Sludge, Lawsuits, and the Digital Divide: Unpacking the Latest Broadband Battles - Episode 655 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:12):
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in St. Paul, Minnesota. I'm here back again with one of my favorite co-hosts. From here on the Community Broadband Networks team, Mr. Sean [00:00:30] Gonsalves, who is the Associate Director for Communications. Welcome

Sean Gonsalves (00:34):
Top of the morning.

Christopher Mitchell (00:35):
Alright, now I'm going to tell people, I want people to let us know in the social medias or to write back Sean Professes that he doesn't know anything about any of these topics. And so I want to know if as a listener, you perceive him to be totally ignorant or not. Mr. Modesty is kicking off the morning recording here. We're going to be talking about the Universal Service Fund lawsuit change, which I'll admit none of us are an expert in. We're going to talk a little bit about [00:01:00] a story in The Atlantic. It's a little bit of a pulling over this story. It's behind a paywall, but I hope many of you'll be able to see it about what they call sludge and it deals with customer service and gives me a chance to talk behind Kim McKinley's back a little bit. I don't think she's going to listen to this show. We're going to talk about that a little bit, customer service, and then we're going to talk about the lawsuit. Again, neither Sean nor I are experts in this lawsuit, the 21 States plus Washington DC have put, but I did say at a Holiday Inn Express last night, [00:01:30] actually, I read a Washington Post article that I feel like was pretty helpful on this.

Sean Gonsalves (01:35):
I was inspired by Better Call Saul.

Christopher Mitchell (01:38):
So we're going to be talking about those things. We will have links to these things in the show page that Jordan's going to put up. So let's start off talking about the USF case. Sean, it came back. Do you want to do a brief overview of what happened?

Sean Gonsalves (01:52):
Sure. Because I know so much about it. It was a six three decision. We can start there that they said that the USF [00:02:00] is constitutional. It was a lower court that said that it was unconstitutional. This is something that's been challenged. Yeah, real

Christopher Mitchell (02:05):
Low court. The Fifth Circuit real low in my opinion,

Sean Gonsalves (02:09):
And that the Supreme Court found that the FCC did not exceed its authority when it established the USF in 1996. And so I think that's pretty good news because it does serve an important function, especially for schools and libraries as it relates to Internet access. And so what, I'm

Christopher Mitchell (02:26):
Confused you're about it.

Sean Gonsalves (02:27):
The part that I'm confused about is Ted Cruz [00:02:30] put forward a bill to curtail the E-Rate program is a part of this. You might want to explain how E-Rate is a part of the USF. So I'm not sure that, I think this says that the FCC has the authority to establish and run the USF. However, in terms of the expanded role that the FCC created under this for the E-Rate program, I'm not sure how this decision affects that.

Christopher Mitchell (02:56):
I don't think it touches that at all, but yeah, I'll just go back a little bit. [00:03:00] The Universal Service Fund has four main programs. They're not equally sized at all. One is E-Rate, as Sean mentioned. One is what's been called the high cost fund. That's changed into different programs over the years, but it's fundamentally about helping rural, very high cost networks be able to pay for themselves so that people have reasonable access. Because set in US law is the idea that no matter where you are, you should have reasonably comparable access to Internet access. [00:03:30] That's not what the actual law says. That's good language in it, but that's basically what it means is that people shouldn't have to pay too much. It should have reliable, relatively similar service whether you're in a city or out in the sticks. So that's the high cost fund. There's one dealing with clinics and hospitals and things like that. And then there is the fourth one that I should have written down because it is the telemedicine is one. And then what's the fourth? What am I missing here? Lifeline Low

Sean Gonsalves (03:57):
Income Funds. Lifeline.

Christopher Mitchell (03:58):
Yeah, lifeline. One of the bigger ones. [00:04:00] Lifeline is the piece that provides access and has made sure that people who don't make a lot of money or don't make any money can have telephone service that's been expanded. That you could use that a $9 and 25 cent discount more if you live on a tribal reservation. You can use that for telephone or against Internet access in many cases. So that's what the Universal Service Fund does. Now, these guys at Consumers Research, and I assume it's mostly guys, they have been doing lawsuit after lawsuit because they are so annoyed they don't like [00:04:30] that. The way the Federal Communications Commission set this up was that the FCC was like, we don't want to do this with our staff. We're just going to create a nonprofit organization and we're going to tell them what to do. That's the Universal Services Administration's Company.

Sean Gonsalves (04:44):
USAC

Christopher Mitchell (04:44):
Probably have too many pluralization there, the USACs. And so USAC makes decisions about the fees that it assesses on certain services and that goes in to fund the program. One of the things we like about it is that we don't need Congress, which is so incompetent, [00:05:00] just so blazingly incompetent this year in particular. We don't want them to be deciding whether or not they're actually going to fund the school's multi-year contracts this year, right? I mean, we don't want to see it run out of money. We saw the ACP, and so this is an ongoing thing that works well.

Sean Gonsalves (05:17):
And I mean, speaking of the ACP, I mean there had been hope that the USF reform to reform it could be a source of permanent funding for ACP because it's a good point of about what [00:05:30] you say about Congress because as we saw with the ACP, such an important program, 23 million households were relying on it. It goes away. There were efforts in Congress, bipartisan efforts really put more money back into that program, and it never went anywhere. So here we are. We have no ACP. You've got Senator Cruz who filed that bill to curtail the E-Rate program.

Christopher Mitchell (05:53):
He doesn't want the hotspots going out to kids' homes because he would rather have 9 million kids not [00:06:00] have any home Internet access and be denied an education rather than take the chance that some of them might use it inappropriately. Good decision making, my man.

Sean Gonsalves (06:08):
Well, I'm sure the wireless industry had a finger in that

Christopher Mitchell (06:11):
Maybe. I don't know. I mean, I don't want to try and get into Ted Cruz's head. It's dangerous. It's a dangerous place. But I mean, just wrapping up the USF piece and before we can talk more about that, the issue basically was that this group has done multiple lawsuits over the years. It was losing. It was losing and it lost in the Fifth Circuit. [00:06:30] And the Fifth Circuit did what's called an inbound review in which basically a bunch of the judges there were like, we really actually want to kill this thing, even though it's been found to be constitutional over and over again. And so they found that it was unconstitutional and the Supreme Court then felt like, oh, we got to hear it because that's a bigger deal. And they basically told the Fifth Circuit, look, you guys are Looney Tunes.

(06:54):
It is so frustrating because the Fifth Circuit keeps throwing this stuff up. And although the Fifth Circuit, I would say agrees [00:07:00] largely with the Supreme Court generally on things, they keep tossing up these big overreaches and then the Supreme Court slaps 'em down. So the Supreme Court basically found that Congress had outlined the goals of USF in enough detail that the FCC didn't have boundless authority, that it was curtailed, and that the USF administration through the nonprofit USAC is hunky dory. Basically, they have oversight, they control it. So they haven't delegated that away. And they also said that it doesn't matter [00:07:30] whether it's a tax or a fee, they said for in this case, it was basically a total rejection because this Fifth Circuit case was basically, we don't really know if one of those things is unconstitutional or the other is. But we know that if you combine them, all the resulting pastry is unconstitutional somehow.

(07:46):
And the Supreme Court was like, as they say on one of my favorite podcasts, which is, wow, boy is that embarrassing. Right? One of my favorite podcasts, I was literally just listening to it. It fell out of my head advisory opinions. I think David French and Sarah Iger, [00:08:00] I disagree with them more than half the time, but I think they do good analysis. They always say that the Supreme Courts sort of reaction on this is no dog. So the Supreme Court basically said, no, no, no. And that's the answer we were looking for. We're ready to do an emergency show. And then we didn't have to because it was a boring opinion that was like, yeah, the grass is green, the sky is blue, and let's go on with our lives.

Sean Gonsalves (08:22):
And for folks that are not as familiar with this program, we talked about the different components of it, but the E-Rate program I think is one [00:08:30] of the more important functions that it helps to support. And according to schools health and libraries, broadband coalition, we're talking about 54 million students over 12,000 libraries and something like a hundred thousand schools. So the scope of this program is pretty significant. And then I'm remembering the Jemez Pueblo who used E-Rate dollars to essentially build part of their network backbone. So I mean, this is in a really important program. The funding of it [00:09:00] is really important and for it to suddenly go away would be yet another blow to what seems like an all out assault on all these efforts to close the digital divide.

Christopher Mitchell (09:11):
Yes, I agree. Now, let me just say that I don't like the E-Rate program. I feel like it is really important that we support schools and there are aspects of it that are really good. You just named the one that for Hemis Pueblo, where they built out a fiber that was able to be the backbone of not just for the schools, but also they could at [00:09:30] their own expense. They were able to put in additional fiber at the same time that really benefited the community. It is a really great way of doing it. One of the things that I've seen over the years is that this program has created some poor incentives that should be, I think looked at. There's arguments constantly that you're going to be overbuilding with these funds as though that's a terrible thing. Because anything that happens where you build a new network where there's an existing network, that only happens when you find that the existing network is charging way too much [00:10:00] and it is cheaper to have a bunch of people go out and dig up the streets and put in new fiber that is cheaper than paying for the overpriced services in this what's called special construction, I think is what they call it.

(10:13):
And so it's a good approach. But I've seen in school districts where the school district is paying way too much and they're like, whatever, we don't care. We have a lot of poverty. The federal government pays 90%, and so they end up with a network that is not as good as what they could have, and they just don't have a lot of incentive to fix [00:10:30] it because they're not paying the bills. And so I get concerned when we see some of this money being used in ways that I think is not super efficient, but you don't hear about that at the federal level because that's money that's mostly going to the pockets of the powerful big telephone companies. And so that's never even talked about, but I would say that E-Rate is super important, but where it fails, we don't even really talk about that. We were always focused on other things.

Sean Gonsalves (10:54):
Good point. Good point.

Christopher Mitchell (10:56):
So we wanted to talk, this is a story that I threw at you, [00:11:00] so I got this. I've been a fan of The Atlantic for a long time. They do interesting writing, but this actually, my dad sent me this article and he said, I fing knew it because in the article it talks about how isn't it odd how you get so many more phone disconnections when you're on the phone with some big company in the middle of their telephone chain, and that's when you get disconnected. It's not when I'm talking to a family member and I'm like, oh my God, I got to end this conversation. I never get disconnected randomly, then it's only when I'm trying to 45 minutes [00:11:30] into these series of phone calls to try to cancel my Comcast bill or something like that. It turns out that's intentional. It's not an accident. These people aren't incompetent that are working behind the scenes. They're often dealing with unrealistic expectations and targets that they have to make. So what do they call this? Sean, you enjoyed this word.

Sean Gonsalves (11:49):
Well, they call it sludge, but I like Cory Doctorow's word for what I think this article is describing, which by the way, this article spoke to my soul. I mean, I think it will speak to most people's soul [00:12:00] because it perfectly captures what I think is the experience of just about everyone when you've got some issue in this article,

Christopher Mitchell (12:10):
Right? Sorry, let me just, so the title of the article is "That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose". It's by Chris Colin. And as a writer, Sean, I know that you appreciate giving people credit for their work.

Sean Gonsalves (12:20):
Exactly. No, Chris did a, I'm not all that familiar with this other work, but this article was right on point.

Christopher Mitchell (12:26):
Yeah, so it spoke to your soul, huh?

Sean Gonsalves (12:28):
It did. It did. I mean, the [00:12:30] scenario he described, which was sort of his introduction, is this issue he had with, I think it was a Ford Explorer he bought and was driving, and there was a curve coming up in the road and suddenly the steering wheel wasn't working and his brakes weren't working. Luckily for him, the car kind of puttered out before it hit the curve, and then he describes all of the

Christopher Mitchell (12:51):
Right, and then it happened 20 minutes later again when he was trying to drive the

Sean Gonsalves (12:54):
Place to get it fixed. And then he just describes about going to the mechanic and then trying to talk to Ford [00:13:00] about getting his car fixed and just the whole bureaucratic corporate bureaucracy that he tried to navigate. That took six months to figure out because he had a lot of flexibility and time on his hands where he could do that. But then the article talks just about the scholarship on this area and about this whole thing that these economists call sludge, which Cory Doctorow calls

Christopher Mitchell (13:23):
Enshittification.

Sean Gonsalves (13:25):
Exactly. Which I love that word even better because it just really describes what feels [00:13:30] like the experience that we all have when dealing with these kind of things where it's not customer service, it's like customer blocking, or it's like these corporations come up with all of these internal incentives for that their customer service departments are based around, that are essentially designed to deny delay and get you so frustrated that you give up

Christopher Mitchell (13:52):
Right Now, I'm not going to keep saying the word again over and over again, but Cory Doctorow term more specifically refers to I think a service [00:14:00] that starts off really good. Often you get this sort of things that are funded by VCs. They have five or six years or however much time in which they're providing a great service, and then they got to start making money. And so they've captured you, they've driven others out of the market, and they're the only ones that do it. And then they start making the service worse and worse. I feel like that's totally relevant to this because this is an effort to just wear people down with these phone calls. And this is what we see with the big cable and telephone companies. The way he described it. In talking to the people who have worked [00:14:30] these positions and often for many years, to me, it brought to mind a conversation that we had on Connect This! recently with Kim McKinley talking about customer service.

(14:39):
And she noted rightly that Comcast customer service had gotten better over the past 10 or 15 years. And I agree with her, but she went further, and I don't know, I don't want to misrepresent her, but I feel like she was saying basically they're going to keep getting better because they're feeling this pressure, and I have my doubts. I think they're going to continue to hire people in customer service and then not empower them to really solve people's problems [00:15:00] because they don't want to make it easy for people to unsubscribe. And the Federal Trade Commission under the Biden administration was going to do the whole click to cancel thing to make it easier. I think that's been delayed. I don't think it's been fully canceled yet, but do we really think the Trump administration is going to push it through? I don't know. We'll see.

(15:16):
I think they're going to find ways to delay it. And so these big companies are going to keep screwing us over. And it's the smaller companies that ILSR, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance that we're focused on because they have better incentives. And this is something [00:15:30] you've heard me talk about many times before. A for-profit company that is a local business employing 10, a hundred, even 400 people in a community is different from one that's controlled by Wall Street that is Whether's, publicly traded or not, that has the exact opposite incentives. They don't know any of their customers. They don't really care. They don't see 'em. They don't have to deal. They're not accountable to 'em. And it drives me a little crazy that people think about for-profit and nonprofit when they need to think about the scale being involved [00:16:00] in these things.

Sean Gonsalves (16:01):
Exactly. I mean, if you've got a small, you say a small, locally based business, they actually still care about their reputation, their brand, what customers think about them, how often they come back, all of those kind of things. These bigger companies. It's clear that as this article kind of points out, it's like once they've got you captured, it used to be customers king, and now it's kind of like the only thing that matters is efficiencies from the corporate perspective and quick turnover of profits to shareholders. [00:16:30] I mean,

Christopher Mitchell (16:32):
Customer has a choice. Right?

Sean Gonsalves (16:34):
Exactly. And this is hard to quantify, but whenever we talk to end users, subscribers of municipal broadband networks, one of the things that you hear all the time is that local customer service means the world to people apart from the reliability of their Internet connection. They love being able to call somebody, a human being from that community answers, the phone and service calls are answered [00:17:00] in fairly short order. That makes a huge difference to people. And like I say, it's something that's hard to quantify, although PC Magazine, I think does their ranking customer satisfaction rankings, and that's why you see networks like Longmont and always get these high customer satisfaction ratings is because of things like that. I think people understand that sort of in their bones and this article that you picked, I mean, yeah, everybody should read it because you're going to be saying, that's what I'm talking about all the [00:17:30] way through it.

Christopher Mitchell (17:31):
And this is where I actually think this is a part of why our politics are the way they are. Because whether you're dealing with a government agency in some cases, or I think it's much more often a company, a big company that has cornered some part of the market where you don't have any other choice. You feel powerless. This even happens with games and stuff where you've been playing a game, you've been putting tens of hours into something, and then something happens and they flag your account as being fraudulent and you haven't done anything, but you set off some sensor somewhere [00:18:00] and then you write to them and you get some AI response, which is like, oh, yes, you definitely committed this infraction, but no, we can't tell you what it was and now go away and you just feel so burned and you can't do anything about it. And whether that is from a cable company, a fitness company, a bank or whatever, our game company, it feels the same way. And then you just have this rage that builds up and you just feel like, like no one, you don't have any control over your life. And that's because increasingly [00:18:30] we don't have freaking control over our lives. Right.

Sean Gonsalves (18:33):
Well, you said two things that we should also mention that as it relates to this, which is that you mentioned politics and then you mentioned AI so quickly. I think that this is going to get exponentially worse with ai, this kind of sludge, and then what we've been seeing in everybody's aware of in the news, this whole battle in the Senate over the quote, Big Beautiful Bill. But I think there'll be sludge put in there as it relates [00:19:00] to Medicaid, as it relates to Snap, where there's all of this paperwork and all these processes that are designed to discourage people from getting something that is available to them. And that's what I think the hope is, which is why I think you hear some Republican senators claim that, oh, this isn't cutting Medicaid, for example. Well, I think the whole thing is designed to get people to give up and thereby save federal government, federal taxpayer dollars on [00:19:30] these programs.

Christopher Mitchell (19:31):
Yeah, absolutely. This is something Jennifer Pahlka detailed, well, particularly in California dealing with, I think it was the unemployment program. It was her book is Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better. I've recommended it so many times. I think her interviews and podcasts are really helpful. And basically you have systems in which it's not a failure, it's not an accident that it works the way it does. It was designed to screw people over because there's a sense that if they can [00:20:00] deny half the people who are eligible for benefits, benefits, it will save money for someone and we won't have to raise taxes on whether it's middle class or higher income folks. Now, I do want to say one other thing, which is that to get back to the story is that one of the reasons you get hung up on or why you get transferred places is because if you're talking to a person who has already elevated an issue to their supervisor too many times that month, they're going to get dinged if they do it again. And so they might be pushing you off. They might accidentally hang up on you [00:20:30] in hopes that you're going to find someone else because they are not empowered to solve your problem. They are there to make sure that the company hits certain targets for how much they're spending on products they didn't properly test or things like that.

Sean Gonsalves (20:43):
That's right.

Christopher Mitchell (20:44):
And so that's all detailed in this article, which to me was you knew

Sean Gonsalves (20:49):
Every other sentence. I'm screaming, I knew it.

Christopher Mitchell (20:51):
I certainly feel that way about a vehicle that's really expensive. My family's not in a position to be like, oh, we just dropped $40,000 on this vehicle and it doesn't work. [00:21:00] We'll just take the loss and go on and get a new one that it's not in the cards.

Sean Gonsalves (21:06):
Not at all. Not at all for most people. I mean, come on.

Christopher Mitchell (21:09):
Yeah. Alright, Sean, the lawsuit that we were waiting for has been filed apparently, and I just found out about it. You asked me if we should include it as a topic on this show. Somehow I missed the 21 states plus the District of Columbia that have filed challenging the way the Trump administration is canceling the Digital Equity Act grants and perhaps entire [00:21:30] program.

Sean Gonsalves (21:31):
So this was a lawsuit, and I think it kind of just flew under the radar because there's not a lot of reporting about it. Broadband breakfast reported on it was it yesterday, and this was a lawsuit that was actually filed a week ago in US District Court out here in my state in Massachusetts. And even though it has implications for the Digital Equity Act, I'm quite sure it's interesting because apparently the Trump administration has been interpreting this Office of Management budget rule in terms of [00:22:00] how awards are granted in a way that's never been done before. And I think that is what the lawsuit is challenging. It's what 22 states? I think they're all democratically led states.

Christopher Mitchell (22:13):
21 states in dc. I don't know if we have 21 democratically-led states, Sean.

Sean Gonsalves (22:16):
Yeah, I'll see

Christopher Mitchell (22:17):
Which ones they have.

Sean Gonsalves (22:20):
So it does have implications for the Digital Equity Act, of course, but I think probably other federal grants as well in terms of all of these federal grants that are being canceled [00:22:30] or terminated that were passed by Congress. And so this is going to be a really interesting case to follow. It names like the Department of Commerce, department of Agriculture, department of Defense and Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, as well as the OMB Director, Russell Vaught. So we should really follow this carefully because it does have so many far reaching implications, including for the Digital Equity Act. But oddly enough, the suit, as I understand it, is just [00:23:00] asking for the courts to say that the Trump administration cannot use that rule to cancel these things. But what it doesn't ask for is for the money to be reinstated,

Christopher Mitchell (23:11):
Right? Yeah. I think there would be other lawsuits that are being contemplated that might be related. You are right. I would say blue and purple states. So we got New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, district of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, [00:23:30] Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. So there you one. And so there's this great article that I will link to in the Washington Post that I thought covered this pretty well, offering some background in the first Trump, they had canceled a bunch of programs and at that time the rules around how to cancel programs with that, it had to be for cause. And so there's a bunch of lawsuits and the Trump administration lost lawsuit after lawsuit because they were trying to cancel these programs without following the law. And so in November [00:24:00] of 2020, the Office of Management and Budget under Trump changed the rules, which they did using the right process so that to the greatest extent authorized by law, a grant could be pulled if it no longer effectuates the problem goals or agency priorities.

(24:14):
So this word effectuates and effectuate, you'll see over and over and over again in this. Now it turns out, and this was just people want to look it up, it's 2 CFR 200.340 (a) 2. And so the Biden [00:24:30] administration came in and they took a look at it and they adjusted it a bit, again following the appropriate procedures. And my understanding is how they left it was that grants had to have very clear termination language in them. And so if an agency like NTIA was making a grant, it had to include the terms under which a grant could be terminated. And it sounds to me like the Trump administration now is just ignoring that and just saying, Hey, broadly, these grants don't fit with our new priorities, so we're just canceling them.

Sean Gonsalves (25:00):
[00:25:00] That's right.

Christopher Mitchell (25:01):
I don't know. I mean, I haven't dug in deep enough to know what the exact cancellation terms were in the DEA grants, but I'm guessing it wasn't on the whim of someone who's going to lie about whether the program is racist or not, because this was the claim, right? The Trump administration, Trump himself, Donald Trump, our President, said the Digital Equity Act is racist and unconstitutional, and that is just blatantly incorrect. I'm not a scholar, I'm not a qr, but I [00:25:30] happen to follow law pretty closely for a random guy. And this law is pretty constitutional. I'll say that if a court found that a part of it, a small part of it that does in fact say among the eight different covered groups, one of them is improper because the federal government should not include a racial characteristic for whether or not one, it's part of a covered group, then we would have seven covered groups. We don't cancel the whole law. We just cancel [00:26:00] that one.

Sean Gonsalves (26:01):
Exactly. And also it must would come as a big surprise to say the state of Maine that the Digital Equity Act was racist. They were in line to get 35 million bucks. 89% of the state is a covered population. Why? Because it's a state, I think it's the oldest state in the country in terms of demographics, and then obviously it's a pretty rural state. And so those are two big covered populations in the Digital Equity Act. So it's kind of crazy. And as [00:26:30] a matter of fact, actually, wasn't one of the senators from Maine was one of the bipartisan co-sponsors of Yeah, Angus King was one of the bipartisan co-sponsors along with Pat Murray out in Washington, and Senator Rob Portman in Ohio, or a Republican who co-sponsored the Digital Equity Act.

Christopher Mitchell (26:47):
Yeah, Senator King and his staff have long been very smart and focused on digital issues, trying to make sure people have access. So yeah, I'm curious to see what happens. I mean, we have seen that, [00:27:00] like I said, in the first administration, the Trump administration was constantly reversed by the courts. I believe he's lost more than 90% of the court cases this year already. I think I could be wrong. I made me misremembering exactly what that stat was. I think he's the most reversed president basically in we've ever had in terms of the courts. And so it will not be a surprise when the Digital Equity Act is found to have been terminated improperly, and we hope that there will be some sort of actual accountability where the program [00:27:30] would then be able to go forward. Again, although I have deep concerns about whether how this NTIA would administer it, because obviously they find it to be odious.

(27:38):
But at the same time, we know that there's a great many people out there who vote Republican, who care a lot about workforce development, who care about making sure that people have Internet access, who want our seniors to be able to access telehealth to save all of us fricking money. I mean, this is the thing that drives me nuts is that like, and I'm going to do a little mini rant here for you. Okay, a little, [00:28:00] here it is. But when people want to talk about what our deficits and our debt and stuff like that, it's from talking about levels of taxation. What they should be talking about is how much we're going to be paying in the future to cover two diseases, diabetes and Alzheimer's, right? Or other cognitive decline. Those are the things that are going to kill our productivity, our medical expenditures and things like that.

(28:24):
We need to be doing more research into those issues because that's where our costs are going to increase [00:28:30] hugely. That's where people like me are going to have to leave the workforce to take care of my parents in a wrong kind of scenario where we don't have Medicare or Medicaid that's going to help take care of 'em because the costs are too great, and it just drives me nuts. And I'm not talking about one small group of people. People in general don't understand where our future costs are coming from and how we need to be spending a lot more on a number of these issues to try to make sure the costs don't balloon wildly out of control. That's where we should be thinking about if we're thinking smart about future money.

Sean Gonsalves (28:58):
That's right. That's [00:29:00] right. I co-signed that rant. I don't know if it was a full on rant, but I totally co-signed that.

Christopher Mitchell (29:05):
So this all comes back to Internet access though, because we know that Medicare and Medicaid save money if the people who are on them have decent Internet access, they have decent Internet access is correlated with a ton of other things and will help us to save far more than the costs of getting these people connected, making sure they have devices, making sure they're able to use those devices in a safe manner, and that's where we should be focused. [00:29:30] The rest of this just seems like games

Sean Gonsalves (29:32):
Truly. I mean, especially you mentioned telehealth, especially as it relates to telehealth in rural communities, and especially if this bill passes, lots of rural hospitals are going to be closing its doors because of it. I just

Christopher Mitchell (29:45):
Saw a legislator in Kentucky was saying that they've got a bunch of counties that don't have any hospitals, and they're going to have 35 counties that lose their hospitals is with what they're projecting. If these Medicaid cuts go through, that's a lot of telehealth that we're going to need. And Kentucky is a state that is not [00:30:00] super well connected. At and t did not invest a lot in it. The Digital Equity Act and bead are very important for Kentucky, especially if they're going to be closing down a bunch of new hospitals or a bunch of hospitals in rural areas and things like that.

Sean Gonsalves (30:13):
And that's exactly the reason why the senator Tom Tillis has been one of the only Republican senators saying, look, this is bad. And you know what? I'm not even going to run for reelection, so I don't care. I'm just going to say the truth.

Christopher Mitchell (30:25):
No, I'll say it is hard for me to sit here and I'm not going to talk about how much I like Tom Tillis [00:30:30] because he is the man who is responsible for enacting Time Warner Cable and at t's agenda in North Carolina. He is the reason Internet access is so poor in North Carolina. He was basically on the payroll of time, water cable, according to some of the documents we've seen back in the days when he was running the house in North Carolina, has done indescribable damage to the state of North Carolina, and now he's decided he's not going to defund this program. Hey, I appreciate anytime anyone steps up and does what I think is the right thing, [00:31:00] this bill, it drives me crazy. This Bill, if you remember, I have talked so many times with 20 17, 20 18, when the Republicans decided to tax broadband. The IRS had previously made it a determination that if you got money for a broadband grant, it was not taxable and Republicans without even reviewing the bill, right? These bills didn't go through committee. It was just the same sort of process of just being stuff being thrown around long bills. No one really knows what's in 'em, and they passed it without proper forethought, and now [00:31:30] we're taxing fricking money on broadband grants, and it's the same process here. No one actually knows what's going into these things. It's just, it's infuriating.

Sean Gonsalves (31:39):
It is.

Christopher Mitchell (31:39):
Kudos to Tom Tillis for standing up on an issue, and I hope that we can have, even if we have bad results, I would like results that I'm saying that I don't agree with. I'd like to see it go through some sort of rational process to be intelligent stuff that I disagree with rather than slop that I disagree with.

Sean Gonsalves (31:56):
Right? Sludge.

Christopher Mitchell (31:58):
Sludge. Thank you. Well, Sean, we're out [00:32:00] of time. I appreciate you did a great job, and I ask you to step in and be uncomfortable. I know you're going to do a great job, so I appreciate you.

Sean Gonsalves (32:07):
I sludge my way through it.

Christopher Mitchell (32:09):
Cool. Thank you so much.

Sean Gonsalves (32:11):
Alright,

Ry Marcattilio (32:13):
We have transcripts for this and other podcasts available @communitynets.org/broadbandbits. Email us at [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow Chris on Blue ky. His handle is @SportShotChris. Follow CommunityNets.org [00:32:30] stories on BlueSky: the handles @CommunityNets. Subscribe to this and other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcast. You can access them anywhere you get your podcasts. You can catch the latest important research from all of our initiatives if you subscribe to our monthly newsletter @ILSR.org. While you're there, please take a moment to donate your support in any amount keeps us going. Thank you to Arnie Hesby for the song Warm Duck Shuffle, licensed through Creative Commons.