My summary

I often am asked by urban planners why I'm looking at a rural phenomenon (rural infrastructuration). I'm not, really, of course. I'm interested in how communities (irrespective of space and/or place) plan for broadband expansion. For the most part, the funding mechanisms for these sorts of public planning projects have addressed the rural aspects of the broadband challenge, because RUS has gotten most of the $$.

Without question, what I'm hearing from the interlocutors in today's meeting is a genuine interest in redefining how the broadband challenge is taken on by the federal government. A big funding mechanism is pointed at rural America, but the need is by all means not exclusively a rural one.

More Broadband Stimulus Live Blogging

Great questions from participants, focusing on redefining and allocating spectrum, allowing for in-kind contributions from local and state governments, platform neutrality.

Most of the questions are geared toward criteria. The answers are typically skirting specifics, stressing comments regarding suggestions for criteria. I.e., no one has nailed anything down yet, it appears, at all.

How will we determine effectiveness? Everyone is soliciting input regarding developing metrics. For example, a stated goal is "innovativeness". But how do we measure that, as Seiffert quipped, "Are you three times more innovative than me?"

Question focusing squarely on urban-rural. Fellow from right here in MontCo asked what a suburban wireless provider should do. A disproportionate amount of the broadband $$ are going to rural areas. Deutchman uses this as a plug for FCC's mapping project. In future, funding allocations will be geared toward definitions of underserved vs. unserved (aha, more contested terrain).

More on the Broadband Stimulus

All the interlocutors in the discussion portion are stressing the ways in which the governmental structures that will be at work in implementing the broadband portions of the stimulus.

That is to say, Seiffert keeps stressing that the nature of the collaboration among FCC, the USDA's Rural Utility Service (RUS), and the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) are up for grabs. That is to say, part of the infrastructuring that is occurring centers on the presently inadequate federal structures. Right now, RUS, FCC and NTIA have been funding mechanisms whose missions were suited for the times in which they originated. Broadband is rendering certain hypostasized and often obsolete structures of these previous epochs in stark relief.

It'll be interesting, in other words, to watch and see what, if anything, changes about the governance of broadband. Right now, I'd say follow the money. The NTIA got the biggest piece of the pie. They're steering most of the stimulus dollars (that makes it a hopeful signal that Seiffert is stressing the need for collaborative grants).

But is USDA really where broadband should be driven in the 21st Century?

What I Think of the Broadband Stimulus So Far

Here's what I think makes a lot of sense:

a) NTIA and RUS are obvious funding mechanisms for the investments being made. While the majority of the funds being released are heading to rural American infrastructure development RUS (more on that in a moment), there seems to be some reason for this. RUS has been developing actual, physical networks (power, phones, now broadband) for quite some time. They have institutional capacity.

b) Seiffert makes interesting point: As the ARRA stipulates, the NTIA's mandate is to address questions of "underserved and unserved", while RUS's is to deal with "urban and rural, focusing on the rural". How these distinctions are negotiated (if not politicked) will, in my estimation, be the crux of the success (or otherwise) of this broadband program.

Live Blogging the Public Mtg on BBand Initiatives

You can watch, too!

Meeting will be (or was) webcast.

The presentation began with a welcome from Anna Gomez, acting Administrator of NTIA.

Next Tom Vilsack, Sec of Ag: private sector, all levels of government should work together to find new models for implemention. "It's fair to say that we are not as far along as we need to be."

Key stakes: competitiveness. Creating platform to make the US competitive. "Very important technology that every American needs to have access to".

Next Michael Copps, acting head of the FCC: "at long last a proactive broadband buildup for our country"

Obama feels extending broadband to four corners of this country is key to country's future. For past seven years, FCC has received reassurances regarding pace of telecommunications development. But as recently as last week, US has received news that it continues to fall behind.

"Years of broadband drift and growing digital divides are coming to an end"
"Broadband is the central infrastructure challenge of our time" Then an excursus on previous epochs "eras of private enterprise supported by progressive public policy".
"We lost precious time."

FCC has important role to play. "On April 8, FCC will kick off an open, participatory, public process" to deliver a national broadband strategy within the next year. "Will seek out a range of traditional and non-traditional stakeholders to be heard."

And then, Rick Wade, Senior Advisor to NTIA:

Goals a) Extend broadband across US: spread "pipes" closer to need, allow private sector to serve public via these.
b) Jobs
c) Connect community anchor institutions (libraries, schools, health care centers, etc)
d) Stimulate demand

Develop proposals for funding across sectors, regions, and communities. "Are working to ensure that broadband capacities and needs of local communities are known"

Broadband Internet technology will create jobs both in the near and long term.

Next, programmatic stuff.

a) Dr. Bernadette McGuire-Rivera, Associate Administrator, NTIA Up to $350 million on broadband mapping and planning
Up to $200 million on demand ("sustainable broadband planning")
Just about anyone who meets the criteria can apply (i.e., all levels of gov't, private sector, non-profits, etc).

b) David Villano, Assistant Administrator for Telecommunication Programs
RUS has got over $2 billion in budget authority, meaning it can be deployed as grants or loans. Will thus attempt to use large portion to leverage additional funds.
Purpose of RUS throughout its history has been to spur economic activity and development.
Focuses on rural populations.
RUS is well-equipped and experienced for this sort of budget allocation. USDA Rural Development

c) Scott M. Deutchman, Acting Senior Legal Advisor to Acting Chairman Copps, FCC

d) Mark Seifert, Senior Advisor to NTIA lead roundtable. Made an appeal for rapid efforts to define what should determine what "best" proposals are, should focus on, etc. Moreover, he asked for recommendations regarding making the collaboration among FCC, NTIA and RUS work.

QUESTIONS:

a) Are multi-jurisdictions or groups of organizations going to receive priority? Answer, no preference, but multiple applicants are encouraged. Then, Villano suggested that grants across agencies are specifically encouraged.

b) Will number of towers and/or wired buildings information be included in the mapping? Answer from Deutchman: not ready to explain specifics, but goal will be granularity. Seiffert then suggested that suggestions for how best to leverage mapping technologies would be encouraged (hmmm. grant idea).

Infra-Economy: Braudel's Structures of Everyday Life

So back in the Winter, I re-read Fernand Braudel. I had encountered the early portions of The Structures of Everyday Life before. But this time, I believe I found what I was looking for.

For some vague reason, I've been pondering quite a lot the origins of capitalism. The basic logic is this: I'm thinking these days about infrastructure (and how things become infrastructural). From the STS crowd, I've come to appreciate that infrastructure is characterized as much by humans, norms, and institutions as it is by specific technological artifacts. So, as I considered the large infrastructure projects that characterize (indeed, usher in) the modern era, it's hard not to wonder where the cart and where the horse should go.

So I began thinking about capitalism generally as a framing device, an infra-infrastructure that foregrounds the construction of canals, road systems, railroads, etc. And that led me to think about Braudel. Well, first I was thinking about the Hanseatic League (i.e., the emergence of free cities that had for themselves a bevy of infrastructure problems and set about addressing them). But my curiosity about the League, as a protocapitalist set of institutional arrangements, is really curiosity about the origins of capitalism. Or perhaps I'm still interested in the League, but can't find a good overview or history in English (let me know if you have any recommendations).

Okay, so what do I find in Braudel? His explanation of his enterprise: In the emergence of modern economies, we really witness the rise of several economies. The one we study in textbooks, the economics of "production and exchange", comprises those economic activities that are readily observable. And hence, economics confines itself "within this privileged arena".

But Braudel is interested in "another, shadowy zone, often hard to see for lack of adequate historical documents, lying underneath the market economy: this is the elementary basic activity which went on everywhere....This rich zone, like a layer covering the earth, I have called for want of a better expression, material life or material civilization."

The things we take for granted in the study of economics that focus on the former, readily formalizable topics are in fact wholly reliant on the latter, inchoate realm of everyday life. Braudel refers to it, in fact, as the "infra-economy," providing already a set of "active social hierarchies" upon which the market economy could base itself.

Relating this basic position for a moment to the process of infrastructuration, consider for a moment the famous example of marketing automobiles in the hinterlands described by Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch ("Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States," Technology and Culture, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 763-795). The appropriation of cars as mobile power units rather than as transportation devices is an example par excellence of the law of unintended consequences. Or really, unintended repurposing. But what Braudel's approach bids us to consider is that the world of latent demand is framed by everyday life. In other words, system-builders construct based on their perceptions of this vie quotidienne.

New Time; New Channel

It's been a while. Time to re-engage the blog of a season of hibernation. Here's a short list of topics I aim to tackle in the coming weeks: a) theory: how do both the literature on planning and the infrastructure literature differ and converge in my project on broadband? b) methods; I've been investing immense amount of time learning how to evaluate the spatial data at the heart of my empirical claims c) policy: there are quite a few big decisions in the pipeline at a federal and state level that relate to my academic work.