Disconnected & Disempowered, Part One: Appalachia's Digital Desperation
“A failure to act will leave Americans catching up”
If you’re reading this, it is probably because you are accessing the internet.
If you’re reading this on a computer, it means that you are in a household that has at least one computer and it has internet connectivity. If you’re reading this on a phone, it means you have a cell phone service and probably a smart phone, wherever you are.
In either case, you are voluntarily able to participate in the digital world. You are digitally sentient. You could be called a citizen of the digital world. Maybe you even feel like you are a "digital native".
No matter what you call it, many people in West Virginia and Appalachia are not even voluntarily able to participate, even though their lives depend on it more and more every day.
West Virginia, and Appalachia as a whole, is severely behind in terms of how many citizens we have who can voluntarily participate in the digital world. And that puts us severely behind in any 21st century economy, as a state and as a region.
This is something that every politician in America seems to fundamentally understand.
For instance, Chris Dickerson at the West Virginia Record reported in June 2020 that West Virginia’s staunchly pro-Trump Attorney General Patrick Morrissey “joined a bipartisan coalition of 39 attorneys general in urging Congress to ensure that all Americans have adequate internet connectivity as part of any additional legislation that provides Coronavirus relief and recovery resources.”
Dickerson’s reporting continues:
‘A failure to act promptly will continue to leave millions of Americans struggling to catch up,’ Morrisey joined in writing a letter to congressional leaders. ‘And the importance of broadband has skyrocketed just at the time when so many Americans are struggling financially – more than 30 million unemployment claims have been filed in the last two months, a harbinger of the recession to come.’”
Thirty-nine attorneys general signed this bipartisan letter because it polls well. It polls well because it’s a visceral issue for voters, and not just young voters.
As Dickerson reports:
“In their letter, the AGs ask Congress to provide state and local governments with adequate funding expressly dedicated to ensuring that all students and patients, especially senior citizens who are at risk, have adequate internet-enabled technology to participate equally in online learning and telemedicine.
Additionally, the coalition asks for increased funding to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission Universal Service Fund. They say it would provide vital funding to rural and low-income populations, healthcare providers and educators with the goal of bridging the digital divide.”
What this boils down to is a bipartisan consensus agreeing that state and local governments need more funding to expand access to broadband because
students need it,
patients need it,
seniors need it,
rural populations need it,
low-income populations need it, and
the unemployed need it.
That’s a lot of voters.
And even from a ‘good of the country’ sense, they all agree that “a failure to act will leave Americans catching up.”
And they’re right!
Looking at the state level, it's clear why broadband is a political buzzword in West Virginia. According to census data from between 2015 and 2019, there were ~15% of households in West Virginia that didn’t have a computer at home, and ~25% of households didn’t have a subscription to broadband internet during the same time period.
The picture gets bleaker as the analysis gets more granular. The ACLU-WV released an analysis in August 2020 that used census data from 2014-2018 to create “map images showing Internet access, device ownership, income level and racial makeup of Black and Hispanic/Latino people by county.”
In Logan County, the analysis showed that "nearly 20 percent of households have no Internet or access to a computer, smartphone or tablet" as of August 22nd.
But Logan County isn’t even the most desperate, as ACLU-WV reported,
“In Pendleton County, schools are pursuing traditional, in-person instruction while also allowing a virtual option for students. About 35 percent of households there lack Internet access or a computer, smartphone or tablet. As Hampshire County evaluates their approach for the 2020-2021 school year, a similar percentage of households remain without Internet or technology devices.
In Mingo County, where Black people make up a relatively high proportion of the population, nearly 25 percent of households have no Internet or access to a computer, smartphone or tablet. McDowell County has the lowest median household income in the state, and about 30 percent of households remain without Internet or technology devices.
To make matters worse, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to have dramatically impacted these numbers. With widespread unemployment and economic upheaval, households across the United States are experiencing income loss and possibly lesser access. In April, about half of lower-income Americans reported household job or wage loss due to COVID-19. Roughly one in five homes in the country lacked either a computer or a reliable connection for online work.
West Virginia is one of the least broadband-connected states in the country. It also consistently ranks among the poorest states, with the fourth highest poverty rate in the nation as of 2018. The state’s median household income was about $44,097, which is $17,840 below the national average. According to the 2017 Census, nearly one in five West Virginians and one in three Black West Virginians lived in poverty.”
Echoing the 39 attorneys general, U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito from West Virginia wrote to the Federal Communications Commission in December 2020, declaring that “[t]he COVID-19 pandemic has proven that access to true broadband service is no longer an optional luxury, it is a core component of everyday life.”
If it wasn’t clear before, the pandemic should have made it clear as day: broadband is a necessity for families, for business, and for community in the 21st century.
If we are serious about wanting to attract the best talent, to bring WV’s expats back, to attract new businesses to West Virginia, and to foster a competitive economy for the rest of the 21st century, we need to be serious about bringing WV into the 21st century when it comes to broadband and connectivity in general.
But it seems like most of what is happening is that politicians are scheduling meetings to schedule future meetings that will check up on a tax-payer funded project being conducted by a private firm to figure out the feasibility of connecting rural communities.
WV Public Broadcasting reported on the latest motion ‘forward’ to remedy the situation:
“Frontier Communications agreed Wednesday to quarterly meetings with the House Infrastructure and Technology Committee, as well as the creation of a liaison between the company and the committee for constituent complaints.”
The agreements come as Frontier is wrapping up a national Chapter 11 bankruptcy process, and a few months after the Federal Communications Commission announced it would award the company more than $247 million over the next 10 years for broadband deployment, through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).”
In other words, the WV House Infrastructure and Technology Committee got a bankrupt company, Frontier Communications, to agree to have four meetings a year and to hire someone to listen to constituent complaints.
Frontier agreed to this modest commitment just four months after the FCC agreed to shovel a quarter of a billion dollars ($247 million) to the bankrupt company over the next 10 years. Frontier, a bankrupt company, is getting those federal dollars so it can upgrade the infrastructure that it neglected for the past decade.
It’s not no-strings: Frontier has to raise its own capital of $250 million.
But it’s a pretty good deal: the taxpayer-funded federal government foots half of the bill to upgrade a bankrupt company’s infrastructure, so that, in the best outcome, the bankrupt company can get more customers; or, more modestly, just so that the bankrupt company can offer reasonable service to their existing customers.
That’s the kind of deal that only could have come from the FCC under the leadership of Trump-appointed telco swamp-monster Ajit Pai.
Obviously, investment is needed. But the model of "throw public dollars at the private sector" won’t solve anything.
More on why that won’t work, and what needs to happen instead, in a coming post.