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posted by janrinok on Sunday April 22 2018, @07:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the pretty-much-like-everywhere-else-without-broadband-internet dept.

Here's an article:

On Thursday mornings, locals from Sharon Township, Michigan, can drive to the 100-year-old town hall and meet with their local government. The supervisor, planning chair, and zoning administrator all gather at a long wooden table, where they share a box of doughnuts and wait for the heat to kick on. On these days, the township clerk dutifully saws open envelopes containing tax payments from residents and—if it's anything like the frigid February Thursday when I visited—has to take a break to thaw her fingers, numb from the frozen mail.

The digital divide is perhaps more starkly illustrated here, in Washtenaw County, than anywhere else in the US. Sharon Township is just 30 minutes outside of Ann Arbor, and a little over an hour from Detroit, in the next county over. Its 1,700-odd residents are spitting-distance from some of the most technologically advanced areas of the state, including the University of Michigan. Yet when it comes to internet access, Sharon Township may as well be in the mountains of West Virginia.

On a map showing Michigan's internet access at the county level, the square representing Washtenaw looks like one of the best-served regions in the state. Fewer than 10 percent of residents don't have access to broadband internet. But the fact that the city centers are so well-served only makes it more difficult for communities like Sharon Township to get access. Telecom companies aren't expanding their land-based networks to reach these relatively small markets, and money for rural broadband get earmarked for areas farther away.

"It looks like we're covered," said Kathy Spiegel, the Sharon Township Planning Commission Chair. "When Peter [Psarouthakis, the township supervisor] first started going to meetings at the state level, they said Washtenaw County had full coverage and he just kept laughing."

[...] "The issue is very much like rural electrification," said Spiegel, referring to the federal subsidization of electric infrastructure in the 1930s that ensured all Americans had power. "Areas will die if they don't get internet. It's become essential, and if we want to keep a community here, you've got to have something."

Before the Rural Electrification Act was passed in 1936, many Americans were on the far side of a different technological divide. Though we take for granted the ubiquity of electricity now, for a long time many Americans were left behind by electric companies that didn't want to spend the money to power remote, rural, poor, and less-populated areas. Senator George Norris, who represented Nebraska from 1913 until 1943, later recalled in his autobiography that at the time rural Americans had become sharply "conscious of the great gap between their lives and the lives of those whom the accident of birth or choice placed in towns and cities."

It's difficult not to draw similarities between that "great gap" and the digital divide holding so much of America back today. Many solutions have been proposed, and successfully executed in specific areas, but a widespread, ambitious solution like the Rural Electrification Act is little more than a dream at this point.

Instead, as the internet continues to become more and more vital to daily life, the areas without access drift further away from the rest of the country.

"Our world is a little bit different than everybody else's," said Ruth Bland, the school technology coordinator in West Virginia. "We can't just sit in this county and let the rest of the world go by."


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @02:26PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @02:26PM (#670346)

    If you live out in the boonies you do have your hand out. Electric and water infrastructure are paid for by the cities. And depending on how this goes it could be another handout.

    To live out in the sticks you get your own Obama phone. Except you pretend you don’t.

    Want quiet, clean air, lots of stars, hunting and fishing? I say you pay for it in full no subsidies.

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  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 22 2018, @02:50PM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 22 2018, @02:50PM (#670360) Journal

    Hmmm. No subsidies? That's really not a bad idea. So - you're willing to give up all those grants and subsidies that the feds give to the big cities every year? All that "pork" found in every budget? As far as I know, all those Obama phones went to the cities. I don't know anyone who got a free phone out here in the boonies.

    Sounds to me like you're running at the mouth, but left your brain in park.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @05:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @05:29PM (#670407)

      Yep. I will one hundred take you up on that. Simple math. We need full visibility of these subsidies. Not the hidden shit politicians like. Full accounting and zero freeloaders.