Girding for the Last War

One Last Comment on the 3/10 Hearing:

We're using the army that fought the last war. In many respects, the last time the federal government was used to stimulate demand for a networked infrastructure was 70 years ago, during the Great Depression, with the creation of the Rural Electrification Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority. In other words, the federal agencies that are taking the lead on broadband deployment policy are themselves artifacts of political and policy dynamics with long pedigrees.

At a public hearing regarding the broadband infrastructure allocations occasioned by the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) on 10 March 2009, officials played their cards quite close to their chests. The three agencies involved in distributing over $7 billion toward increasing broadband access and adoption, themselves haunted by the ghosts of funding cycles past were reticent to overindulge specifics. Rather, they called eagerly upon "traditional and non-traditional stakeholders" in an effort "to ignore no sector of our national life".

I argue that this focus on soliciting public input is a helpful thing. After all, who are the agencies involved? First there is the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) within the US Department of Commerce. NTIA didn't come into being until 1991, when Commerce's Office of Telecommunications absorbed the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy. Probably streamlining made sense, but this does give one a sense of the newness of the program. Now NTIA is taking on a big task, dispensing the largest chunk of the broadband dollars to establish the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), an agency that has yet to be created to dispense grant dollars and loans based on criteria that are yet to be determined in pursuing goals that are, in many respects, still under development (but we're hoping for jobs, right?).

The Rural Utilities Service (RUS), within the US Department of Agriculture, will dispense over $2 to provide grants and loans with similarly unspecified criteria is itself a legacy of the Depression. RUS got its start as the Rural Electrification Administration.

So we are being led out of the present malaise by an antique and in many ways obsolete federal structure. RUS is in a strong position to administer funds, of course: it has been funding rural projects for decades. There are many reasons why it makes sense to funnel money through a proven conduit.

But then again what we see at play in the broadband portion of the recovery package is the effect of last year's army. By dent of attempting to address the broadband challenge as one with a rural and an urban component, RUS is enacting what my good buddy Cory Knobel calls "ontic occlusion". The existing bureaucratic structures, since they are overdetermined by the past, are overdetermining what will happen next. It is ever thus, of course, but we may be watching it in action.

That said, one legacy of REA that is being reawakened is its focus on grassroots planning and implementation. More on that later...