Why the Founding Fathers would want us all to have fast Internet

Yahoo Finance Video

Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 7:35 AM

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: High-speed internet, it is nowhere near the fast lane on the information superhighway. At a time when a lot more Americans like all of us here are working from home, we need faster and more reliable internet now more than ever. Our Editor in Chief Andy Serwer wrote about this very subject over the weekend. Good morning, Andy.

I was reading your article over the weekend titled, "Why the Founding Fathers Would Want Us All to Have Fast Internet." I'd say it was an awesome headline. It definitely made me click.

Tell us about-- you went on to opine about your own situation up there in Maine. Tell us what you're experiencing.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah, first of all, how's my shot? I've got to be close to the camera. I've got to make sure that I don't have any other applications open. And then most importantly, I've got to check on my kids and see if they're not on at the same time. And, of course, they take priority. Dad, I'm on a call, right, like it's their world, not mine.

So in any event, I was talking to a friend of my daughter's about this. And she's in a home in Rhode Island, grown kids with parents both working, and she said it best. She said the internet at my house is like a war, right, and it shouldn't be that way, Alexis. That's the point of my article. It shouldn't be that way. There's not enough broadband to go around for Americans.

And this has always been the case, but pre-COVID it was just about, oh, someone's doing Netflix and someone's playing a video game. Big deal. Now we're talking about people's jobs, we're talking about people's schooling, and we're talking about telemedicine. So it's mission critical, and we are behind, and COVID has now exposed it for what it is.

BRIAN SOZZI: Andy, is there a solution here?

ANDY SERWER: Public-private partnerships. That's the only way we're going to get this done right now. I mean, we can talk about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and their satellite systems in a minute, but right now-- you know, I understand where the ISPs, the Internet Service Providers, are coming from. They're saying there's no ROI. In other words, there's two major underserved communities here. We're talking about-- let's be honest here-- low-income neighborhoods in urban areas, people of color primarily, and then also people in very rural areas. And when you're looking to set up in these areas, the economics just don't work for these companies.

And they're not nonprofits, right? They have shareholders. That's the way our economy works. So what that means is the government needs to get involved. That's what happened to a degree with electricity and with water. So in other words, you're seeing companies with electricity that are public utilities, and water is a completely different system as well. And we need to have access to these types of-- to broadband in the same way that people have access to electricity and water in this country.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: What about some of the big players in this space like, you know, Google, Apple? In tech I'm talking about-- even Elon Musk. I mean, do they have a role to play in all of this and helping us with our high-speed internet, do you think?

ANDY SERWER: Well, yeah. I mean, the biggest companies are our parent company, Verizon, and AT&T, et cetera. Of course, Alexis, and Google is also involved as well. Then there is the Comcasts and, you know, the old-- what is it? Spectrum I guess is, right-- is the company now that is the Time Warner Cable descendant. And my company up here is a company called Consolidated Communications. I mean, there are actually hundreds of companies that provide internet and broadband.

When you're talking about-- there's two pieces of the big tech companies. Number one, it's a little bit ironic to me that Washington, DC, is going after privacy and going after internet security and the safety to the elections when those issues don't even matter to huge parts of this population because they don't even have internet or they don't even have fast-enough internet to really have these be problems. So that's number one.

Number two, some of the tech companies like Google in particular are providing internet. And then we mentioned Bezos and Elon Musk. They are both working on satellite systems to provide broadband, primarily to rural areas. Bezos has got something that's connected to Amazon, not Blue Origin, his satellite company. And Elon Musk's is called Starlink, which is connected to SpaceX, his space company there, and they both are working with the government and skipping right ahead and going into this business.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, Andy, well, your shot's looking pretty good today, so maybe the kids aren't on the Wi-Fi? I don't know. But thanks for your article.

ANDY SERWER: [INAUDIBLE]

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: It's a really valid point.

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