connected to fiber. So, so again, this failure of money is that we, like, we just gave out a billion dollars a year to what I call Big Telco, and they've really failed us. And in fact, some companies even said, you know, we can't, we can't live up to our promises. We in 2018, 2019, CenturyLink said, hey, you know what, FCC? We can't live up to what we committed to. Not only were they not punished, they were given more money and then allowed to compete for another grant. Like, there's. So there's a lack of accountability too, when it comes to this money. And one of my concerns here is, of course, with the infrastructure package, $65 billion is going to go to broadband, $42 billion of which is going to go specifically to deployment. So I'm always worried, you know, what happens if history repeats itself and we just funnel this money back to Big Telco and they don't do anything with it. That's very concerning to me. So that's a failure of money and then there's a failure of management. And what this means is that at the policy level, and I'm a policy scholar, so these politics kind of really interest me is we've got kind of three cooks in the kitchen. We've got the Federal Communications Commission, we've got the usda, and we've got an agency called the ntia, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is the technological advisor to the White House. So the executive branch, and they all compete for who has broadband supremacy in terms of regulation, but they also don't talk to each other. And so oftentimes we see rules. So, for instance, the Federal Communications Commission for its latest grant said, if you get USDA money, you are ineligible for this grant. Now, a major problem there is USDA money is based on a loan, not a grant. And so a lot of particularly smaller companies were using FCC money as the collateral for their USDA loan. They need both. They just got shut out of accessing more loans, which means it's going to be much harder for them to deploy. Interestingly, again, in the infrastructure package, Congress bypassed both FCC and USDA and gave all the money to the ntia. The NTIA has never played such an important role as it's going to play in the next five years. So that's going to be something really interesting to watch. But again, my concern here with these four failures is I hope, I hope, I hope history does not repeat itself in terms of meaning, money mapping and management.
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Michael Johnston
And then as there was also something in there I think in the in the money. Part of the failure among the other three is with the additional costs throughout history for rural areas to get electricity, telephony and Internet because these large corporate companies corporations tend to favor more dense areas like inner city metropolitan areas rather than the rural communities because they have fewer people to provide to, which results in some ways costing those residents of smaller communities more Money.
- [20:30]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Absolutely. So a rural resident will most likely pay upwards of 30% more for broadband and usually for subpar broadband than we get than urban Americans. 30% more for lesser quality speeds and connectivity. That's egregious. But you're absolutely right. It's because, you know, when it's, when it's less exclusively to the private market. And it's basically a monopoly. Right? It may not be a monopoly in terms of we have a number of broadband country companies across the country, but when you drill down to the community level, you usually only have one, maybe two providers. But most Americans actually don't have a choice in providers. So that provider can do and charge whenever it wants. And this is oftentimes why Internet service providers are ranked as the worst customer service companies. Because they have no competition. There's no incentive for them to do better. And so one of the big policy questions then is how do we actually incentivize competition that will drive down prices and drive up service and potentially increase.
- [21:32]
Michael Johnston
Trust among residents of those communities?
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Dr. Christopher Ali
Absolutely. And actually that trust angle is so important. And that's again why I say the local broadband is the best broadband, because it matters when you can see the owner of your provider at the grocery store or at the football game or at church and you can say, hey, Michael, my Internet's been out for two days. Do something about this. That's very different than having to call up Comcast or AT&T and talk to a bot or talk to someone who's removed from where you are and doesn't see the urgency there. So that stuff is so important.
- [22:05]
Michael Johnston
I live in Pella IO and we just recently got local broadband. So it's so nice to call and not be put on hold and have to go through pressing buttons to get, finally get to a person and you know, they answer right away. I'm like, oh, it's like they're my neighbor or something. I'm able to get to them right away.
- [22:20]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Exactly that. I mean, and there's, there's a, there's a trust in there, there's an accountability in there that often gets overlooked in the importance of broadband.
- [22:29]
Michael Johnston
So do you think there are too many corporate hands in the development of broadband? What's your thought on that?
- [22:34]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Yes, definitely. And if, because if we look at, so the, the, the governing act of telecommunications in this country is something called the 1996 Telecommunications Act. And the first thing we need to remember is how crazy is it that an act that was written the year after the World Wide Web was created still governs telecommunications in this country. Right. I mean it is, it is woefully too old, but there is not a lot of appetite to reopen it. And it was largely written to favor AT&T. AT&T was broken up in 1984. The 96 act allowed ATT to recombine. And what Congress had hoped is that you had this entity of DSL Internet and then you had the rise of cable Internet. And they were hoping that if they got rid of all this regulation that we'd actually see legitimate competition. Instead, what we saw was a carving up of the country. You know, you take Philadelphia, I'll take Los Angeles. You take New York, I'll take dc. Right. And so there was no competition. There just was these massive monopolies. Again, AT&T recombined into two, three companies. CenturyLink, AT&T and Verizon. So the Telecom act gave birth to the massive companies. And we've seen this time and time again where big telecommunications companies have had their hand in crafting policy. I mean, again, just look at the mapping problem. Big, Big Telco actually isn't breaking the law by over reporting. They're doing exactly what the law says they should do, which is buy the census block. Who does that favor? It favors Big Telco because suddenly they can advertise. You know, we've all seen the AT&T maps or the T mobile maps. You know, the whole country is blue because everyone has service and the whole country is, is pink because they have service. Now we all know that doesn't work. I mean, I leave my house 15 minutes outside of my house, I don't get service anymore. But According to the FCC's map, I'm completely served. So it serves. All of these regulations serve the interests of big telecommunications companies and undermine the interest of consumers.
- [24:42]
Michael Johnston
Yeah, and you mentioned that there are three that AT&T broke up into three, which basically means that they are one huge conglomerate that are supporting one another. Because if, if you know a person is a CEO of one company, they might also serve on the board of the other.
- [24:58]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Yep, yep, exactly. Exactly. I mean, they're all, you know, they're all looking out for each other. Right. Because they don't actually compete. So there's no reason to be aggressive with pricing because there's no incentive to do that.
- [25:10]
Michael Johnston
Oh, so just cut it up and map and do what you're there doing with mapping. Share the. Share the pie per se.
- [25:17]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Share the pie. I like that. Yeah, that's great.
- [25:19]
Michael Johnston
Okay, well now let's get into the specifics of broadband and what it means to be local as a broadband provider. You mentioned broadband localism. What is this? This is a concept maybe that you coined, if I remember.
- [25:34]
Dr. Christopher Ali
You know what? I wish I coined it, but I didn't and I should have. But no, it was coined by a fabulous legal scholar named Oliver Sylvain in 2012, though I did expand his definition. So when he talked about broadband localism in 2012, he said, he really said it's public or municipal broadband, as in a municipality offering a broadband service that is owned by them, owned and operated by the municipality. And that's a major contentious issue. It's one that I agree with, that municipalities should be allowed to be their own provider when in the absence of a legitimate private provider. Right now, though, 18 states prohibit or inhibit that practice. And Sylvain was saying, no, we need to allow municipalities to become competitors in broadband, to fund the deployment of a network, and then to operate a broadband network as a utility. What I did is expand that beyond the municipality and say, well, broadband localism shouldn't just be about municipal broadband. It should be about cooperative broadband and it should be about local broadband, even local investor owned broadband. So I kind of expanded the term to capture all of the different dynamics within, within a local broadband ecosystem. And I did that because, you know, I did a ton of interviews and one of the, one of the great companies and great organizations that I was speaking with was the ntca, which is the representative for, for local telephone companies, most often local cooperatives, but also some investor owned. And they, they reminded me, they're like, you know, Chris, yes, Coopers are doing amazing work, but so are just local private companies. Like, don't forget about. And you know, as a political economist, like, I need to be reminded sometimes that sometimes the private market can do some good things. And so I do see the value in supporting local, private telephone companies as much as local cooperatives. And that's where I wanted to push that concept of broadband localism outside of the municipality, outside of municipal owned networks, and into all different types of locally owned networks.
- [27:37]
Michael Johnston
Do you think that there is a future promise and using this method of broadband localism?
- [27:43]
Dr. Christopher Ali
I absolutely do, yes. And you know, in the chapter where I use this term and I expand it from Oliver Sylvain's, you know, I offer a model, some of the. What can we learn from a case study I did in Rock County, Minnesota, which to me really was the pinnacle of broadband localism. Right. You had a county that really wanted fiber optics to the home. They Partnered with a local telephone cooperative. They got money from the state and they bonded themselves. I mean, everything was done locally and now they are the most connected county in the state of Minnesota, or at least were when I wrote my book. 99.93% fiber to the home pass by. That's incredible. And so that's the type of thing that I like, I think could be repeated. And it doesn't have to be necessarily like replicating that exact model. But what did we see that's important? Local digital champions. We saw the importance of public private partnerships and we saw the importance of the state in facilitating those arrangements. We can learn, everyone can learn from that model. It may not be partnering with a cooperative. It could be partnering with an electric cooperative, could be partnering with an IS or, you know, a privately owned isp. Partnerships, public private partnerships are going to be essential. But all of this happens at the local level. And I definitely think it's a model that we can reproduce across the country.
- [29:04]
Michael Johnston
Well, it's the three parts of government working well together, right?
- [29:07]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Yeah, yeah.
- [29:08]
Michael Johnston
It's a federal government providing the, you know, in a capitalist system, it's the federal government that is incentivizing corporations, local businesses, and it's, it's a state's responsibility to distribute it across those funds, equally across the state. And the local government's responsibility to oversee the implementation of, of that money to fit the needs of their community.
- [29:32]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Absolutely. Couldn't have said it better myself.
- [29:35]
Michael Johnston
And, and do you think that this broadband benefits Rock County, Minnesota in more ways than just connecting the people there? Does it make the, the community more attractive to businesses, to people to help grow their community in ways that they hope to see it grow?
- [29:53]
Dr. Christopher Ali
I mean, absolutely, it does. And, and you actually said it earlier in our conversation that the importance of telework and remote commuting now. Right. That we've learned through this pandemic that we can kind of work anywhere so long as we have an affordable, high quality broadband network. Right. I had friends of mine who during most of the pandemic spent in the U.S. virgin Islands because they could work remotely the entire time. This is going to be a boon for rural communities as we see a lot of urban flight. Right. We saw a lot of people move outside of the major cities looking for more space, more scenery, more nature. This is going to be so important for rural communities to attract remote workers. It's also going to be vital to attract business. I read a study once that said that 100% of a business's decision to relocate to a rural community is based on a fiber optic connection. You can't do work without high speed, affordable broadband. You simply cannot do it. And you know what? My, my husband is a realtor and he sees people all the time wanting to leave Washington D.C. to come to a rural community, but then forget to ask, is there a broadband? Because they just took it for granted that it was there. Right. They had it in D.C. why not, why not in Louisa County, Virginia? And, and so he's, he's been also quite sensitive to making sure that people are informed about, about sometimes the lack of it. So. So, absolutely. So broadband in a rural community can help attract new people. It can help att. We know that it will just generally raise the GDP of the community, will also lower unemployment. We also know that it will raise grades. A student with broadband is more likely to have half a letter grade higher than a student without broadband. All things being equal. I mean, but, but on the flip side, I also want to remind your listeners that this is not a, I'm not trying to say like this is a technologically determinist argument where like, all you've got to do is put broadband in the ground, put fiber in the ground, and suddenly all these benefits will happen. You have to make sure it's affordable and you also have to make sure that people have the skills and accessibility to be able to use the network. I was reading this really interesting article on cnet and it was a town, goodness, I can't remember, but somewhere bordering Lake Ontario. And they were talking about the elderly community who might have had an Internet connection, but who wanted to online grocery shop, something I take for granted. And they didn't have the skills to.
- [32:26]
Michael Johnston
Be able to do it.
- [32:26]
Dr. Christopher Ali
So they had the connection, but the connection was useless because they didn't know how to take advantage of it. And we have, we've got to make sure that when we think about solving the digital divide, that only the first step is getting wires in the ground. The next step is making sure they're affordable and also making sure that people have the skills to be able to take advantage of the network. Otherwise it's useless. It really is. Yeah.
- [32:48]
Michael Johnston
So an onboarding process similar to, you know, business onboarding, getting the onboarding.
- [32:52]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Yeah.
- [32:54]
Michael Johnston
And you know, I think of all of this and even in my research, looking at towns along the Mississippi river or in your area with Rust, with the Rust Belt community, or the Appalachian communities that once had thriving communities during the Industrial Revolution, but now we're looking into a post industry. What's their new reputation going to be. And I think there's opportunity and connecting them and providing a lifestyle where they can still connect to Internet but also enjoy the. The countryside.
- [33:25]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think, you know, particularly as we are slowly clawing our way out of the pandemic, you know, and, and we're seeing people not need to return to their office buildings, but can do these remote conversations. Broadband is going to be that much more important. It was so crucial during the pandemic. It's going to be, I think, even more crucial after. Well, hopefully we will get out of this pandemic and it will continue to be crucial.
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- [35:22]
Michael Johnston
So now we get to go to the dark side. You were talking a bit about, you know, how it's not all deterministic and how there are some crucial aspects that to be part of it, but then there's also, you know, management and making sure that all people are held accountable and that's the question with who owns all of this data and who controls the technology that is associated with broadband Internet.
- [35:46]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Yeah. And that you're absolutely right, calling it the dark side. And this is about a chapter I wrote about how farmers use the Internet. And one of the major concerns for farmers is. Parallels the same concern a lot of us have for our data when we use social media. Right. Which is, who owned the data that I generate when I'm on Facebook? Right. Who owns the images of the upload that I upload? Who owns my searches? Right. Farmers have very much the same concern, because what often happens if you're a farmer or grower, let's say you are on a corn farm or cornfield, excuse me. And there's now something called precision agriculture, where if you've got a good broadband connection and the latest technology in real time, you can start to understand your soil. You can also understand your yield. Right. And you can be much more precise, hence the term precision agriculture. But then you. So you've collected all of this data, right? Let's say it's on. It's on your harvester. What do you do with this data? You generally then contract with another party. If you're using a John Deere. If you're using John Deere equipment, you have to go to John Deere and then you send that data off to John Deere and they will provide you with a plan. The concern who owns, once you send it to John Deere, who owns your raw data? Right. More often than not, it's ambiguous and this becomes really concerning because, you know, one farmer can do it, let's say, in, in Iowa or in, in, in Missouri or in Kansas. But what happens when hundreds or thousands of farmers are doing that? That is a tremendous amount of data. What are the implications there? Can you, can a company who has all this data start, for instance, manipulating the market, manipulating futures, because they know actually yields and they know what areas are going to produce more? The other concern. So that's one concern around data I read about another concern, which is around who actually owns the technology, who owns the tractor. And now what we're seeing is farmers may own the outside of the tractor. And I'm using kind of tractor in general terms here, but they don't own the software. And if they violate terms of use, if they try and jailbreak it, they risk that tractor being immobilized by, let's again say, John Deere. So these are definite concerns of farmers and growers throughout the country. And I spoke with both The American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Farmers Union and the Grange about these concerns. So we're seeing a number of states try and pass, right. To repair laws. We're seeing a lot of concern around educating farmers around their data. And just like, you know, we're trying to educate young people about how to use social media responsibly because it all kind of tethers to the same concern, which is around ownership and control and the consequences of losing that ownership and control. We surrender when we don't know what we're signing, when we sign a contract, for instance. So these are, these are definite concerns. And John Deere becomes a really interesting player in this space because they're also one of the major proponents of rural broadband. I mean, obviously, right. They're, they're, you know, the largest agricultural technology company in the world. But, but in my research, what I found is that there's a double edged sword here. So they're able to manipulate this data, they're able to lock farmers into the kind of these black boxes where you can't get out of the John Deere ecosystem. And they're advocating for more broadband, which only serves their interests. Right. And so this is kind of the, we need to be. This is, I think, where the subtitle of my book comes in, the Politics of Rural Connectivity. It's not just about Big Telco, it's about Big Ag as well and the, the intersection. John Deere has an exclusive arrangement with AT&T, for instance, you know, or maybe not exclusive one, but certainly they have a deal with AT&T where, you know, you get favorable rates if you use the AT&T network. You know, that opens up a lot of concerns at these intersections. And I think what I ultimately write in this chapter and spoiler alert for your readers, is that yes, we need to be excited about precision agriculture and excited about rural broadband, but we can't let the hype overtake some of these very material concerns.
- [39:56]
Michael Johnston
Yeah, and holding people accountable, that first part that I'm. Yeah, and then being responsible with it, being protective. You know, we could even get into the whole conversation about WI fi and wireless Internet that is associated with broadband. And what if a person isn't using their own, their own account when they're connected to Internet, then it's even more complicated. Who does that data belong to? And then with ownership, with more farmers leasing their tractors, leasing their harvesters, there's no ownership there. There's a contract there during a certain period of time and what's left on there when the tractor goes back. Who does that belong to?
- [40:38]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Exactly. Yeah. And so one of my favorite parts in the book is the American Farm Bureau Federation put out this pamphlet a couple of years ago called ponder these nine before you sign. And it's the nine questions you should be asking yourself before you sign a data contract. And I just love it. And I actually got permission to reproduce it in my book, this whole pamphlet. And it was just like this great way, I think, for these associations, these trusted entities, right, like the American Farm Bureau Federation, National Farmers Union, the Grange, to work with their members on, on education. Just like we said, you know, IFP's need to be working with people to educate them about how to use broadband, how to use the Internet. You know, in the same way we're seeing these associations and federations work with their members to talk about this new digital frontier because it will be the future, it is the future of agriculture. Absolutely, it is.
- [41:29]
Michael Johnston
You know, I just saw, you know, what role does the insurance industry play in this? The farms are being insured. Yeah. Because, you know, they're, they're insuring the company, the agricultural partner, the farmer, to, for any damages that could, they could incur on their land and the process of farming that might include or might not include data breaches. But.
- [41:51]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Yeah, no, absolutely. That's a great, that's a great question, actually. Is insurance. Yeah, for sure.
- [41:57]
Michael Johnston
Similar to, you know, with doctors and getting malpractice insurance.
- [42:02]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Yeah, yeah.
- [42:05]
Michael Johnston
So the, the final question for today about this book is 5G. This is, you know, the hot topic, the thing that's on the street today, 5G, the fastest of Internets available. But, you know, it's not the full truth. What is the problem with 5G?
- [42:26]
Dr. Christopher Ali
In one word, hype. That is the problem with 5G. So 5G is not one thing, it's a couple of different things. What it is in General speak, what 5G is the next level of connectivity for your mobile phone. Right. And the idea being that the frequencies, 5G frequencies are so powerful, they can carry so much data that in theory they could replace your home Internet connection with a wireless connection. Right. That's the hype. The reality though, is that it will only work in highly dense areas. And that's because the signal might be able to carry a lot of data, but the signal itself is very weak. It can't go through a wall, for instance, it can't turn a corner, it can't pass through a human body, which means you need all of these repeaters, they're called small cells, about 800ft apart. And these repeaters are incredibly expensive. So it might work in Manhattan or Houston or Dallas, but it's not going to work in rural Iowa or rural Virginia, where you would need tens of thousands of them to have in a vastly spread out rural community, for instance. And so the hype is definitely very real. There is a different type of 5G called low band 5G, and this is the type of 5G that T mobile is deploying throughout the country. And they're able to say that's where the largest 5G network or whatever. But in reality, there also, that technology, the user experience will be no different than 4G. So, yes, they can call it 5G because it's technically 5G, but what we get, you know, on our phone, the actual download experience, will be no different than a 4G LTE signal. And so right now, 5G has really failed to live up to the hype of industry. And we're actually seeing some slowdown in 5G in certain areas because, yeah, it just hasn't been able to live up to what was originally promised to the country where, I don't know, I remember these, I can't remember what company it was that was like, oh, we could do like holograms now, because your broadband is going to be. Your mobile phone's going to be so fast. Right, that's not going to happen. And. But what really worries me about this hype, though, is when I talk to communities and they say, we think 5G is just around the corner, so we're going to pause our broadband plans because 5G is coming. And I have to be the one to say, like, it's not going to come, it's not going to come to rural communities. Like, don't pause your broadband plans. There are solutions on the ground right now that you can take advantage of. Don't buy into this hype because it, you know, I call it like a waiting for Godot moment. It's just never going to happen.
- [45:05]
Michael Johnston
I think you mentioned something about technology that would have to be attached to telephone poles just to make a strong enough signal to bounce from place to place to place.
- [45:13]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Yeah. So there's a great line and I didn't include it in the book, but it's wireless, is just one wireless. And I love it because, so all of these small cells that I mentioned, they still have to be tethered to a fiber optic cable in order to deliver the data back to the Internet. And so, yes, the, you know, you were walking around with your phone, which is wireless and you get one kind of bump to a small cell, but then everything going back is wired. And that's something that we don't often think about. And it's going to be absolutely crucial to remember because we're going to need still 5G depends on a nationwide fiber optic network. And we don't have a nationwide fiber optic network.
- [45:54]
Michael Johnston
And then to, and then the more connections, each connection slows down the speed of Internet.
- [46:01]
Dr. Christopher Ali
I mean, this is the benefit of 5G is that it can handle, if you're using the best 5G, it can handle an almost unlimited amount of users. It can. So the technological potential is there. The deployment, though, is so incredibly expensive that it's just not going to be a reality for most of the country.
- [46:24]
Michael Johnston
So I'm guessing you started this project prior to Covid.
- [46:28]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Is that. Yes. Accurate? Yeah.
- [46:30]
Michael Johnston
But Covid just added one more layer to this book. Right. And what potential do you think a post Covid world has with broadband? And what do you think that we.
- [46:42]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Can learn from COVID Yeah, I mean, I think the, if Covid taught us anything about technological access is that it ended the debate around whether or not broadband is a luxury or a necessity. Right. No one is saying it's a luxury now. We are still debating what is broadband, those speeds and the technology, but no one anymore is saying broadband is a luxury, and that's that. So that's important. Right. But we still have a lot of debates around, again, speed and technology. So, so I, you know, I, I think one thing we, you know, in, in the talking about broadband being a necessity, a need, even a utility, some have even started talking about talking about it as a right. And that's actually going to be my next project is whether or not broadband or Internet access should be considered a human right. Which is, which is a conversation that kind of re emerged with the COVID 19 pandemic. Do we have a human right to be able to access the Internet? Very pragmatically, though. I mean, the other thing the COVID 19 pandemic did is spur on the Infrastructure act, which will be the largest investment in telecommunications in the country's history. $65 billion, 42 billion of which will go to deployment, 14 billion will go to affordability, and the rest will go to digital equity and inclusion. Huge amounts of money. We need to make sure that, like I said earlier, history does not repeat itself in terms of where the money has traditionally gone. Right. We need to make sure that it's going to local communities and there's some good provisions in There kind of piggybacking on what you said earlier, Michael, is that the NTA will distribute money, but they will distribute it to states and then the states will decide who actually gets the grants. So we're seeing more involvement of the states. One of the concerns though is that not every state is going to be prepared to tap into this money and it will be a wasted opportunity if they can't. But I think we've only really scratched the surface of what high speed, affordable broadband can do. You know, I'm taking to the book, Susan Crawford's book, Fiber, and she contemplates this like it's one of those things that we don't know what we don't know because we've never had high speed, legitimate high speed access. So I think we're going to see a lot of technological innovation. I think we're going to see a lot of innovation in telehealth, particularly for rural communities. I think, you know, we've seen a massive surge in E commerce with the pandemic. We've seen a massive surge in video conferencing. I mean, zoom, the usage of zoom went up, I think 530% in 2020. So, you know, that alone is indicative of, I think, where we're going. And, you know, we're not all settled on the fact that we're all going back to offices anymore. So I think that the need, the impetus, the catalyst, all of these things will continue to grow for broadband. Now the challenge for us, the challenge for policymakers is, is how do we make sure that it's efficient, democratically distributed and also affordable. Americans pay the most for broadband in any country. In the OECD, it's $84 a month right now. That is egregious. There's no reason it has to be that high. As I said, rural Americans pay 30% more than that. We need to lower these prices. We need to make sure more people cannot access the Internet because they can't afford it, not because they can't have access to it. That should be one of our number one priorities as we're deploying fiber optics, as we're deploying fixed wireless, we need to make sure these subscriptions are affordable. And that's the other thing the pandemic taught us.
- [50:16]
Michael Johnston
Excellent. So this next project, this is the dying question that always asks. You already answered it. But I would like to learn more about this new project about Internet broadband as a human.
- [50:28]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Right.
- [50:31]
Michael Johnston
What do you mean by this? Do you mean like health? It's mandatory if A person wants it, should get it without having to worry about cost of care.
- [50:42]
Dr. Christopher Ali
That's the question. And I should caveat this by saying, I'm not saying it is a human right. My question is, is human rights the right way to think about Internet access? Right. And so the project is going to be called the Great Digital Migration. How Covid forced us all online and exposed the gaps in our digital world. And I'm going to be doing fieldwork in the five countries in the OECD where broadband is a human the right. So Finland, Estonia, Finland, Estonia, France, Costa Rica and Mexico. I want to figure out in these countries where it is a human right, what does access look like, who doesn't have access, what does it mean legally, regulatorily, policy wise, when something is called a human right in a country, when something like Internet access is considered a human right, do you get a guaranteed amount of speed, for instance, or is it more about you've got the right to the Internet, but that means that there's a lot of public accessible WI fi, but not maybe necessarily in your home. What does it look like, taste like, smell like, feel like? And that's something I'm really, I'm really excited about. I'm really excited to be able to do more international fieldwork. I think this project is going to take me a couple of years, to be honest, and that's all right. But, you know, I actually promised myself when I, when the book came out that I would take a full year off. And I just, this was the lingering question, I think, from the book. Is this question around, how do we make sure that everybody has access to the Internet? Because that's even what universal service means. We have a policy of universal service in this country. We have never called Internet access a right. We don't even call electricity a right. So what is so special about broadband that it makes some people say it's a human right? Including, by the way, the United nations has said Internet access is a human right. The European Union has said it's a human right. Right. We haven't, most countries haven't. So what are the implications here? And that's, I'm really excited to, to investigate these questions.
- [52:39]
Michael Johnston
Yeah. And even looking at surveillance, because now if it's a human right, everybody has it and the state is providing it. So does that mean the data then becomes the, the ownership of the state?
- [52:48]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Right, yeah. And then they can do whatever they want. That's a great, that's a great question. And you know, so I'm, I'm definitely not taking it for granted that it is a right. My question is, should it be? And is this the best way to make sure everyone has access and then how each country?
- [53:04]
Michael Johnston
Because you're looking at. I'm sure that there's going to be some similarities across these countries, but I'm guessing that there's probably going to be some major differences in how it's deployed.
- [53:12]
Dr. Christopher Ali
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's what I'm excited to find out.
- [53:16]
Michael Johnston
Excellent. Well, thank you again, Dr. Ali, for joining me on the show. This is New Books in Sociology, a channel on the New Books Network. Look forward to talking with all of you soon.