Fixing America’s internet, with Susan Crawford

Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford explains how America’s internet connectivity issues and corrosive infrastructure are holding the country back and how we can rally to fix it. She and Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel also discuss the Huawei scandal, politicians' roles in improving broadband internet, and her new book Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  Hey everybody, it's Tim from The Rich Cast. On this week's interview episode, we have Susan Crawford, who's a professor at the Harvard Law School. She lives here in New York. She's written a ton of books. I actually interviewed her years ago about net neutrality. She was a big proponent of net neutrality, but she's got a new book out. It's called Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution and Why America Might Miss It. As you might have surmised from the title, it's a book about why we need better fiber network deployment here in the United States. She just traveled all around the world. She looked at a bunch of countries in Europe, in Asia. They have vastly better internet service than we do. And one of the reasons is they have vastly better fiber networks. We talked all about how those fiber networks are deployed, about the nature of the companies and the policies that lead to those deployments,

• 1:44Nilay Patel?

  about, this is true, about the Republican communities all across the country that are building their own fiber networks because they're just not getting serviced by the big carriers. It's a fascinating turnabout. It's exactly not what you would expect. We talked about all that. We talked about Huawei and the fact that rural carriers really need Huawei's cheap equipment to build out 5G. We also talked about 5G and what it could mean for big carriers controlling all the devices in our life. Just a wide-ranging conversation about the present and future of our broadband networks here in America and around the world. A super interesting conversation. She is so smart. It was so much fun to talk to her. Check it out.

• 2:25Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're here with Susan Crawford, who's just written a new book called Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution and Why America Might Miss It. An optimistic title to start 2019. Why write a book about fiber at this point in time?

• 2:36Speaker 03

  Well, Americans by and large don't travel a lot, but I've been privileged to go to South Korea and Japan and Sweden and all kinds of, and China, and notice that what's going on in those countries is that they just take ubiquitous, really cheap, basically unlimited connectivity for granted. And I began to dig into that and find out why that is and why in the United States we're always thinking about how expensive it is and it feels like a huge rent that everybody's paying and it feels like a luxury. So, I investigated the story. It turns out that the United States is due for a massive upgrade to fiber optic connections between, it's called the last mile, between nodes connecting to the internet and individual homes and businesses.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  And we have no plan to make that upgrade. And that's because we've got a bunch of companies in the United States for whom the status quo is terrific.

• 3:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  Who have no interest in either being subject to competition or oversight. So that's the basic picture. And, right now, you can see the crisis, but we don't have leadership in place that could change the story.

• 3:42Nilay Patel?

  So I want to dive into that, but I want to rewind just a little bit. The last time I talked to you, I think, was like 2007-ish. It was the height of the net neutrality battle. You had just written a book about Comcast and NBC. I remember you very distinctly saying Comcast should be very happy that I've written this book because it makes a great case for their business. Because your entire approach was that they had become a monopoly and they were vertically integrating content. And you're saying, okay, it's 10, 12 years later, that business is great and they actually don't need to invest anymore.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  In fact, their capital expenditure is down from years in the past. They've spent their money, they're just going to sort of soak their network and try to increase the number of premium services that they're charging for. They have no incentive to expand their lines, and they have no incentive to do this upgrade to fiber. So, what's happening is that they're able to pick off very rich areas and cities and then leave behind poor people in those cities and completely leave behind rural areas. And so we're suffering in this country from a number of intense digital divides. One is between rural and urban, that's pretty well documented. The other, also well-known, is between poor people and richer people in America. And the most scary of all, really, in this era of climate change and everything else going

• 4:58Speaker 03

  around the world, is that our relevance as a nation is under threat because we failed to take on this issue with leadership and vehemence and vigor. We just haven't done it.

• 5:08Nilay Patel?

  So, just looking around the industry right now, every telecom company is trying and fits and starts to become a content company.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:17Nilay Patel?

  Right, so AT&T buys Time Warner, it's Comcast NBCU at massive scale. I have to mention, by the way, Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, which owns what we do here, but they don't love me, so it's not a big problem. I assure you, they're not the biggest fans of me. But they own Vox Media, so if you're listening to this, it has been disclosed.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Oh, and by the way, I have no clients or consulting arrangements, just to make that clear as well.

• 5:37Nilay Patel?

  See, you're cleaner than me.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  Lucky.

• 5:39Nilay Patel?

  But my point is, that deal, years ago you wrote about it and said, "This is a harbinger of things to come." We now live in a world where those things have come to pass at massive scale.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  But there are some failures here, just to challenge you on that. So Verizon tried to become a content company, disastrously failed in a number of ways. T-Mobile bought a TV company called Layer 3, this doesn't seem to have rolled out, and they've announced some partnership to do some other silly streaming thing on top of it that doesn't seem like it's going to go anywhere. It's not like Sprint is doing it, it's not like Charter and Spectrum are doing it. Why is it these big ones are succeeding in this way and it's not happening as pervasively across? That's usually the pushback I get, is you're talking about Comcast and AT&T, which are their own companies, but these other companies aren't doing that thing.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Look, the most important part of this story is actually the access network part. And so, look hard at what Verizon is up to. They have stepped back from wireline investment because their plan is for 5G.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  To be a completely integrated and utterly controlled

• 6:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Provider of very high premium wireless, fixed wireless services. And they'll be able to pick and choose which services survive on their platform. That's the whole point of 5G. All those internet protocols that we fell in love with, they don't function in the world of 5G. This is a completely ad hoc controlled thing from Verizon. It will allow them to sell smart city services, which are high premium, they'll get a lot of money from that, in metro areas. And it will allow them to pick off some wealthy people who would like their high-speed internet access connection in cities. So, in fact, Verizon does have a plan, which is to stay with wireless, to really become a powerhouse in 5G in metro areas,

• 7:25Speaker 03

  and to, in that way, make more money from their existing assets.

• 7:29Nilay Patel?

  Right. And that's a huge push.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:31Nilay Patel?

  I mean, the amount of 5G

• 7:33Speaker 03

  Hype.

• 7:33Nilay Patel?

  Hype that exists in this world. I described it yesterday in a talk I gave, as a fake idea that everyone gets to put their own emotions on, like an inkblot test.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 7:42Nilay Patel?

  And this was a room full of marketers I was talking to, and they all just sort of nodded approvingly. They're like, yes, we can... But you're saying that 5G protocol is going to be built atop the internet infrastructure we have now and allow for more sort of service discrimination to occur.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. That's the point.

• 7:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  In fact, I saw a presentation in South Korea where Korea Telecom actually had on their slide market domination. That they're sick of being commoditized as a dumb pipe. They have other people making money from their infrastructure.

• 8:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  And 5G allows for that control.

• 8:14Nilay Patel?

  Are we just back in the cycle? I feel like

• 8:15Speaker 03

  We're doing it over and over and over again.

• 8:17Nilay Patel?

  You have AT&T saying they're not going to use my pipes for free, and now we have

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 8:20Nilay Patel?

  Korea Telecom saying we're not a dumb pipe.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 8:22Nilay Patel?

  So we're just back at the start.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  And we always have choices.

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  We could say, let's have, and let's go all the way back down to the ground. Let's have really great glass in the ground, that's the fiber optic connection, that's just blank dark fiber, but reaching, having interconnects into every home and business.

• 8:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  And then you'll be able to choose from a host of wireline providers, and, by the way, A host of 5G providers. And it's that pressure of having great infrastructure open that is deliberately nondiscriminatory and allows for a lot of retail competition that's going to change the picture. We just haven't made that step.

• 8:58Nilay Patel?

  We haven't made it as a policy set of decisions.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  Right. This is all about policy and we are in a vacuum of policy at this point.

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  So to characterize sort of where the United States is versus Europe.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:09Nilay Patel?

  Europe historically has had fiber on the ground, lots of retail competition.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Well, actually, Europe is heterogeneous. It depends where you are. So Northern Europe, I'd say, Scandinavian countries are much better at this than Southern Europe. And actually, in Germany, Deutsche Telekom has enormous power.

• 9:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  And no incentive to upgrade to fiber. They're replicating our story in Germany. And in Britain, actually, it looks like they have regulatory oversight, but in fact, British Telecom gets to choose where that structural separation is called takes place and whether competition actually will exist. And they're seeing a huge rise in cable in England as well. So it's not one thing. It really matters what country you're in, whether they've made the sensible choices that will allow them the ubiquitous, cheap access. Now, the country that we really should be focusing on is China. After I wrote this most recent book, Fiber, China is saying 80% of their homes and businesses are going to be connected to fiber.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  They're planning to be the next big market, the next place where great things come from. By the way, that market through Huawei will extend to a lot of developing countries. So their internet, their market, will be circling the globe. And the United States has no response to that in league with its usual companions. So it is an astonishing moment in telecommunications.

• 10:34Nilay Patel?

  You brought up Huawei.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:35Nilay Patel?

  Huawei is in the news all over the place right now. Obviously, their CFO was just indicted and there's some talk of extradition from Canada United States.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  A controversial company, inside of this company, to say the least.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Inside of this country. Isn't it interesting that you said company instead of country?

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  It happens all the time.

• 10:51Nilay Patel?

  I met with the sort of like chief comms officer of Huawei and she was insistent. It was actually remarkable how insistent they were that. They were not, they were separate from the Chinese government.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Right, but even when you refer to our country, you slipped and called it a company. That's, that's the point I'm trying to point out, that we've forgotten that there's a real line between public and private.

• 11:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  And the public sector has a very important role in crafting policy that serves everybody. In the depression, we began to understand that private companies left their own devices are not necessarily going to serve the public good. We've forgotten that these days, and that's why we're in this state when it comes to telecom and many other issues in America. But back, back to Huawei.

• 11:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  They are, of course, closely tied to the Chinese government. Enormous investment in their research and development was made by the Chinese government. And this is part of the Chinese 25-year plan to connect all the ports that they need to move their goods using Huawei Communications Networks to provide telecom using Huawei gear. This is not just for surveillance. It's also for economic growth and market power. Again, because this perfect control will be possible, not just in knowing what's happening on your network, but who's allowed to use it for which services.

• 12:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  That allows the Chinese government to create its own global powerhouse based on telecom infrastructure.

• 12:17Nilay Patel?

  So, we ran a story yesterday on The Verge. We went out and talked to a bunch of rural broadband providers who are very excited about 5G. Because in their mind, it gives them the opportunity to not have to run cables to these customers in far-off places. They can just beam fixed wireless to them at high speeds. And they're saying, well, this Huawei thing is crushing us. Because they're the cheapest provider of this equipment, and so now our costs are going to skyrocket.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  Right, the choice here is between profits and patriotism. It really is, because that gear is 20 to 30% cheaper because of the weight of surveillance and market control it carries with it. And you would have to resist that. And say, well, actually, in America, we want to have free flow of information. We want to be able to let anybody with a good idea launch a new service.

• 13:08Nilay Patel?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Those are our values.

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  These are near and dear to the verge.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  These are our values as Americans. And to put profit as the only value that anybody counts is tremendously corrosive and destructive. So I don't fault the rural carriers for wanting a better deal. It's just that it actually is too good to be true. It's not gear that should be in their networks.

• 13:29Nilay Patel?

  Should consumers be asking their carriers, hey, do you use Huawei equipment? Is that a market signal that will be taken?

• 13:35Speaker 03

  They should be, but because they're unlikely to, that's why it's the role of government to say something about this.

• 13:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So our government right now is in a state of, I would say, turmoil.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:48Nilay Patel?

  Particularly because of the shutdown and the FCC was literally shut down and was not doing anything for quite some time. My favorite story is that Pi, Chairman Pi himself, was answering the press email line.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Oh, I didn't hear that.

• 14:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, some reporters at Motherboard had sent in an email asking about location tracking and he just personally started responding. He's the only person left. So the FCC is in a state, you know, they shut it down. Pi's entire rhetorical argument is, I'm going to reduce the regulations and let these carriers do whatever they want. They will dump cap expenditure into their networks, explosion of 5G. I've got to get out of the way and let this thing happen.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  As a matter of fact, we know from the recent public reports the companies are making that their capital expenditure has gone down since Pi completely removed the threat of regulation from them.

• 14:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Because they've done it. They've built their networks. They just want to be able to make more money from the same assets. So not going to happen.

• 14:46Nilay Patel?

  So what is the move besides, you know, a turnover in government, a new FCC? What are the policy moves that you need to make in order to push fiber development in order to say, we need to restart? Network equipment manufacturer, I mean, there's a lot of things here. What are the, what are the set of policy prescriptions that you have?

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Well, we're already seeing a vast movement across the country that I document in this book, fiber. About 800 communities in the United States and cooperatives are taking their destiny into their own hands and raising the money through bonds, through taxes, all kinds of ways to build fiber networks that serve people at cheap prices.

• 15:25Nilay Patel?

  One of the things that you point out in the book that I think is really interesting is these are not necessarily liberal communities.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  No, not at all.

• 15:29Nilay Patel?

  These are very conservative communities.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  They're mostly Republican areas because this is just sensible. This is not partisan stuff. Again, it's about what is necessary to lead a decent life in the 21st century. And Republicans, as well as Democrats, understand that a key element of a decent life in the information age is to be part of it in a way that you don't have to worry about what you're paying for it above the price of utility and it's persistent and always operating and very high capacity. They, these Republicans and Democrats, want businesses to come and stay in their town, want the young people who are in those towns to stay there. And they are committed to this, not, it doesn't really matter what networks already exist from the incumbents in those towns because those networks aren't serving the public

• 16:14Speaker 03

  interest necessarily. And even the threat of a municipal move towards this causes the incumbents to lower their prices. So it's good all around, no matter what happens. So this is a definite point of light in an otherwise gloomy universe when it comes to telecom in the United States. There's so much local activity. There's so much just sensible interest in this subject. As people understand how different fiber access is from what we've gotten used to as internet access in the United States and appreciate both the economic and social justice sort of American fairness values that are served by having this network in place. The story is exactly like what we went through with electrification. People don't know this, but electricity was once controlled in the United States by

• 16:59Speaker 03

  a handful of companies that divided up markets and served only rich areas and left out rural and left out poor people. And what turned that story around initially was local progress. And that's what we're seeing right now in the United States. Eventually that shamed the feds and in particular FDR into taking on the issue. But the intervening Thing that happened was the depression, that people understood that unrestrained profit taking does not necessarily serve the public good, especially when it comes to things that are just utilities, like water, electricity, and, you know, clean air and all that kind of stuff. None of that happens without government involvement. This is so basic, and we've forgotten

• 17:44Speaker 03

  that lesson today. So we need both the fight at the local level, we need champions to emerge all over the country, we need local government and federal government to lower the cost of capital to build these networks. We need to make sure that people are in place who understand how important it is that they be overseen by public authorities and not bought out by private equity, so they'll continue to have these public values in place. But the government itself does not need to be your ISP. That doesn't make sense to me, actually. I want to see lots of wholesale, or it's called dark fiber networks available, that allow for fervent retail competition on top of them. It's just like a street grid or a highway system.

• 18:26Nilay Patel?

  Right. So who would own the dark fiber? Is that the government project? Is that you want a network of dark fiber providers that are restricted or regulated away from owning the vertical stack?

• 18:35Speaker 03

  We've always relied on private companies in the United States, really alone among developed nations. We've always relied on private companies to provide us with telecom, but burdened with public obligations. So for me, what matters is the public obligation, not the locus of ownership, although you have to make sure that whoever owns it isn't gouging the retail providers, but just charging a reasonable nondiscriminatory price. I've seen this work so well in other countries, because that's the way you engendered competition in telecom.

• 19:08Nilay Patel?

  Just to be clear, the dark fiber is, some company would come in, they would lay a bunch of fiber, they would not be using it. Another company, a retail provider, would come in, light up a circuit to your house and say, "I'm your ISP now."

• 19:19Speaker 03

  Right. And there would be many choices of those retail providers. That has to be the case.

• 19:22Nilay Patel?

  This is the dream, by the way, is that, you can see it, there's glimmers of it in mobile, where you open up the cellular tab of an iPad, and it's like, "Here's four providers, and here's all the prices listed." And you're just like, "I want AT&T for 24 hours," and your SIM card lights up, and it goes up. Like, every time that happens to me on a trip with my iPad, I'm like, "This is how everything should be all the time."

• 19:42Speaker 03

  Yet even those providers are in a pretty constrained market and they've all got caps on data.

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  A lot of them and overage charges and, you know, networks that aren't quite equal. So if you get better infrastructure in place, those choices get better and better, too.

• 19:56Nilay Patel?

  And that obviously reduces consumer costs.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 19:59Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're going to take one quick break to hear from the sponsor. We'll be right back.

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• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  All right, and now back to our conversation with Susan Crawford. So, you know, just talking to you, what's super interesting to me is I had Tim Wu on several weeks ago, totally different subject. He's wholly focused on antitrust law right now.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:29Nilay Patel?

  He wants to break up Facebook. Nothing to do with putting fiber in the ground. Susan just rolls her eyes, by the way, just so everybody knows. But that's where his mind is.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:38Nilay Patel?

  So radically different subjects. But both of you said something, and I just want to try to connect the dots. Both of you talked about the quality of life in America.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:47Nilay Patel?

  And related it very much to concentration and profit-taking, especially by tech companies and telecom companies.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  Why do you think that thread is so powerful?

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Something is profoundly wrong with the way we're living in America right now. It's characterized by grotesque inequality. And we're noticing that, but that's a symptom of this underlying loss of a sense of the difference between public and private, that actually, as a public, we want everybody to have respect.

• 22:16Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  We don't want to redistribute income necessarily, but you want to give everybody a chance and an adequate and decent life. So both Tim and I are talking about the bundle of things that go into that respect.

• 22:28Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  That are common in other countries, but because we've fallen in love with profit as the only thing that matters, we've lost track of those values. You can see it, though, in the subway this morning. People treat each other with respect. Everybody, you know, you don't elbow other people out of their way. If someone falls down the platform, you help them. Americans are actually like this. We love chatting to everyone around us. We want them to have equal value. But somehow, in our public, like the bloviators class, everything is about making more money, as if, you know, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

• 23:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  Which is so out of whack with how life actually proceeds in a thoughtful, compassionate way, that the people who move between levels, maybe that aren't so rich, and notice what's going on in the country, and are worried about what's going to happen in the future, are really concerned about this, and looking for the levers they can pull that would bring things back into a more stable.

• 23:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  And freer state for everybody concerned. Because actually, even for rich people, this isn't a great time, because they feel they have to build gated communities. There's a lot of fear of the other, and that all comes from this loss of public values. So Tim and I are both attached to this.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  And it's the truth, and we're right. It's just a matter of what steps, what kind of turbulence we're going to go through before we come out the other side.

• 23:58Nilay Patel?

  What is particularly interesting to me, and Again, these are radically different conversations. But what's interesting to me, and I think what makes this like a verge thing to talk about, is I love to talk about 5G and I will talk to you about the screen size of a phone and the number of pixels on that screen for hours and hours. We literally do that every week. But the actual quality of the lives that we lead is now in the hands of a very increasingly smaller number of very large corporations that are making decisions about what we can experience. And it seems like access competition, like you and I have been talking about access competition for like a decade.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  And I'm just wondering, why hasn't that message gotten through? That we actually need a range of internet providers and if you have massive competition, it's probably fine for T-Mobile to subsidize Spotify and Verizon to subsidize Apple Music because the consumer can make some sort of informed choice. But if you don't have that competition, you actually need, at a policy level, to make some rules about how people can experience what's on the other side of the access. Why is that message just, it just doesn't, we just have this argument over and over and over again?

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Because it's not visible to people. It's not clear, which is why I wrote this book, to make it really apparent what's going on. It takes a few sentences, takes a few beats, you gotta pay attention for a little while, and we're not that great at doing it.

• 25:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  You know, when you see something like the Dust Bowl and dirt rises up from the plains and floats into the offices in Washington DC in May 1935, everybody noticed that, it's visceral. We haven't found a way to make this issue a collectively visceral policy problem. But the temperatures are rising for this one because more and more people are noticing, and these individual fiber networks are helping this, that life doesn't have to be like this and are jealous. So getting mayors jealous of each other is part of the first step here.

• 26:01Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. And helping them and then having people give them air cover as a policy matter. To fight back against the blandishments and outright mischaracterizations promoted by the telecom ministry.

• 26:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  But it's hard. There's so many places where there's fuzz and confusion. We have terrible data being given to the FCC about this.

• 26:21Nilay Patel?

  It's all self-reported, right?

• 26:23Speaker 03

  You know, and it all comes down to this, that people talk about this choice between heavy government oversight on the one hand and a completely free market on the other. But in fact, we've got the worst of both worlds. We effectively have a private government run by just a handful of companies.

• 26:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:40Speaker 03

  When it comes to this crucial issue for the entire country. Electricity used to be the same. We changed it. We should be able to change this issue as well.

• 26:48Nilay Patel?

  It does seem like the economy is on a turn. We are in a, you know, in a moment when you have a resurgent Democratic Party that's talking a lot about income inequality, right? You have these little quivers in the market. Do you think that's enough or does something yet more have to happen?

• 27:04Speaker 03

  There is so much ahead and sea level rise plays a big role in this. So it's kind of a slow-rolling crisis. What is government good for? Is anybody actually leading the kind of life they want to in America? Does it become too unsafe? Do we become, do we start to feel more like Rome as a country than anything else with our corroding infrastructure? I don't want to wish a crisis on my fellow man, but it does seem that we're heading towards some sort of correction. I happened to watch Jimmy Carter's Crisis of Confidence speech recently. He gave that speech in the summer of 1979. He said, "We're heading towards

• 27:47Speaker 03

  a more fractured world. We don't care about public values. What's going on?" And of course, that sort of doomed him as a presidential candidate.

• 27:54Nilay Patel?

  [laughing]

• 27:55Speaker 03

  But he was telling the truth and we are always sailing towards it. But we would need an actual sharp crisis to change the picture.

• 28:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Because everything's so incremental and not felt. And I'm not sure we'll, we'll change unless there's a, a real jolt.

• 28:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know, you don't think of a bunch of people saying, you know what, actually screw this. I'm going to stop using Facebook today. I'm going to cut the cord. I'm going to just use, I'm going to go find a market vendor that provides me with a clean connection. That's what I get told. Like, if enough people want this, the market will deliver it.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  It's very hard to get to that direction because I look at my friends' kids' pictures on Facebook and a lot of people do that. What we actually need is a terrific set of leaders.

• 28:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  The only reason we have a federal highway system is that Eisenhower, Republican, after the First World War, happened to be stuck in a convoy crossing the United States, trucks and cars. It, they all got stuck in the mud. It took them, they went, it took them two months. And they went at about six miles an hour because the roads were so terrible. And he really felt that.

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  And that's what gave him the sense that, oh, we need a federal highway system. We don't have anybody like that right now in the public sphere who really feels these issues and has lived them and can speak persuasively without worrying about being attacked and undermined by the companies. We don't have that in the moment.

• 29:18Nilay Patel?

  I was literally over the holidays, I was at my mother-in-law's house and it's rural Illinois. And she's paying like a hundred dollars a month to AT&T to get 20 down and three up. It's a ton of money.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  A ton of money.

• 29:31Nilay Patel?

  And I actually said, you know, Comcast is here, like, I'll figure this out for you. And the switching cost is so high.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, she literally was like, well, then I have to get like a new TV service. I'm fine. I don't, I don't need this thing. And the only thing that's going to convince her is that we can't FaceTime her with

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:45Nilay Patel?

  Our, our kid.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  Human presence is the killer app.

• 29:48Nilay Patel?

  I constantly think about, what are the things that make people want the next thing? That's going to open up this range of possibilities. And it is very much like photos of children.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:57Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's like just that simple.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:00Nilay Patel?

  And it, that's the thing to me where you see the big carriers and I, I don't think they know that people would use more of their services. I don't think they've made it, they've made that mental connection.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  Well, Comcast has. That's why they have that data cap right up there at terabyte.

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Because they're seeing data usage go up. Thirty percent a year or more. So they, they do know that people want more data and they are ready to make more money when they actually do use more data.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  When they hit that cap.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  They tell, they tell me that no one ever hits the cap.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Uh, more and more people are getting closer and closer. And it's just, so to draw the historical analogy again, the only reason domestic uses of electricity became really popular was because we had a world's fair where everybody went to see what was possible using electricity. Before that, people thought of electricity as only good for a single light bulb in their home. You know, they didn't, you plugged your appliance, if you had one, into the light bulb socket. So, so, and they were rolling an electric kitchen around the Irish countryside in the mid sixties. It takes people a long time to understand all the appliances they could be connecting to this network. When the appliance becomes human presence at a distance with your family, or your doctor,

• 31:12Speaker 03

  or an educator, or a job, that is going to change things. But people haven't seen that yet. We don't believe things until we see them.

• 31:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  So places like Chattanooga and Wilson and Louisville and these towns that are actually insisting on having fiber all over the country, that's going to slowly change the story.

• 31:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know, it's funny, on the other side, like the other hat I wear is like the consumer product reviewer.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:37Nilay Patel?

  And you're, you're just describing like this slowly incremental change. People are going to start figuring it out. They're going to start understanding they need to build these things. And then on the other side, you know, there's any number of companies that come in here and they're like, we have, we built a wifi light switch and everyone's going to buy our hundred and ninety nine dollar wifi. This is a story on our, our website today. For those companies to succeed, they're reliant on you having a clean connection into your house because otherwise the cloud service won't work. And then yet the third factor is with 5G, the carriers are saying, we're going to put a smart home in your house, we'll manage it at the network level for you.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:12Nilay Patel?

  You know, AT&T will sell you a security system today. It's full of Huawei tablets, by the way, which is deeply hilarious to me, like cheap Huawei Android tablets. They just seem like a botnet waiting to happen. But you just have all these forces converging on like the, the individual home.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:30Nilay Patel?

  Right? Can you, can you become your own sysadmin and build your own smart house and your house is now a computer and you run it and you've like integrated all these products from Amazon and these other little vendors for the light switches and light bulbs? Or are you going to let some carrier come in and do it for you and charge you some fee on top of it? And all of this requires massively more connectivity, no matter how that market shakes out. And it just, it doesn't seem like that demand is being realized on the other end. Like, hey, if we're, if AT&T is gonna do smart homes in everybody's house on 5G, we need to deploy 5G across the whole country just to have a market.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  Actually, AT&T is probably figuring, as is Verizon, that metro areas are enough.

• 33:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  And richer parts of those metro areas are enough. These will be very premium services. That's the whole game here, to charge more for more.

• 33:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  And if you have fewer people, you just need to charge even more for more. So that's the game. It's not, there's nobody saying they're gonna blanket the entire country.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  And just, so just take your example of the individual homeowner and how much depends on a great network, and then change that to every policy we care about as a country. If we want people to get a great education, we want great healthcare, if we wanna make sure that we're dealing with climate change and moving climate refugees and all that kinda stuff, that requires a great network across the country that really reaches every American. And that's the decision we made with electricity, it was gonna serve all of our policy goals, we just haven't made that flip yet when it comes to extraordinary connectivity. And because it's not extraordinary, it's not extraordinary. You could get, you know, gigabit symmetric access in these Asian countries for, you know, a reasonable amount, 30 bucks, 40 bucks a month.

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  That's crazy.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  No big deal. And we can't imagine that. And yet, we're, we think we are so exceptional as a country, that of course, things are better here. But anytime you leave and go see what's going on in the rest of the world, it's just not the case.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But the, the classic argument is, this country's too big. South Korea's very small. You know, you can just like unspool one roll of fiber and you got everybody. This country's too big, we can't possibly do it.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  Somehow, we managed it with electricity and the telephone system.

• 34:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  And our phone system was the envy of the world when it was rolled out.

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 03

  You know, Sweden has the same density as the United States. Korea has a lot of really rural areas. They have blazing connectivity, you know, and they just rely on it. Everything just works.

• 34:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  In our country, things are not working. And we need that leader or set of leaders to show up who says this is a huge problem. For from a national security standpoint, big problem. From a resilience as a country standpoint, from an economic growth standpoint, we need to be able to use our big market as the sandbox to develop the new things for the next generation. We're not in that position right now.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  So if you're a Vergecast listener, what can you do? How can you participate? That's usually the next thing people always ask, right? How can I participate? How can I push? What are some steps you can take besides buying your book, which is now on sale from the other universities?

• 35:24Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Well, the book does really try to spell this out in a very approachable way with funny stories. What you can do is find out at a local level who's doing what. Because often, people just don't know each other who really care about this issue. So have a meetup in your town. Get a neutral place like a university, you know, seminar room available and meet and talk about what's happening. Get the mayor in. Make sure this is a question for every candidate running for office. What are you doing? What do you plan to do? Raise the temperature for this one.

• 35:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Because the problem is there we're so passive, we're just consuming media and not actually acting to make sure we all have a better life, that politicians are short term and feel as if they have no air cover to do anything about this. And that, we know, is not the case. If all of America got exercise, we can do almost anything. And we're gritty and spunky. We can do it. So getting involved at the local level is the first step. Forcing it onto the political radar screen is the second step. And ensuring that it's an issue for the 2020 presidential election is the third.

• 36:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I can't wait to hear Trump talk about fiber deployment in a debate. During the last one, we were just like, all right, he said cyber again. Somebody figure out what that means. So hopefully it comes up. Hopefully, hopefully it all shakes out. But I'm very excited that you came on to talk to us about it. I know our audience, the Vergecast audience, deeply cares about this stuff.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  Oh, that's great.

• 36:51Nilay Patel?

  It's bizarre that we have a big audience that wants to hear about policy implementations about fiber, but I'm glad you came and talked to us about it.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 36:58Nilay Patel?

  Thank you so much, Professor Crawford. We'll have to come back soon. We've got to keep it not years this time.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  Okay, not years, totally not a decade.

• 37:04Nilay Patel?

  Thank you so much.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 37:06Nilay Patel?

  So I'm Susan Crawford. She's so smart. It was so much fun to talk to her. You can buy her book Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution and Why America Might Miss It wherever you buy books these days. We also have a bunch of stuff for you to read on the site. I want you to check out AI Week. We have an entire week-long package of the state of AI, where it's going. It's super interesting. We just did a story about how AI is helping people detect cancer. Check that out on the site. You can also check out Better Worlds, which is our science fiction project, imagining hopeful futures. So this brought you down, we can lift you back up. That is on the site. It's on YouTube. It's in the Verge Extras feed. And we'll be back on Friday with another Vergecast. We hope to see you then. Talk to you soon.

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