There’s a 2010 episode of The Office where the bumbling Michael Scott illustrates how bad he is with money: “This has not be a blockbuster year for me financially. My Blockbuster stock is down.”
Even then, we were well past the beginning of the end for the video rental chain that once boasted 9,000 outlets across America. Nowadays, as the Washington Post reported in April, there are only about a dozen Blockbuster outlets left – all in rural areas without affordable, reliable, Netflix-ready Internet.
These last few Blockbusters are more than just relics of a dead empire, however. They are symbols of America’s failure to expand Internet freedom to everyone, no matter where they live.
The breadth of the rural-urban divide is something most of us didn’t realize, until Donald Trump captured the nation’s attention and the GOP nomination, and made a best-seller of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Nowadays, headlines such as the Wall Street Journal’s “Rural America Is the New ‘Inner City‘” continue to drive the difficult conversation.
As the pace of digitization has accelerated, rural communities have not kept up. It’s estimated that 34 million Americans live in communities without access to broadband Internet. Of those, 24 million live in rural areas.
Many of these people probably wish there was a Blockbuster near them. But it’s about way more than streaming Netflix and YouTube.
Better Internet would help farmers reduce waste, save water, and maximize yields via cloud computing. Those of us on the coasts need to remember that someone grows and harvests the food we eat; it doesn’t come out of thin air, but the Internet can, if we use TV white space.
Huh?
The main problem with expanding broadband Internet is that connecting small, sparsely populated areas with broadband-ready cables is prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, and difficult. It doesn’t make financial sense to do it.
White space is a much cheaper solution, if the FCC will get on board. It is the unused space on the radio frequency spectrum, such as buffer zones between channels or channels that aren’t used at all. By piggybacking wireless signals over white space, ISPs can provide Internet connection to anything. Since TV signals are so powerful, we can reach almost anyone in America – even extremely remote areas where mountainous terrain makes laying cable almost impossible. (That would be “hillbilly country.”)
The fusion of white space with the Internet is not an experiment. Hospitals, megachurches, theaters, and the NFL already use it at their own venues.
The benefits to such a plan are legion. Internet connectivity in rural areas would have applications to help law enforcement, health care, and education. It could turn the tide of jobs leaving rural areas by connecting companies with employees in less expensive areas – so American companies could start outsourcing to America.
Last month, Microsoft President Brad Smith announced his company’s Rural AirBand Initiative, a non-profit, public-private partnerships that aims to bring high-speed Internet to 2 million Americans within five years. As part of the initiative, Microsoft wants to reserve at least three white spaces in every network. Microsoft will pay the upfront capital, then recoup the costs by revenue sharing. A lynchpin in Microsoft’s plan is the use of white space.
The FCC oversees the nation’s television channels–they’re the ones who can free up white space and allow plans like this to go forward.
Recently a bipartisan coalition of congressional members added their voices in support. Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) drafted a letter to FCC Commission Ajit Pai and others, urging them to preserve three useable 6 MHz channels in every market around the country, giving ISPs the white space to piggyback their signals. The letter has signatures from 41 members and was co-led by Republicans Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Austin Scott, Mark Meadows, and Darrell Issa; and Democrats Peter Welch, Mark Pocan, Suzan DelBene, and Anna Eshoo.
President Trump vows to get rid of unnecessary regulation. His maxim of “one in, two out” promises to free the private sector from cumbersome, outdated interference that will help revitalize the domestic economy. The huge gains in the stock market are a sign of investors’ confidence in the Administration, and this plan is an easy way to turn that confidence into realty. Freeing of TV white space would be great news for everyone.
Except, of course, for those last few Blockbusters.
Jared Whitley is a political writer and Washington operative who has worked in the Senate, the White House, and the defense industry. His works have also appeared in The Hill, The Daily Caller, Investors Business Daily, and Cracked. He currently lives in Dubai.
