Digital Equity and the Way We Build Networks – Episode 5 of Unbuffered

Christopher Mitchell (00:15)
Welcome back to what I think is the fifth episode of Unbuffered, our new podcast that combines our old podcasts here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, dealing with Internet access and technology more broadly. Kind of think of the show as dealing with technology and how we organize society and how those things overlay each other. I’m Chris Mitchell with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. ⁓

Got up early this morning. We had our board meeting yesterday. ILSR continues to operate as a more than 50 year old nonprofit organization. Had a very inspiring meeting with the board and some of the folks that have been running the organization. And it’s great. So I’m in a good mood, but also I’ve been already been up for half the day as we’re recording here in the morning. ⁓ On the show, I’m really excited to have Jade back, Jade Piros De Carvalho Did I get it right? Without even checking with you? Close enough. Jade Piros.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (01:05)
Close enough, Chris. Pyros, pyros decarbola. Just think pyromaniac.

It’s Greek.

Christopher Mitchell (01:10)
I just always

want to make you Greek. and you’re with IdeaTek as well as, ⁓ some other folks, you’re long time Kansas commentator at this point. I’m excited to get you on another live panel show and we’ve got some news about those coming up soon and, we’re going to get you on one this spring. I’m sure. ⁓ but for now.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (01:19)
Yeah, thanks for having me on.

I gotta be careful

live because you know I can be spicy and I need to…

Christopher Mitchell (01:33)
That’s why we want you. so, but

for now, we’re bottling you for folks. And then we also have who my car thinks the name of is Sean Gonsalves. Welcome Sean Gonsalves. And also when I told my car to call you this morning when I was driving home from the airport, it said Sean has two numbers and then it listed two identical numbers. And I’m just saying AI is not doing so hot for me.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (01:38)
Yeah, appreciate that.

Sean Gonsalves (01:59)
You

Christopher Mitchell (01:59)
So welcome,

Sean, you do all our communications work as associate director, associate director, is that right? Yeah.

Sean Gonsalves (02:07)
Associate Director of Comms and you know, I’m calling Houston from ⁓ Artemis negative two.

Christopher Mitchell (02:15)
That’s right. For people who aren’t aware of the background, ⁓ Sean, ⁓ his feet are firmly rooted in on the ground, but his head is rooted in space. And so it’s been a, it’s been a good month for Sean here. today we’re going to be talking about, ⁓ an article that talks about Internet access and compares the United States, Switzerland, and Germany, and tries to draw some lessons from it. It’s an article called the free market lie.

Sean Gonsalves (02:24)
That’s right.

Moonjoy!

Christopher Mitchell (02:44)
and ⁓ it was written and posted on GitHub. I actually don’t have the author right here. Thank you, Stefan Schuller. And it had some good comments. We’ll pick some things out to laud praise and some criticism. But we’re gonna talk about that. We’re gonna talk about digital equity a bit. Sean wrote a great profile of woman in San Antonio that’s really inspiring regarding.

Sean Gonsalves (02:49)
His name is Stefan Schuller.

Christopher Mitchell (03:10)
⁓ how digital equity training has changed our life and why these are important investments. So that’s going to be what we talk about in the middle part of the show. And then toward the end, we’re debuting a new section. Sean, let me ask you, what are we going to call this recurring segment on the show?

Sean Gonsalves (03:29)
What the Tech?

Christopher Mitchell (03:30)
What the Tech?

Jade Piros De Carvalho (03:32)
that’s clever. That’s clever, boys. I like that.

Christopher Mitchell (03:35)
It’s Sean’s invention. I’ll let him, let him get that giggle up. When I, when I mentioned that to other folks in the, in the room yesterday at our board meeting, it was a lot of enjoyment of it. And, I did, I will say that one of the people in the room, ⁓ said that they are sad to see Connect This! go because it was such a good name for a show Connect This. So yeah, we’ll bring it back in some way. I’m sure that I will, I will not, ⁓ leave.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (03:38)
I figured, I didn’t want to say it, but.

Sean Gonsalves (03:41)
Ha

It really was though.

Christopher Mitchell (04:04)
the Earth without having found a new way to use that phrase, I’m sure. okay, let’s dive in. So this article, ⁓ is interesting. Jade, did you get a chance to review it? ⁓ okay. I’m just curious as someone who’s working directly for ISPs has worked, you’ve, you’ve worked with the federal government on the BEAD program. I’m sure you’ve thought a ton about regulation at the federal, the state level, ⁓ from different angles. How did you react to this article?

Jade Piros De Carvalho (04:16)
Yes, I did. I did.

Well, OK, so I thought it was an interesting illustration of how you could do it way wrong on the Germany side, know, by gold plating everything, ⁓ how you can do it way wrong by privatizing everything, and, you know, this kind of utopian model. But I think my biggest question to you, Chris, is how do you go back from where we’re at now? I’m not saying, like, OK, we shouldn’t have done it that way from

Christopher Mitchell (05:01)
Yes, that’s such a good question.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (05:03)
the start, but now that we’re working in this privatized model, I just don’t see how you ever make your way back to the way it quote unquote should have been done. We could say that about any number of policies or like our healthcare system or lots of other big thorny problems in America, but I don’t see how we move from what we have now to.

Christopher Mitchell (05:29)
Yeah,

is a way to phrase it as in keeping with Sean’s Artemis focus is we’re building a moon colony. Yeah, let’s learn the lessons from the Swiss in terms of having multiple fibers to the home and having an aggregation points at which different ISPs can get in there in that sort of a thing. Yeah, absolutely. They’re, like, but we’re not colonizing the moon. We’re trying to figure out how to solve challenges in our cities that have existing infrastructure. ⁓

Sean Gonsalves (05:57)
Right. Well, we should,

but for folks who haven’t read the article, we should probably talk about what’s actually in it.

Christopher Mitchell (06:00)
Yeah, I was gonna, yeah.

So how would you summarize it, Sean?

Sean Gonsalves (06:07)
Well, first of all, when I read it, made me want to yodel, ⁓ you know, in Swiss. ⁓ I would summarize it as basically that, ⁓ you know, as you alluded to, comparing the United States, Germany and Switzerland. So in Switzerland, apparently 25 gig symmetrical services like available like everywhere.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (06:10)
you

Christopher Mitchell (06:27)
No, I think that that’s a little overstated in the article, but that is what the article suggests. Right.

Sean Gonsalves (06:29)
Well, in most cities, I think

is really what it’s talking about. ⁓ But how there’s real competition, you’ve got like a dozen or more providers in most cities. ⁓ they talks about that and then compares how in the United States where we worship the free market and say, just let come to private market do whatever it ⁓ Do whatever it wants. We actually have worse service.

higher prices and all of these territorial monopolies. And I like that phrase, territorial monopolies too. I thought that was pretty good. And then in Germany, which is sort of often criticized for, know, as Jay talked about that gold plated where like, it’s like overly regulated. So he asked the question basically saying, how is it that in ⁓ a nation like the United States, where it’s like,

know, laissez faire, free market capitalism, let private sector do whatever it wants. Germany overregulated. We have very similar sort of ⁓ Internet service and lack of choice, et cetera, wherein with Switzerland, ⁓ there’s a difference. And so he explores that and he talks about natural monopolies, which I think is important to understand this whole thing. then, you know, lands on how Switzerland has, I guess you would call it like a particular type of an open access model.

Christopher Mitchell (07:34)
Mm-hmm.

Sean Gonsalves (07:49)
I feel like most fiber networks go into creating moon bases. We’re already where we’re at where a lot of fiber networks, I think use PON, which is shared infrastructure.

Christopher Mitchell (07:59)
Passive Optical Networks, yeah, and shared infrastructure. So I would, if I jump

Jade Piros De Carvalho (08:00)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (08:03)
in for a second, there’s like multiple critiques and one is a technological critique. And I think his article would have been better if he didn’t go down that path. there’s this, there’s people that care very passionately about whether you build a network where every home has its own dedicated fiber back to the point of presence or the network operations center. ⁓ And.

And there’s like, I mean, there’s good reasons to discuss this and to talk about what is the appropriate model, what’s cost effective, what is future proof and this and that. But I’ll say that I think that the technological differences for a home user are more or less imperceptible across most networks.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (08:39)
Yeah, and

there are huge energy demands on the active side versus the PON side, which again, we don’t need to go down that rabbit hole, but everything’s a trade off. And ⁓ when it comes to the end consumer, that’s what we need to focus on. Like, what is the biggest difference, right?

Sean Gonsalves (08:55)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (08:57)
Right. And so I think, the thing that people I think should focus on is what do people want? What do they need? And, and I will say that like, and Sean, I don’t I feel like that pretty much sums it up. I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to say before I, I offer my damning critique.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (09:03)
Yeah.

Sean Gonsalves (09:11)
I mean, there’s a couple of little other spots

in the article that I thought were interesting to note, but we can come back to that.

Christopher Mitchell (09:15)
Okay.

All right. ⁓ So, so anyway, I feel like the technological question of like, you know, okay, well, like, I’m sharing it with my neighbors, but most of my neighbors aren’t home, you know, like, you know, like, there’s just, it’s not, it’s not the case that in many cases, ⁓ you are during prime time, throttle down to 10 % of what you’re paying for because of congestion from the neighborhood that just that I’ve never seen any evidence that that is happening. And I don’t think that is happening. ⁓

And the other thing I’ll say is that like, I do feel like there’s a lot that we need to improve. think that a majority of Americans have Internet access that is not meeting their needs and is creating some kind of drag on us, both ⁓ our wallets, our innovation, ⁓ and just the fact that we stuck on hold and our time when we have to deal with problems.

At the same time, I don’t want to overstate that like everything’s broken. Like, I don’t know if I lived in a territory or get G Fiber it’s 70 bucks a month. It’s been 70 bucks a month for a year, 70 bucks a month for years. Like it seems like they’re doing a good job. If I lived in the UTOPIA area, I’d be thrilled if I could get fiber from a small private company that’s crushing the record, you know, crushing the stats. That’d be great. And so there are places where it has worked, but I think it is true that we don’t have a plan to solve this issue for most people.

Sean Gonsalves (10:22)
Mm-hmm.

Christopher Mitchell (10:35)
So I just always want to defend us a little bit, you know, like, and to his credit, ⁓ this article does know what are the things you should do is support the right of local communities to build their own networks. And I think also to partner with appropriate folks to, to improve networks. So ⁓ anyway, like that’s like, get a little bit perky about that, but I will say that like,

I want to have, this is something I want to go deep with Benoit Felten in the future, ⁓ who studies a lot of the international systems and he’s a Frenchman. He lived in China for a long time and studied their systems and just, he thinks about these telecom issues a lot. And this idea of like structural separation versus functional separation, which he kind of alludes to, ⁓ not working well in Germany. Well, in Britain, I think it’s gone even worse. And, and that’s because they didn’t build a new network that might be.

you know, that is separable. So there’s a lot more lessons to learn from Europe than I think we got out of this. ⁓ But I guess…

Sean Gonsalves (11:31)
Yeah,

there’s a couple other things that I would highlight that I think are worth the consideration, which is that, well, first of all, he talks about how, I don’t know if Swisscom is like the equivalent of AT&T in Switzerland or something like that, but.

Christopher Mitchell (11:36)
Okay, hit them up.

So

I looked into this just briefly and I’m not an expert on this, but like Swisscom is an incumbent and it’s fascinating to me that they originally proposed this structural separation system. Okay, so they were 51 % owned by the government, whereas Deutsche Telekom, which has been so resistant in playing the same games in Germany that our large companies play, they are owned by the state and a minority. So I think the public…

Sean Gonsalves (11:55)
Well, yeah, exactly.

Christopher Mitchell (12:12)
owns two large shares of Deutsche Telekom, but they add up to less than a controlling share. And I don’t know if that makes a big difference.

Sean Gonsalves (12:17)
Right, I still think,

right, But I do, I still think it’s interesting that you have a large incumbent that actually was arguing for, arguing against like the single fiber and how it would create this monopoly. And that regulation would actually be necessary. I mean, can you imagine a company, a telecom company, United States saying that regulation is necessary? So that I thought is…

Christopher Mitchell (12:32)
And I think Italy did that too.

Theodore Vail did it 120 years ago.

But yeah, no, it’s been 110 years. So yeah, you’re right.

Sean Gonsalves (12:47)
Yeah, well,

yeah, he also thought that AT&T should, you know, be the only ⁓ telecom company in the world. But anyway, ⁓ but then when he gets, when Schuller, the author of this piece gets to like the five basic things he thinks we should do. See, I’m more of a like…

like an authoritarian when it comes to this. And so there was a lot of things where I was like exactly like when he says mandate open access, physical infrastructure, ⁓ enforced, enforced point to point architecture, create a neutral fiber standard. And here’s the thing. And I like this phrase too.

Empower competition authorities. We never call people competition authorities. We call them regulators, which allows for all of this, aren’t, you know, these word games about deregulation and stuff like that. When competition authorities is a better phrase for what we’re actually talking about, which is not to like squeeze out capitalism per se, or all aspects of free market competition. It’s really to have some authorities or referees to ensure that we actually have competition. So I

Jade Piros De Carvalho (13:49)
Yeah.

Sean Gonsalves (13:50)
thought those were important things to point out in the.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (13:52)
So Sean, I’m going to agree with you that like the whole point of a market is to have a marketplace of choices. And so obviously we’re not really operating in a truly free market in this respect, but are you really proposing that we take all these private networks and force them to be open to anybody else? I mean, yeah. So how do you, or do you think the government,

Sean Gonsalves (14:14)
If I was ruler for a day, yes.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (14:19)
should take ownership in the networks like they did in these other countries that were listed in the article. Because I think both of those are shocking kind of suggestions. ⁓ yeah, do you think that would fix the problem? Because I’m not.

Christopher Mitchell (14:27)
I’m not sure we have that.

Sean Gonsalves (14:35)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (14:36)
If we

had a lawyer on, might say, Chris, you’re an idiot. But I’m not sure the federal government has the authority to own telecommunications networks that are for the public.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (14:43)
Well,

didn’t Trump take like 10 %? What was that company that 10

Sean Gonsalves (14:46)
Yeah, Intel,

think it was, right?

Christopher Mitchell (14:48)
Well, of like seven or eight, or maybe even more companies now. ⁓

Jade Piros De Carvalho (14:51)
which I like fell

out of my chair when I read that, you know.

Christopher Mitchell (14:55)
Right,

no, and I mean, the issue with that, I think, is we are very litigious society. And so it’s not always the case that we can just adopt a culture that is quite different, that is the legal structure of somewhere else. And so I deeply, I worry about solutions that might look good on paper that result in 10 years of telecommunications lawsuits and no progress. So.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (15:20)
Yeah, like I

don’t think we should nationalize our networks.

Sean Gonsalves (15:23)
No one’s ever accused me of having practical ideas, okay?

Jade Piros De Carvalho (15:25)
you

Christopher Mitchell (15:26)
But no,

this is like you’re not the only one suggesting this there are other people and I’ve I’ve questioned whether or not we should have that debate on this show with people that really would push for national open access and I’m ⁓ I think we probably should I’ve just been nervous about it in part because I don’t like having angels dancing on the head of the pin arguments that are you know kind of like you know like well it’s not gonna happen and but I don’t know with the backlash against tech I don’t think we can predict what the

Sean Gonsalves (15:47)
Mm-hmm.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (15:47)
Yeah. Yeah.

my gosh,

Christopher Mitchell (15:54)
where the old Ogerton window is going. ⁓

Jade Piros De Carvalho (15:54)
yeah.

Sean Gonsalves (15:56)
No doubt.

Christopher Mitchell (15:58)
But I do think that ⁓ the idea of focusing on competition is a good one, right? I’ve said before, for the 30 years since the Telecommunications Act was passed, the general thing that the federal government has focused on is removing what they called barriers to competition. But it turns out that simply removing barriers does not produce competition. One needs

Sean Gonsalves (16:21)
Mm.

Christopher Mitchell (16:24)
pro competition policies in place. And the thing that drives me nuts about this, when I see the term free market, I just, have a little like mini like burst of anger because I’m reminded of where people try to tell us that like, I’m in support of free trade. And that’s why we have this 24,000 page agreement for free trade, right? And it’s like, that’s not free trade. That’s just the pharmaceutical companies writing the trade rules. That’s not.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (16:45)
Yeah.

That’s the problem

about the whole term of free markets. They’re not just unfettered, like this isn’t science, natural law. There are policies baked in depending on where the lobbying dollars are that choose these winners and losers. so people, you’ll hear policymakers saying, we’re not going to choose winners and losers. We need a free market. I’m like, well, you are. It’s just a little bit hidden to the average person who doesn’t understand economics.

Christopher Mitchell (16:58)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

You need rules.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (17:20)
or these macro issues.

Christopher Mitchell (17:21)
Yeah, you need, you need rules.

need to figure out how the courts are going to adjudicate things. like it is impossible to write a neutral set of rules on these industries. And so I feel like we should be very active in saying thumb on the scale for more competition, you know, and not only that, but also locally, mean, I would put thumb on the scale for like local locally accountable networks, you know, and, that sort of a thing. but I think the, my ultimate critique with all of this is that people don’t want competition.

Sean Gonsalves (17:34)
Right?

Christopher Mitchell (17:50)
And I don’t know, people don’t want choice of utilities. know, they don’t want choice of water providers. They don’t want choice of electric providers. People say they want choice when they have a bad option. When they feel like they’re overpaying, they feel like they’re getting a product that’s not good.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (17:51)
now.

Sean Gonsalves (18:02)
Right. That’s a great point.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (18:03)
Yeah, that is a good point. Because

it’s a pain to change.

Sean Gonsalves (18:09)
That’s what it is. And also like the decision fatigue. It’s like there’s so many choices sometimes and it’s like, do you really want to be like going through 12 different like ISPs, like, you know, all of the, you know.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (18:12)
Yeah.

Sean Gonsalves (18:21)
fine print to try to figure out, know, it’s like, you know, like, that’s why when I always get like lose my mind when people say, like when it comes to like insurance, like you can choose like all these like, yeah, I’m gonna read like a 400 page like ⁓ insurance manual to figure out, you know, what’s the best, you know, option for me is, you know,

Christopher Mitchell (18:39)
and still get suckered.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (18:40)
You want enough choices

to force fair behavior on the part of the company.

Christopher Mitchell (18:45)
If you can do that, that’s exactly it.

And so that’s the question. Is that like, I mean, our work focused on municipal networks and co-ops, but when we’re thinking more about competence, so co-ops are more like a solution for rural areas where we’re never expecting real competition, right? Now we’re going to perhaps have two satellite competitors and the co-ops will face some competitive pressure, which in some cases might push the co-op to be better. But in most cases, the co-op is doing a great job without any competition, but in a municipal space.

Sean Gonsalves (19:00)
Okay.

Christopher Mitchell (19:15)
The question is, if you’re building the moon colony, I think you’d probably build the Swiss model and you say, we’re not gonna have competition in fiber optic wires, we’re gonna have competition in services and people are gonna be using the same fiber optic cable. And then there’s gonna be a customer service and pricing and perhaps other, like how good your lag to Earth is. You’re gonna be measured on other things and you’re have competition at that level.

Sean Gonsalves (19:34)
Mm-hmm.

you

Christopher Mitchell (19:43)
But you also might just say, we’re going to have utility and we’re going to have it be run appropriately. But I will say that like we have a hundred, 150 years of experience of that with electricity. have 120 years of that with national telecoms and whatnot. And the results aren’t great. There’s a reason we moved away from monopoly systems, you know, in copper to more competitive systems in part, because we thought there’d be multiple technologies that would create.

this flourishing of options that Jade, you just noted, which is that you gotta have enough market competition for that to work. And we are stuck between those things right now.

Sean Gonsalves (20:17)
⁓

Jade Piros De Carvalho (20:18)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (20:20)
Okay. Any last comments on that? So, so from there, we wanted to move to talking about digital equity and particularly because Sean did a great window into ⁓ into this person from San Antonio that DeAnne and our team connected us with ⁓ Belinda Parker-Mendoza who yes, ⁓ I would, I always think of McBain.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (20:21)
So we didn’t solve that next.

Sean Gonsalves (20:45)
Mm-hmm.

Christopher Mitchell (20:50)
For Simpsons fans out there, I can’t see the name Mendoza without immediately flashing back to a vaguely Arnold Schwarzenegger-esque character ⁓ overacting ⁓ in The Simpsons. But ⁓ Sean, you were quite taken ⁓ with this piece and really inspired by it. So tell us what the highlights are.

Sean Gonsalves (21:11)
I was taken with it because it, to me, her story embodies what it is that we’re actually after.

⁓ So, you know, we talk about technology and open access networks and municipal broadband and all this kind of stuff, but ultimately, like, what does it matter? And why is connectivity so important for people? And so her story to me illustrated that in a really powerful way. you know, she’s someone who lives in one of the Opportunity Home complexes in San Antonio, which is public housing. They’ve got a bunch of them across the city. ⁓

Christopher Mitchell (21:42)
Which is public housing.

Sean Gonsalves (21:48)
and

was really in a tough spot, especially after her parents died. And so one day she goes down to get the mail, which she was kind of just only doing. She comes from a family of 10 siblings. No one in the family, including her mom and dad, had a diploma of any kind. High school, college, whatever. Actually, her father graduated from high school and went straight to work. But none of her siblings. so anyway, fast forward, she’s 45 years old.

Christopher Mitchell (22:10)
I thought so, yeah. Yep.

Sean Gonsalves (22:19)
an adult daughter, but was really struggling with the death of her parents and the lack of sort of employment opportunities and these kind of things. She had no device. She had no Internet service at home. One day she goes out to her car and one of the folks that work, one of the staff at Opportunity Homes, I think it was, was handing out flyers and said, you know, hey, do you want to like help hand out these flyers? That led to her kind of getting involved in doing some volunteering,

their resident apprentice program. Then AmeriCorps VISTA had a digital skills training course, you know, within the opportunity homes that she was encouraged to apply for. She got it and it just changed her life. Because she went through that course, she was able to get this refurbished Dell laptop. They were able to sign her up for ACP, which allowed her to get Internet service for the first time. And all of that led to her getting, going to San Antonio College.

college, a community college, got her associate’s degree, 4.0 GPA, transferred to Palo Alto College, I think the name of it is. She’s working on her bachelor’s degree and it has all of these ripple effects. And in the story, she just talks about how she’s very clear about how that laptop and that Internet connection totally transformed her life and it like cascaded outward. Like, so she became a trainer of trainers even in these digital skills training courses. And now within

Jade Piros De Carvalho (23:32)
Yeah.

Sean Gonsalves (23:48)
that apartment complex, people don’t just see her sad, they see her as confident and knowing something about technology and they’ve seen it change her life. And now her daughter, she pushed her daughter, her daughter’s gotten an associate’s degree, she’s working towards a bachelor’s degree. And so I just think it’s a really powerful story because the ACP, we just let die.

the Digital Equity Act got terminated and both of those programs were really designed to produce more Belindas and lead to those kind of results. And now all of that, well, ACP doesn’t even exist anymore. And the Digital Equity Act and the court litigation that’s going on with that is still tied up in the court. there’s a lot of programs that we’re going to rely on that kind of funding to create these kinds of opportunities for folks, which I

I is exactly what we want. And so I just thought she was really inspirational and really embodied the why of what we’re all talking about and what we’re all doing.

Christopher Mitchell (24:55)
want to make sure for people who may not be familiar because it’s like, ACP has been gone long enough. That’s the Affordable Connectivity Program that delivered $30 a month benefit to families to help them afford Internet access, many of whom did not have to make a payment beyond that that covered the costs for many of me. Yes.

Sean Gonsalves (25:02)
Right.

that 23 million households, not

individuals, but households were using.

Christopher Mitchell (25:18)
Right. Sorry. So what’d you say, Jade?

Jade Piros De Carvalho (25:20)
I was just gonna commend Sean, because he did such a good job on that profile. And yeah, you’re right. That’s exactly what that was intended to do. And we need to start looking at these programs as investments into people, families, communities, instead of as costs. And I don’t want to get like super controversial or off topic telecom wise, but I do want to point out that it really shows.

a country’s priorities when you can find 50 million or $50 billion, which is three and a half ACPs ⁓ to spend in like a week or two on a pointless war. And you continue to say that ACP was a handout, that it was too liberally applied, that it was a cost we can’t bear. ⁓ We could afford to.

Sean Gonsalves (25:50)
Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (26:17)
to do that program and it’s widely supported on both the private and the public side. So I wouldn’t say that it’s gone away completely. I mean, I know it is, but we’re expecting what we were expecting a USF report this summer. Let’s hope there’s an affordability or an adoption component of that. ⁓ The DEA is not dead, Sean. It is in the courts.

Christopher Mitchell (26:34)
Mm-hmm.

Sean Gonsalves (26:39)
You’re right. You’re

Christopher Mitchell (26:39)
The Digital Equity Act

is, in this story, Sean notes that it is working, you know, there are people who are challenging it. I believe National Digital Inclusion Alliance. I think it, I do expect that it will come back as long as Congress doesn’t decide to remove it while it’s dead. ⁓ I think as long as Congress doesn’t change anything, I think the courts will find that it has been improperly terminated and will be restored. I don’t know exactly what I expect to happen after that.

Sean Gonsalves (26:40)
right. It’s not bad.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (26:43)
Don’t put that out in the universe. have, I believe it will prevail. Don’t you Chris?

Sean Gonsalves (26:45)
You

Thank you.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (27:08)
And

we still have 22 billion in non-deployment that could ostensibly be used for some of these. Well, we don’t know. We don’t know.

Christopher Mitchell (27:09)
And that could be five years away.

Sean Gonsalves (27:12)
right?

Christopher Mitchell (27:15)
Yes.

Right. But I will say, Jay,

picking up on one of the points that you made when I was, ⁓ so we’ll talk in a second about some of the states that are doing an Affordable Connectivity Program like, ⁓ effort. And when I was searching for some of the rules on California’s pilot that they’re about to do, or that they’ve started doing, ⁓ I did California lifeline and like it auto completes. The first option is fraud. Now, if I did like Pentagon spending, I don’t know that the first one would be fraud, but I can tell you.

that like government programs had fraud and frankly, we need, I’m a big fan of inspector generals. And I think we need to be doing a good job of policing fraud because aside from wasted money, it’s when people lose faith in these programs that we really start to have problems of actually being able to have a society that functions. And so like it is essential that we combat fraud.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (28:04)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (28:12)
But the level of fraud that we put up with in some areas is like magnificent. And the level of fraud we put up with in other areas, the level of fraud is very small. And we act like we should spend $20 million to stamp out $3 million worth of fraud. I think we should be making sure that we can minimize fraud as much as possible. But at a certain point, like humans are gonna find a way to cheat and we need to keep that down to an acceptable level. Like recognize there are costs to trying to stamp it out entirely. So.

Sean Gonsalves (28:22)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

face.

Great.

Christopher Mitchell (28:41)
We just need to be adults about some of this stuff.

Sean Gonsalves (28:43)
Right,

get, like you, I get frustrated with the throw the baby out with the bathwater kind of approach stuff. mean, it’s like, you know, of course there’s, with any institution or business or anything, there’s always gonna be some level of cheating or fraud or something like that. But it’s like, you know, I feel like making an argument of getting rid of an entire concept or a program based on, you know,

you know, a certain, you know, sort of lower, low level kind of like fraud and stuff like that. It’s like, you know, because like some restaurants like, you know, got busted for like not following like good health practices that the idea of restaurants are a bad idea. I mean, it’s ridiculous.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (29:27)
Yeah, we

use these really tiny marginal peripheral, you know, one to two percents to justify getting rid of it. And then we spin our wheels, putting so much energy into figuring out how that one to two percent doesn’t happen instead of just delivering on programs for the American public, which we know can be done. You know, I’m still a big believer that in government’s ability to improve the lives of people.

through programs. still believe that, but it’s super broken now. But there are examples out there where it’s happening and where people are proving that these things aren’t that hard, you know, and I don’t think ACP was that hard. we do believe that the 200 % poverty level was too high, take it back down to 135 or to 150. There are these compromises that can be made, but to just act like it’s too hard to figure out how we can make it happen without fraud, it’s not rocket science.

Sean Gonsalves (30:19)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (30:21)
Well,

I think the pathway to creating that political will is by profiling people who demonstrate that it is working. And I often think of Susan Crawford’s book, Fiber. She profiled the person who in Wilson, the city of North Carolina, that they built an amazing fiber optic network that ⁓ is just succeeded in any metric that you would like to apply to it. It’s been wildly successful.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (30:28)
Yes.

Sean Gonsalves (30:36)
Mmm.

Christopher Mitchell (30:48)
three different programs to help low income families take advantage of the services that are available. And in their book, Susan Crawford noted a woman who had pursued a nursing degree ⁓ because she was able to do it from her apartment there as opposed to trying to take her two children to the library in that as they were ⁓ able to get devices and better know how to use them, her children

⁓ their, disciplinary record improved, I believe. I don’t know if I’m commi, if I’m combining stories, but, but we’ve seen that a number of cases where when people have real opportunity and they feel like that someone’s actually cares about them, they often are more productive, members of society, even if they’re 11 years old. So, you know, like 11 year olds know this stuff. So, ⁓ I wanted to, Sean, I wanted to give you a chance to tell us briefly about, New Mexico, ⁓ because there’s an important, thing that they’re doing, with

Sean Gonsalves (31:28)
Yeah.

Yeah, no doubt. mean.

Christopher Mitchell (31:44)
the Affordable Connectivity Program there.

Sean Gonsalves (31:46)
Right, well as it relates to all of these things, whether it’s the ACP like thing or the Digital Equity Act.

as a transition, I love the thing that Belinda said at the very end of that article, which is that it’s never too late. You don’t have to sprint. You don’t have to jog. If you can’t walk, crawl, just start. And just start is what New Mexico did. And they said, I mean, like they were, you know, surprised at the end of ACP, but also recognized how important universal access to ⁓ Internet is. And so they said, we need to

fix this and they created, I guess you would call it ACP style, it’s actually called LITAP and I forget exactly what the acronym stands for but what they did is they took their state level universal service fund and they changed it so that it wasn’t just here’s ⁓ a surcharge on your bill that pays for landlines, it’s here’s a surcharge on your bill that can help subsidize ⁓ the, you know, ⁓

you know, maybe seven to 10 % of the population who needs a subsidy in order to afford Internet. And so that’s what they did. And ⁓ they, you know, they were able to do that without…

having to raise taxes or create a whole new ⁓ budget. essentially took the existing surcharge for their essential lifeline program was about 50 cents per connection. They think this will raise it to about $2. So for about $1.50 more per connection, they’re able to fund this in perpetuity at a tune of $45 million a year, which they think will cover everyone in the state that ⁓ could qualify for it would be

Jade Piros De Carvalho (33:16)
now.

Sean Gonsalves (33:37)
able

to get access to it. And in talking to Senator Mike Padilla, who really spearheaded this legislation, he’s the Democratic Senate whip, and he’s been around for 16 years. In talking to him, he makes it really clear of how important it is to have a real champion within.

you know, state legislature to push these kind of things forward and all of the kind of groundwork that has to be laid in order for this kind of stuff to even be possible because, you know, they filed the bill officially on like January 26 and like two weeks later, the governor signed it. And that’s like incredibly fast. but behind the scenes, this was this was something that he had been working on with his colleagues for years. You know, he obviously he’s actually really involved in broadband issues.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (34:14)
well.

Christopher Mitchell (34:16)
He’s a good whip.

Sean Gonsalves (34:26)
He was one that he filed the legislation that created New Mexico’s broadband office and some other stuff. this has been, you know, it was ongoing, that preparing the ground and being ready to file legislation and having a champion is super important, but it’s also like super inspiring. And there’s now other states that are like looking at this and being like, hmm.

Christopher Mitchell (34:53)
Right. so.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (34:53)
I love

⁓ the laboratories of democracy idea. And I really do think states should have the ability to create programs that work best for them. my only concern with this, because I thought that was brilliant, but there’s like this ethos in the Midwest that really ties income level to morality. I don’t know if that exists everywhere.

Sean Gonsalves (34:58)
Mm.

Yeah.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (35:21)
As long as that exists, it’s really difficult to get these Midwestern states like Kansas to do things like that because they feel that they’re somehow like encouraging ⁓ people to, I don’t know, not improve themselves. I hate saying that because I love Kansas and we’re great, nice people, but it’s just so deeply embedded in the culture.

Sean Gonsalves (35:26)
Hmm.

reload or

Christopher Mitchell (35:41)
Well, it’s interesting, right? I

I don’t know if people are aware, ⁓ when, 130 years ago, there was very few libraries. Most families owned a book, right? The Bible. And didn’t own other books, didn’t come into contact with other books. I might be overstating a little bit or missing the years by a little bit. That’s more or less the trend. And one of the things that Carnegie did, and ⁓ I have plenty to say about Carnegie being a terrible, horrible person.

Sean Gonsalves (36:10)
you

Christopher Mitchell (36:10)
and

just destroying the lives of many families. But he felt it was really important to give people the opportunity to improve themselves with books. And so he helped to establish libraries. And so like, you have this like American businessman who embodies the let them lift themselves up by their bootstraps ⁓ sort of mentality. And for him, that was key. Was that like you had to give them

make sure they had bootstraps, you know, they had to make sure they had libraries in their community that they could go and improve themselves with. And it is disappointing to have this sense of like, not only like you should have to like, you know, slaughter the cow to get the leather to make your bootstraps. There’s a point like, what are we doing here? And so yeah, I mean, like, but the libraries

Jade Piros De Carvalho (36:42)
Yeah.

Sean Gonsalves (36:52)
Right.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (36:53)
Yeah.

I’m curious

if you guys think we’ve lost this, because I feel this sometimes, has our country lost this shared value of the American dream? Because I feel like sometimes with the growing inequality that there is a cast of people who feel like, no, there’s only a few of us who deserve ⁓ abundance.

Christopher Mitchell (37:18)
Yeah. Young people like you are

my understanding, Jade. I just listened to some focus groups this morning. We’re talking about younger generations and how there is this sense that they will not get ahead, that the deck is too stacked against them. I, I lived it. My family, I was born in to a family with two working class people that did not have, ⁓ degrees or my mom was a registered nurse and, ⁓ my dad would later go back to college. ⁓

Sean Gonsalves (37:30)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (37:46)
And so we went from being working class solidly to being, I mean, I would describe that as the upper middle class at the least ⁓ is how I kind of finished. My dad was able to get a job that was so well paying that I could go to a private college. ⁓ And I paid off my debt in 20 years, which was substantial because I was able to then get this job and create a family where we had sufficient income. So.

Like it’s hard for me because I’ve seen it happen, but I also know that that is not a common experience right now.

Sean Gonsalves (38:17)
Right, I will say this, but my sense is that yes, I think that shared value ethos is very, still much alive. I really do. think that…

I would even go so far as to say that I think most Americans have that ethos isn’t completely dead, but it’s in an environment, this survival of the richest environment. And we were talking about libraries and books. You know how we can kind of help reclaim? When we talk about banning books, get Ayn Rand books out of libraries for the love of God. That is what’s driving this.

Christopher Mitchell (38:44)
No, no, no, think, I, no, no, no, no,

Jade Piros De Carvalho (38:45)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (38:49)
no. I mean, I think people should learn to critique and read books and understand.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (38:53)
Yeah, you have to go through

your teenage angst phase of reading every Ayn Rand book and then realizing how bullshit they all are and that she died miserable for a reason. Like it’s part of the process.

Christopher Mitchell (38:57)
you

You know, let

me, let me say this. Like this is, this could be very controversial among people that I like quite a bit. If you have built things, not everyone is a builder, right? Like if you’re a small entrepreneur, you get a sense of how the deck is stacked against you, how hard it is. And if you’re really paying attention, you get a sense of how lucky you are because like a lot of us recognize when we’re unlucky.

Sean Gonsalves (39:24)
Mm-hmm.

Christopher Mitchell (39:27)
And other people don’t recognize when they’re lucky. So, you know, I’ve, I started a photography company before, not to be too grandiose. I’m a photographer and I’ve for 25 years, people have paid me and I’ve maintained clients and I’ve like run a business and filed taxes and like the bare minimum of like being a businessman in America. And I fully see how some people get frustrated when people who don’t do that, who haven’t taken those risks, who expect other people

Sean Gonsalves (39:29)
Okay.

Christopher Mitchell (39:55)
And this Travis would say, you know, whether you’re a paycheck, ⁓ you if you sign the front of the check or the back of the check, and there is a difference once you’ve like taken a responsibility for paying other people. And there is a frustration for people that have only ever received that and not taken on that responsibility. And I think it is, it is overworked. I’m not going to say that it’s like, you know, that like all of the criticisms are true, but like there is a mentality and a sense of there’s an us versus them that can develop when you’ve gone through that.

and you see how a poorly thought out government regulation can threaten something you’ve spent 20 years building, you start to be nervous about any government regulation. And so I’ve seen that happen. I think that that’s, Ayn Rand is totally bonkers town. But the sentiments that are in there are not wholly unjustified, I guess is what, that’s the best defense I could give her.

Sean Gonsalves (40:34)
Mm-hmm.

Well, here’s the thing. I hear you and

I’m sure she appreciates that. ⁓ But I will just say this, besides the fact that she is one of the most verbose fools that I’ve ever read and is an objectively maybe the worst writer in literary history, ⁓ that aside, just looking at the ideas.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (41:06)
Huh!

Sean Gonsalves (41:06)
Cool, like I can relate, like all of us have been a part of group projects where like one or two people do all the work and everybody else is just kind of hanging on and all that. We get that, but like the stuff that bothers me is the stuff that gets overlooked.

the DNA lottery, the genetic lottery of where you were born makes like a huge difference. And so it’s like, you can be the hardest work in person, but if you were born in other countries or no matter how smart you are, how hard you work, you’re reaping the benefits of living in a country that’s got infrastructure, that has roads, that has, mean, you talk about an ISP, for example, as a business, your whole business is possible because public

So it’s just crazy to me that we just like that so many people forget those things that lead to the even possibility for somebody to be able to work hard and build their own business.

Christopher Mitchell (42:05)
That is a perfect lead into what you’ve decided will be our first topic for What the Tech.

Sean Gonsalves (42:12)
What the Tech? Yes. What the Tech today is two things and I’m just gonna hit it real quick because you see this a lot. I have Moonjoy, a lot of people I think did because it was like in this world, ⁓ it’s like, my God, a team of like highly competent people really.

Christopher Mitchell (42:14)
What’s the tech today?

Sean Gonsalves (42:31)
pulled something off to a T, it’s amazing. But of course, there’s a lot of people, and I think it’s a legit question to be like, what’s the point of going to space when we’ve got so many problems on Earth? that kind of question has been around for a while. But let me just say that space exploration, is the, I mean, the budget for NASA is less than 1 % of the federal budget. Okay.

Christopher Mitchell (42:54)
It’s on the bill

of $20 billion. I think it has been for a while, right?

Sean Gonsalves (42:57)
Right.

And it has been for a while. So you want to talk about a bang for the buck because of specs space exploration, have memory phone, phone cameras, MRIs, cat scans, freeze dried food, scratch resistant glasses, wireless headphones, computer mouses, GPS. To me, the value of GPS alone is probably worth what we spent going.

Christopher Mitchell (43:07)
my God, I can’t think about it.

Sean Gonsalves (43:21)
for space exploration, especially because GPS, and this is something that we can get into in another program, is so fundamental to the proper functioning of the Internet itself. So that’s my little What the Tech wonder of Artemis and what it’s led to. My other thing is highlighting what I consider to be maybe…

not the dumbest, but a really dumb space idea, is Jeff Bezos and Elon talking about building these gigawatt data centers in space. Let me just say quickly, a gigawatt is roughly, I looked this up, is roughly the equivalent, is roughly the electrical output of a large nuclear power plant. Forget about the computing. The main challenge is

launch mass and building infrastructure in space. Not to mention meteor impacts, radiation damage, and data centers create a lot of heat. So you’d need like these comically large radiators. So even if you had cheaper launches, you would still need like thousands of them to do it. And then with the straight face, Bezos says these data centers will beat the cost of land-based data centers. And my question is how? On Earth, there’s like,

Christopher Mitchell (44:35)
No.

Sean Gonsalves (44:36)
relatively cheap land, you’ve got existing power grids, you’ve got fiber, you’ve got easy maintenance, and you’re gonna probably in space need like laser arrays to deal with bandwidth or whatever. So good luck doing all of that in space. So that’s my What the Tech!?!

Christopher Mitchell (44:49)
Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think even if data centers are paying their proper full costs and there’s different debates about what that includes, there’s no way that they’re cheaper in space. And for me, every article that talks about this should include the line. People who make all of their money launching things into space think we should launch more things into space. Like, I don’t know. It’s like pretty.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (45:10)
Can’t you just harness

Jade Piros De Carvalho (45:14)
the power of the sun for your energy? Isn’t that, I mean, I haven’t looked.

Christopher Mitchell (45:17)
I mean, you could do it in space, the sun’s always shining, right? No one can hear you scream, but you’re always in the sun, depending on where you are and when you place these things. But ⁓ the fact is that the sun falls, we get lots of sun on the Earth and battery storage is dropping significantly. so I just, Sean listed out the myriad reasons why it would be foolish, I think, to like commit to this or think that this is any kind of a solution. This is a solution for people that are trying to make more money launching things into space.

Jade Piros De Carvalho (45:45)
who make their money. Yeah, exactly. You hit the nail on the head there.

Christopher Mitchell (45:50)
Yeah. All right. Well, this has been fun. I do want to note that we are doing our first Unbuffered live next week. So we’re going to try and do these live shows. have been doing them with Connect This. We’ve been doing those on like Thursdays and Fridays because that’s when it had worked out. But to incorporate in the new schedule, we’re going to be trying to do the live shows when we do them, which will probably be once or twice per month on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoons. And this one will be Tuesday afternoon at two Eastern time.

Sean will have some stuff in the socials,

we’re going to be having Heather Mills, who’s been on Connect This before, and Doug Dawson, who is always on Connect This and helped make the show as good as it was.

And Drew Garner from Benton Institute for broadband and society. We’re going to cover some BEAD for sure because of that lineup. I think we’re going to talk a little bit about the vacation I just took and how Verizon and T-Mobile did not both work anywhere I went.

One or the other so glad I have two Sims So anyway, we’ll be talking about some other things, but we’re gonna have that live show we’re gonna try and produce these ⁓ a little bit better with more advanced warning and ⁓ And then more of the support and Jade we’re looking forward to having Jade Piros Have a future one of those as well

Jade Piros De Carvalho (46:46)
That’s been a popular place.

Well thank you gentlemen for having me on. Good to chat. Alright, have a

Christopher Mitchell (47:08)
Yeah, thank you all.

Sean Gonsalves (47:10)
Roger that, Houston.

Jordan Pittman (47:12)
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unbuffered Podcast. We have transcripts for this and other episodes available at ILSR.org/podcast. While you’re there, check out our other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow us on Bluesky. Our handle is @communitynets.

You can catch the latest research from all of our initiatives by subscribing to our monthly newsletter at ILSR.org While you’re there, please take a moment to donate. Your support in any amount helps keep us going. Unbuffered is produced by Christopher Mitchell with editing provided by me, Jordan Pittman. Special thanks to Riverside for providing the song Caveman. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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