OK, I guess I'll talk about how to generate randomness in a more certifiable manner. OK, so this is joint work with my former student, Thomas Wydic, who is now at MIT. OK, so what's the main question? So we are given some source of randomness, and we want to certify that the output is truly random. OK, meaning it's independent, identically distributed. OK, so if these are physical dice, then it's clear what you do, right? You collect samples, you check that they are uniform. But the problem I really want to talk about is where these dice are sort of figurative dice. These are some sort of physical random number generator. So out of which you want to generate, say, 10,000 random bits. And this device has memory, so it's not like these dice where you toss them many times, and the dice don't remember what you tossed before. So now how do you verify that the output is random? OK, so here's a model for it. So you're given some black box. You don't know what's inside it. All you get to see is this 10,000-bit output. And because 2 to the 10,000 is so large, let's just abstract things away and say that you only get to use this device once. So you get as output one 10,000-bit number. And now you want to certify either that it's random or it's not. So that's your task. Let me spell out the rules of the game a little more carefully. So I said it's a black box. But let's say that you're even allowed to say what should be in this black box. So you can specify exactly what goes into the black box, except that the person who made this black box may not listen to you. So what's inside the black box is either what you said or it's something completely different. You don't know. OK, you use the box only once. And now you want to test the output. And the two conditions you need to satisfy are that if the box was manufactured according to your specifications, then whatever testing you do, the output should pass that test with very high probability. Moreover, if the output passes your test, then no matter what's in the box, the output should be statistically close to random. So these are the two conditions we'll ask for. So what I'm speaking about is sort of a philosophical question. Actually, if you want to look at random generators, they go back a long way. So in the very first commercially available general purpose computer, I think this was back in 1951, was it? So Alan Turing, he was involved in trying to build a physical random number generator. And ultimately gave up. And so this first computer did not have a random number generator. And I don't know if any of them since then have had one. But they recently, in the last few months, Intel announced that they have a new processor for which which will actually generate random numbers, true random numbers. In a feature known as IV bridge, whatever that means. Okay, so why do we want to do all this? Well, I guess you all know random bit sequences are used all over the place. But the requirements for these random number generators, the random sequences depend on the application. So in cryptography, you care about not just randomness, but also privacy, or same for game theoretic protocols. For physical simulations, you don't care if the random numbers are secret. You just care that they are random enough, etc. Right, for many of these applications, pseudo random number generators are sufficient. But there are security issues and once you use a pseudo random generator, of course you prove that it has these strong security properties. If you use a cryptographic one. But then your conditions on the seed become even more stringent because now it's not clear how much correlations in the seed are going to hurt you if you expand out the randomness. So again, true random number generators would be ideal, but they suffer from various problems, including the, so there are problems just finding good sources of randomness that you can exploit not just once, but repeatedly over time. And the random number generator has to work over many, many conditions. And really, the underlying at all there's this philosophical question, which is what I outlined, which is how do you test, even if you built the perfect random number generator, how do you test whether it's good? So that's what we, that's the, so really this talk is focused on the philosophical question, can we or can we not test randomness? Not on the, not on the practical versions. Okay, so there was a computer science approach to this problem that was taken starting in the mid 80s. And this approach sort of took this view of trying to find sort of conceding that we cannot really test for randomness. But, but instead, what we, what we could do is assume that we are given a device which was not perfect. So somebody built a device and they guarantee us that there's some randomness in the output. Whatever that means, right? And now the question is how well, how best can you use this through algorithmic means. So, so the, the way this was modeled by say, was by saying that the output is not independent on bias bits, but it's highly correlated, low quality randomness. And moreover, it's controlled by an adversary, right? So the adversary sort of, you know, is, is, is told the minimal conditions that we require from the, from this, from this box. Meaning the amount of randomness that needs to be output. And subject to that, the adversary can do the worst that they can to thwart your algorithm. Okay, so now there are two ways you can use these low quality sources of randomness. One way is to assume that you have multiple, say, two or more such, such devices. And that you're able to physically isolate them from each other. So they don't talk to each other. And now the question is given the outputs of two such devices. Can you, can you find and find a way of combining these outputs to efficiently create a string which is very close to uniformly random? So that's, that's one way you can use this, these, these devices. The other way is we are what, what are called extractors. So you, you take the output of this box, you add in log n. So if there are n bits of output of this box, you add in log n truly random bits. Whose source we, we are agnostic about. And then you massage these two together to get, get an output, which you again prove is, is extremely close to random in total variation distance. Okay, so those were the, the, the two approaches. So now, even though, you know, I don't know if this argument was made formally, but, but clearly it seemed like, you know, the, the extractor seemed like the end of the road, right? Because what else can you do, right? You, you've got to assume some randomness, you know. So this was the, you can, you can imagine everybody who worked in this field went through this mental process sort of saying, you know, you have to assume some randomness in the output of the source. And extractors make only minimal assumptions about the min entropy of the source. They assume log n truly random bits. You know, this amount seems essential. So, you know, maybe these are, these are the best results you can hope for. So it turns out that you can do, you can get past this, these seeming barriers using quantum mechanics.  So if you want to generate randomness, you should use, you should use quantum mechanics. So that's not the issue here. The issue is not, how do you generate randomness? It's, it's the, the question is how do you certify that what you've generated is truly random, right, without assuming what went into the box? And so it's a bit of a surprise that, that you can actually more than a bit of a surprise that you can get past these barriers to in a quantum world. Okay, so let me give you a little bit of a background about the kind of quantum phenomena we'll, we'll, we'll need to think about for this, for this purpose. So the, the phenomenon that we, we have to, we'll exploit is called quantum entanglement. So quantum entanglement was initially, you know, the, the, the, the first people to think about it were Einstein, Pardalski and Rosen in an attempt to show that quantum mechanics was, you know, was an incomplete theory. Right, so I'm sure you all know that Einstein did not, didn't really like quantum mechanics. It didn't sit well with him. There's this famous quote of Einstein's about how God doesn't play dice with the universe. So, so quantum entanglement was, and this EPR paradox was what was invented by, by, by EPR to, to try to show that there are holes in quantum mechanics, right? It's incomplete. So quantum entanglement is what Einstein called spooky action at a distance. Where he said it in German, where it sounds much more pithy and but, but okay, that's what it meant. And it was actually a Schrodinger who, who sort of distilled the notion of quantum entanglement from, from this paper. And then he made this really interesting statement for that time, you know, very forward looking where he said, I would not call entanglement one, but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics. The one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. So this is really quite remarkable for that time. Okay, so now in, in one other very interesting thing, you know, so these papers have both came about in 1935. And it was, it wasn't until about 30 years later that John Bambell realized that in fact, there was a consequence to entanglement. You know, that, that, that instead of doing thought experiments like EPR did, you could use this as a basis of a real experiment, that there was actually a consequence to entanglement, which distinguished it from the classical, from, from classical correlations. That there were these non-classical correlations that entanglement gives rise to. And therefore that, that, that, that quantum mechanics is incompatible with this local realism view of, view that Einstein was trying to promote, right? So there was, there's actually an experiment you can do which tells you one way or the other. This experiment has been done many times with, with increasing accuracy and, and every time it's been done, quantum mechanics seems to come out. Okay, so, so, okay, so, so what, what I'll describe to you is this bell experiment. But in a, in a more modern form, which is much cleaner. It's called a CHSH game by, after it's inventors. So the game is this. Alice and Bob, you know, are given input bits X and Y. And X and Y are chosen uniformly at random. They are asked to output bits A and B. And what they're trying to do is maximize the probability that X times Y equal to AX or B, or the sum of A and B mod 2. All right, so, now if you, if you think about it for, for a minute or two. You can easily convince yourself that if Alice and Bob were classical, the best thing they could do is just output zeros. Because three quarters of the, of the times X times Y is zero. And they'll agree with that. And there's, there's just no helping the one quarter. No matter what you do, you can only make things worse by trying harder. And on the other hand, if Alice and Bob shared entangled qubits, then they can achieve a success probability of cosine squared pi by 8. Which is, which is about 0.85. Okay, so this, this is, this is really the, the, you know, this is essentially what's called the Bell inequality.  But classically, you know, more than just classically, you know, any local theory of, of a certain kind, you can't do better than 0.75. Quantumly, this is what quantum mechanics predicts and it's much larger. Okay, so since this will play a bit of a role, let me, let me actually describe how this, how this goes. So, by, by saying that Alice and Bob share entanglement, here's what I mean. So, so, you know, sort of the canonical entangled state of two qubits. Is this maximally entangled state, the Bell basis state? It's, you know, you have your two qubits in the state. Superposition of 0, 0 and 1, 1 with equal amplitudes. And now this state has the property that if you, if you measure the first qubit, then you see 0, 1 with equal probability. If you see, measure the second qubit, you see 0 and 1 with equal probability. And this doesn't have to, you know, none of this has anything, the fact that they are in this entangled state has nothing to do with the proximity of the qubit. So these qubits could be very far apart, they could still be entangled. Right? Okay, so now, the question is what happens if, if, if these qubits are very far apart? You measure the first one. And then before light has time to reach the second one, you measure the second one. What, what would happen? Well, so, well, first of all, what would happen if they are next to each other? Well, you know, so if you measure the first one and it's a 0, turns out the second one will also be a 0. Same for the, you know, for, for if it was a 1. The point is that this, this happens no matter how far apart the qubits are. And this is something that, that bothered Einstein greatly because it seemed to say that, you know, the, the signaling faster than light. Well, actually what, you know, here, here's the actual phenomenon that's even more disturbing about these qubits. You know, so far you could say, well, you know, who's to say that, you know, who's to say that this description was correct, that the state was 0, 0 plus 1, 1. It may be, maybe the state was, you know, with probability half it was 0, 0 and probability half it was 1, 1, right? There's no, nothing, nothing that strange about that. But now, okay, so, so, you know, so, 0 and 1, these are orthogonal states in a two dimensional complex vector space, right? That's what, that's what quantum states are, they are super positions or linear super positions, which can be written as vectors, right? And so, so now you could, you could choose a different basis, a different orthogonal basis, a rotated basis, UV, right? And, and that's a perfectly good basis, so you could try to write out the state's psi in this UV basis. It turns out, no matter which orthogonal basis you pick, the state looks like equals superposition of u, u and dv, okay? Meaning that if Alice was to, were to measure her qubit in the 0, 1 basis. Well, then she'll see 0 and 1 with equal probability. Sorry, let's, let's back up. So, so meaning if, if Alice were to measure in the UV basis and Bob were to measure in the UV basis, they'd always get the same outcome. Right? Now, okay, so, so here's another fact. Here's, here's something you can think about. Let's, let's, let's just back up a little bit and talk about this a little more. So it turns out that these, you know, there's 0, 1 basis in the UV basis. So especially if you take theta equal to 45 degrees, right? These are, for, for a qubit, these correspond to something like position and momentum, right? There's an uncertainty principle between them. So if you, if you're in a state of where, where the bit is certain. You're, you're either in this 0 state or the 1 state. Then in this 45 degree basis, you are maximally uncertain, right? In vice versa. So, so if we call this the, the bit and call the other one the, the sign, right? Then there's an uncertainty relationship between bit and sign, which says that you cannot know both of them with certainty. And in fact, there's a certain minimum uncertainty between the two, okay? So now you could, you could say, well, isn't there a way to get around this uncertainty principle by using entanglement like this, right? So I'll take my particle. I want to know both the bit and the sign. So I'll entangle it with another particle. And then I'll move them very far apart. And then I'll measure the bit here and the sign there. And since they both have the same bit and sign, they have the same state. So I'll figure out both these quantities and get bypass the uncertainty relation. So, so the point is, this is not how things work. So if you, if you work it out, it's actually very different. So, so when you work it out, okay. So Alice measures her qubit in the zero on basis. So she got some outcome. Let's say it's a zero. So now what does Bob see? Well, the point is, as soon as she sees a zero, Bob's state is a zero. Because that's what we said, right? If she, she gets a zero, he gets a zero with probability one. If he were to measure it. So his state is zero, okay? So now, if you, if you, if you were measuring the state zero in this UV basis, right?  So it has nothing to do with the original, you know, sign of this state. The state's got changed and now that's how it works out. Okay, so, so the, the, the, the lesson from all this is that if, if Alice and Bob measure in different bases, they, they, Alice and Bob share this, this bell state. Then the chance that they see the same outcome is cosine squared theta, where theta is the angle between their, their bases. Okay, so how do you play this CHSH game? How do you, you know, let's go back to the CHSH game and see how Alice and Bob using entanglement would actually get cosine squared pi by it. Okay, so, so remember again, the game is, okay. So now Alice and Bob share this entangled pair of qubits. Alice gets an input random, random bit x, Bob gets random bit y. They want to produce A and B with this, with status, which maximize this probability. Okay, so, so here's what Alice and Bob do. Well, if Alice does this, if x is zero, measure in the plus pi by six bases, meaning rotate the bases up by pi by six. If x is equal to one, measure in the minus three pi by 16 bases, Bob, if y is zero, measure in the minus pi by 16. If y is one, measure in the plus three pi by 16. Okay, so why, why, why on earth do they do this? Well, they do this because, you know, you pick these numbers so that, you know, there are four choices, right? For, you know, four pairs of choices for Alice and Bob. You make sure that the angle between Alice's and Bob's choice is exactly pi by eight in three of these four choices. The ones corresponding to x times y equal to zero. And it's, it's what? It's three pi by eight in the last case, where x times y is one. If x times y is zero, the two bases are pi by eight apart, if x times y is one, the two bases are three pi by eight apart. In the first case, the probabilities are equal with probability cosine squared pi by eight, which is what we wanted. In the second case, the probabilities are different with probability cosine squared pi by eight, which is what we wanted. But because this is pi by two minus pi by eight. So you get the right answer. OK, so it smells of an STP, doesn't it? So you can show that this is optimal, that you can all achieve any better than this in quantum mechanics. OK, so now let's sort of unroll back to where we started from and let's see what this might have to do with random number generation. So there was this beautiful observation made by Colbeck in his PhD thesis a couple of years ago. So he said, suppose you play this game. And suppose you were to test that, you know, suppose somehow you were able to test that the probability x times y is a plus b mod 2, you know, the probability that of this is greater than 0.75, right? Meaning that you're in the quantum regime. You can't any longer be in the classical regime. Well, then you know that the output couldn't possibly be deterministic. So why do you know this? Well, because remember, if this protocol were deterministic, then, well, at least you know that A and B both can't be deterministic, right? Because if they were deterministic, then in particular, they'd be classical, and then the 0.75 bound would hold. So by saying that the bound is greater than 0.75, you know that there's some randomness in that. You couldn't possibly do this without randomness. So that might suggest that you could generate random numbers and certify them, right? So you run this game over and over again. You test to see if the outputs violate this 0.75 condition, the Bell inequality. And if you do, then you know the output must be random. There must be some randomness in there. And then if there's randomness in there, you can always use an extractor and get that randomness out in a nice form. So there's only one problem, which is that doing all the tests seems to require much more randomness than this whole procedure produces in the first place. So that seems to be the rub. OK, so then last year, a group of people, this was a very, very long list of authors, because it also included some experimentalists. So Peronio et al, published this paper in Nature, where they showed that there's a protocol where you can use only order square root n, truly random bits, to generate these inputs x and y. So now imagine, so you have Alice and Bob. They share entanglement. You play this repeated CHSH game. You input xi, yi. You get that output ai, di. And now what you do is you generate these xi, yi. It's not truly at random, but in some pseudo-random way. And then you test whether the output satisfies the CHSH condition. And if you do that, if it passes that test, then there are, well, theta of n bits of n entropy in the output. So this means that you can use an extractor to convert this output into order n bits, theta of n bits, which are pretty close to being truly random bits. So now you can ask, well, can you do much better? And so what we can show is that there's actually a protocol which uses log n, log 1 of epsilon, truly random bits, to generate these inputs, so that some kind of simple CHSH based test, some variant on the CHSH test, if it's passed, then the output must have theta of n bits of smooth min entropy. And therefore, an extractor can be used to get theta of n bits, which are epsilon close to truly random bits. So if you want epsilon to be 1 over poly, you need log squared n truly random bits, too. OK, so now you can ask, well, how convincing is the fact that the output is random? So what's the model in which one certifies that the output is random? So here's the model. The model is the output is certifiably random, provided first the outputs pass that simple statistical test, which is this CHSH-like test, with some counting and so on. The other thing you need is that no signaling is satisfied. So the two boxes really cannot talk to each other. So for example, you just shield them from each other, or if you want to be that certain, if you want to base it on physics and principle, then you make sure that you do these measurements so close together that light didn't have a chance to go from one to the other. Now you don't have to have this no signaling condition imposed on the entire sequence. It's only for local pieces. So when you're doing these local measurements here, then you can all signal for a little while, and then again for a little while. So between these segments, the boxes can talk to each other if they want to. So in some sense, but the important thing is to believe that the output is random, you don't have to believe in quantum mechanics at all. The quantum mechanics is required only to generate these kind of conditions. Because what we are saying is, classically, you won't ever see these conditions satisfied. But if you see these conditions satisfied, you don't have to believe quantum mechanics to know that there was randomness. Just these conditions show you that the output was random. So basically, you have to believe relativity. You have to believe the simple statistical test. You can be a quantum skeptic. Einstein would have believed this. So now you can go on and you can sort of ask, well, OK, that's all very well. You get randomness. But is it also secure against quantum adversaries? So remember, there's this whole question about if it's a cryptographic protocol you want the randomness for, then it's not enough to be random. It also has to be secure. So nobody else should be able to guess that randomness. So now you turn through cryptographic eyes, you sort of look at everything adversarily. And you say, well, whoever made these two boxes, that person could be entangled with these two boxes. That person could share entanglement with both these boxes. And so it could be the case that even though that person cannot prevent these boxes from generating randomness, that person might be able to guess what the output of these boxes is. Or guess enough to sort of break the security of this random number generator. OK, so now there's a slightly more involved protocol which uses slightly more random bits to generate the inputs. And then there's this enhanced CHSH-based test such that if the output passes the test, then with high confidence, there are order n bits of smooth mean entropy in the output, even condition on Eve's knowledge. So now what that means is that if you use a quantum extractor to take these bits and boil them down to their essence, then you get theta of n bits that look one over poly n close to uniform even to Eve. So there are a couple of related papers which show something very similar. What they show is that if you look at this original Peronio protocol, it also achieves a quadratic expansion against quantum adversaries. So meaning that the original protocol also has this property that it's secure against quantum adversaries, but it only, of course, expands the input by a quadratic factor. But now once you have this kind of protocol, you can compose it. And so you can take two pairs of two boxes, which don't communicate with each other, and you can use those to achieve an exponential expansion. So let me do a sketch of how the protocol works. So here's how the protocol will work, the inputs. Now the question is, how do you design the inputs to this box? And you want to design them using very little randomness. So here's how we'll do it. We'll break up the input into blocks of some small size cave, or the log squared n. And the bits within each block are all constant. So if the block starts with a 0, it's all 0. And if it starts with a 1, it's all 1. Moreover, almost all the blocks are all 0s. So you almost always give inputs 0s. Except once in a while, you give random inputs. So there are very few random blocks, pairs of blocks, which you call the bell blocks. And for these, you pick a random input here. So this bit randomly turned out to be 0. So you make all these 0s. You pick a random bit here. It turned out to be a 1, so you make all these 1s. So overall, only log 1 over epsilon of the blocks contain these bell blocks. And the total number of blocks is order n log 1 over epsilon. And now what you do is test that the CHSH condition holds in every block. So the blocks are long enough that if the boxes are acting as advertised, then they'll pass these tests with very high probability. So by the way, the idea here is that the boxes are being prevented from cheating by the fact that we've interspersed these very few random blocks in there. Those are the check blocks. And since we are checking every block, the output of every block for the CHSH condition, these boxes don't know where we are going to test them. And so they are forced to behave well on every block. So we are testing on each block. So the chance that it passes the test is exponential in log squared n. So it's 1 over poly n. And now they are only n blocks, so the chance that you fail is 1 over poly n. So why does this work? So here's how you read it. Suppose that B's output doesn't contain much min entropy. So suppose it's not really that random after all. Well then, there must be some block such that if you condition on all the outputs that came before that block, then this particular block must be almost completely predictable, at least on input 0. So there must be some blocks. Since most of the blocks are 0s, there must be some block such that if the input is 0 there, the output is almost certainly some determined value, which is a function of what was output in the previous box. More or less. So this is sort of an easy, well, it's one of these easy statements to formalize. It's not something that you want to do because it's a little, you have to work out some numbers, but it doesn't work. OK, so now, given this condition, what we'll show is that the existence of such a block violates no signaling. OK, so how do you do that? So what we'll do is we'll play a guessing game. So Alice and Bob play the guessing game like this. So it's the same setup as before. They can't communicate with each other. They share entanglement. Alice gets an input with x, random 0, 1. Bob gets a random input with y. And then the task is Alice must guess y. So since they're not allowed to communicate with each other, the maximum chance she has of doing this is a half, so if you can prove that it's bigger than a half when you have a contradiction. So that's what we'll show, that there's a contradiction. OK, so how do they do this? Well, they simulate the protocol until they get to the chosen block. Just before the chosen block, they stop the protocol. And then they exchange all the information. So Alice says, output such and such and such and such. Bob says, actually, Bob needs to say output this, this, this, this. He tells Alice this. And then they say, OK, now let's start our guessing game. So they put up the barriers. They don't talk to each other again. Alice gets x, Bob gets y. And now Alice knows that if Bob got a 0 for his next block, then his output is almost surely b1 through bk, some deterministic function of his previous output. We're also assuming that CHSH is satisfied in this block, which you can assume with high probability. So now, since Alice got input x, she just uses x, k times. That's her new block. And she obtains an output a1. OK, so remember, why are we doing all this? Because, well, if they were really playing the CHSH game, this makes no sense. But we are saying, no matter what they're doing. So now these are some, you know, Alice and Bob are doing something crazy. We are just simulating them. And we are going to show that there's a contradiction. So Alice inputs x, k times to obtain this particular output. And now what she does is, if the distance between her output and Bob's output, the hamming distance, is at most 0.2 times k, then guess y equal to 0. Otherwise, guess y equal to 1. Where 0.2 is something that's safely above 0.15, which is 1 minus 0.85. So now, the claim is that Alice succeeds in the guessing game with probability very close to 3 quarters. How do we know that? So let's look at the two cases. The first is, so Alice doesn't know what bit Bob got, right? Why? So let's assume y is 0. If y is 0, in this case, Bob almost surely outputs b1 through bk. And then, because they satisfy the CHSH condition, each of Alice's bits is equal to the corresponding Bob's bit with probability about 0.85. So the hamming distance is going to be about 0.15 times k. And so in both cases, whether Alice gets a 0 or a 1, the string she's going to output lies within this ball of radius 0.2 times k. So now let's look at the other case, y equal to 1. Well, in this case, we have no idea what Alice doesn't know what Bob output. So let's just call that some string b1. So now, if Alice's input is a 0, her output is still going to be very close to b1 within 0.15. So her output is expected to match each bit of Bob's output with probability 0.85. But if input is 1, her output matches each bit with probability close to 0.15. So in one of the cases, her output is within a distance of 0.15. In the other case, it's at least 0.85. So these two output strings, their distance by the triangle inequality has to be at least about 0.7k. So now I claim that there's no way that both of these can fit inside this ball of radius 0.2k. They're just too far apart. So at most, one of them fell in there. And so Alice did correctly on this y equal to 1 case. So that's probably half that she's correct. And on the y equal to 1 case, well, one of the two cases, she got correct. Because she must have answered one or at least one of them. So she's correct with probability at least 3 quarters. So now there's a lot of room to play. Because to get the contradiction, we just wanted to beat a half. But I was very sloppy in this argument. I was assuming that Alice could exactly guess Bob's string and so on, and that you were exactly at 0.85. So you can now weaken all these parameters, and everything works out. So now how do you move on to reasoning about security against quantum adversaries? So if you look back at this argument, the crux of the argument was that if B's output does not contain much min entropy, if it's not very random, then there must be a block which is almost deterministic. And then you can exploit it to get an advantage in the guessing game. But now in this quantum adversary situation, we are conceding that the output is random. All we are saying is that we want to prevent Eve from guessing that randomness. So for contradiction, we'd have to assume maybe the output is completely random, but Eve can predict what it is, or she can predict at least a bit of it, or she can predict some of it, too much of it. So now it's clear that we can't use the previous approach, because we can now say there must be some block that's deterministic. OK, so here's the approach instead. So what we do is we use a particular, OK, so we have the reason based on a particular extractor. So we are going to take the output, Bob's output, and we are going to run it through a particular extractor, which is an extractor against quantum storage. So this is Traversan's extractor using a particular code, the TXR code. And then we'll show that if Eve can distinguish the extractor output from uniform, then actually what Alice can do is she can provide a little bit of information to Eve, information that's available to her from her output alone, together that allows Eve to reconstruct the entire output of the extractor. So this is the so-called reconstruction paradigm that Traversan extractor follows. Except that in that reconstruction paradigm, if you're doing it in a quantum setting, you have to do a measurement to get each bit. And then if you're doing it in a quantum setting, when you do a measurement to get one bit of the output of the extractor, that ruins Eve's state. And then it's not clear that you can get another bit. And so you sort of have to these particular extractors using have somehow the right properties so that you can actually do all this and work all this out. But once you do this, then we are back in business and we can use the guessing game to derive contradiction. Now the interesting fact is that the use of this particular extractor was for the purposes of proof. Because once you prove that the output of this extractor is really indistinguishable from random, you've actually proved that the output of the, you know, Eve's output, even conditioned on Eve's knowledge, has a lot of min entropy. So once you know that there's a lot of min entropy, you can use any extractor you want to get that randomness out. So I guess one could get into a lot of open questions. Well, maybe in terms of the usual open questions, maybe the only one that I'd mention is, so as I said, at least in the simple setting, the number of random bits that you need in order to make all this work is log n times log 1 over epsilon. Now, it's completely, you know, it's sort of, if you think about it for a little while, it's clear that log n random bits are necessary, right? So because if you're going to do any kind of testing, and if you don't have any randomness at all, then the manufacturer of the boxes knows exactly what testing you're going to do, and they can tell you exactly what you want to hear, right? So clearly you need some randomness, and if you work through it, it's clear that you need log n bits of randomness. Now, whether you need the log 1 over epsilon is not clear. So that's one of the questions. But more generally, I mean, sort of getting away from the parameters and sort of these kinds of open questions, I think there's something more interesting at play here, which is, and I don't know quite what it is, but somehow I think that there's some interesting interplay between entanglement and randomness, no signaling. So just as the CHSH game provided these new insights into quantum mechanics and locality, I think there's some kind of insight to be derived by looking at this further, and not in exactly this way, but in some imaginative way. Thank you.


Second Tank Battalion's DFT to Fort Stewart, really the significance of it is the closure of SR-10 in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. We looked through all the east coasts and we found Fort Stewart as a good base to not only fire but to also work on some of the other capabilities we have in the battalion that needed exercise. The priority of training out here was the tank crew ranges. The next priority was maneuver training for the tank platoons and tank company. Then we looked at how we could potentially train our H&S Marines. We didn't only focus on tank gunnery, tank skills, we used this base to its full capability and got training for the whole battalion which includes the 500 Marines and sailors of this battalion. I'm always impressed with them. They stay motivated even being away from the family for 37 days. We just got back from an ITX before we rolled out here. We can go out here and do stuff that we can't do back home. It's definitely a test for them but so far I've seen them persevere, rise to the occasion and it's been a great experience. Overall it's been a phenomenal opportunity and I think it's a benefit to the platoon and to the company and ultimately to the battalion and I think we'll leave a better unit from here than we were when we showed up.


Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us today this afternoon for our Berkman Klein luncheon. I just wanted to remind you that this is being recorded and live streamed. So keep that in mind if you choose to participate in the Q&A session at the end. And also a reminder that you can tag us on Twitter at bkcharvard and at ollie underscore Christopher. I'm thrilled to introduce you to Christopher Oli, an associate professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, and a faculty fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society. Thank you all very much for having me today.  My talk today is based on four years of research into rural broadband and rural broadband policy that's going to become part of my new book called Farmed Fresh Spectrum, Rural Broadband and the Future of Connectivity, which is going to be out next year with MIT Press. And what I want to talk about today is actually the conclusion of my book. So there's going to be a spoiler, so you don't have to go out and buy it now. Where I argue for the need for a comprehensive national rural broadband plan. And to get us there, though, I want to start with a little bit of background about rural broadband in the United States. So rural broadband is having a bit of a moment in contemporary American political discourse. The lack of connectivity in rural areas is a key issue amongst rural residents. A frequent talking point for rural representatives and terms like the homework gap, digital deserts and digital distress have become common phrases while industry associations and researchers, local and state officials and the Federal Communications Commission are grappling with the disaster that has been broadband mapping. Taking heed, the FCC recently announced a $20.4 billion funding program for rural broadband called the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, or ARDOF, and a $9 billion program for rural 5G deployment. Joining the FCC, five presidential candidates have released plans to connect the countries unconnected. The most ambitious of these is Bernie Sanders, which would see $150 billion in grants and assistance for publicly owned municipal fiber systems. So in short, this country is about to spend more money on rural broadband than any other telecommunications program in history. And this is certainly needed as the statistics paint a rather disappointing picture. A rural urban digital divide that has not only failed to shrink despite billions of dollars of yearly investment, but is set on growing with the deployment of 5G in major urban centers. If things do not change, rural America will be left once again unconnected and underconnected. The federal government spends roughly $6.5 billion, $6.4 billion a year specifically on rural broadband deployment that is subsidizing private providers to connect rural communities where no market rationale exists. It is estimated that it will take somewhere between $61 and $150 billion to connect every home and business with fiber, or roughly $300 billion to connect us all with 5G. But I want to argue today, and I'm gonna argue in my book, that simply throwing money at this problem will not solve the issues that exacerbate the rural urban digital divide. Instead, it tends to replicate the existing inequalities inherent within our current rural broadband funding programs. And these include a definition of broadband that fails to account for current, let alone future needs and usage, a dreadfully inaccurate broadband map, a naive commitment to the policies of technological neutrality, preferential treatment for the largest telecommunications providers, a 5G strategy that is only suitable for rural centers, and a failure to recognize municipalities, cooperatives, and local communities as local digital champions. So the overarching issue facing the rural urban digital divide is not about technology and nor is it about money, it's about policy and politics, or rather, the lack of policy and the abundance of politics. It's the politics of incumbency that allows CenturyLink and Frontier to garner millions of dollars a year in subsidies and then fail to live up to their commitments. It's the politics of technological neutrality that allow ViASAT to come out as one of the largest winners in a recent incentive auction, despite offering connections that fail to live up to the definition of broadband.  And these politics, coupled with a lack of policy, have allowed the status quo to go on for far too long. A comprehensive rural broadband plan is needed, and that's what I'll be outlining today. So in many ways, my book and research is one of classic critical political economy of communication in the tradition of scholars like Vincent Moscow, Leslie Shade, Robert McChesney, and Victor Picard. And I address the deceptively complicated question of how the US allocates the $6.5 billion it spends on rural broadband. So to put it more crudely, I literally follow the money. I address this issue and others through a triangulated method of thematic coding analysis of policy documents and public comments to regulatory dockets, in-depth interviews with key stakeholders and site visits and participant observation with rural broadband providers. And the hallmark of my research has been what I called the rural broadband road trip, where my hound dog Tuna and I drove 4,000 miles across the American Midwest, meeting with, talking to, and learning from rural residents, providers, officials, and state representatives. And I call this a method and a process of lived policy, boring from lived theology and contextual theology, a method to understand how public policy decisions are lived on the ground. I argue in my book that rural broadband policy or broadband policy more generally is broken and incomplete. It is incomplete and broken because it lacks coordinated federal leadership and has mired in a battle between regulators, a bewildering array of rules, inconsistent state intervention, the dominance of large providers, and a policy process that favors these large providers. So to be sure, the $6 billion we spend on rural broadband is being spent on rural broadband, but it's not being spent efficiently or democratically. So let's talk a little bit about the basics of rural broadband. Right now, the FCC reports that about 26.4% or 16.9 million people in rural America lack access to broadband, which is defined as 25 megabits per second, download three megabits per second upload. This compares with 1.7% of urban Americans and 35.4% of First Nations people living on tribal lands. In terms of adoption, about 63% of rural Americans have a home broadband subscription, while 15% of rural adults say they never go online. Rural Americans also pay more for broadband and have fewer broadband options. Only 19% of rural Americans have a choice in broadband provider, and this lack of competition drives up prices to amounts unfathomable in urban centers. The lowest density population areas pay upwards of 37% more on average for broadband than the densest centers. And here's an example. In Messina, Iowa, population 345, residents pay $145 a month for 25 megabits per second download for a fixed wireless connection. While the national median is $80 a month. So in sum, even when it's available, rural Americans pay more for worse connections and fewer options than their urban counterparts. But why do we need broadband in the first place? I think we've maybe all heard this question before, and my snarky answer is usually that this was the same question that was asked about electricity in the 1930s. Today, internet and broadband access are not luxuries, they are necessities and public utilities. And in my work, I have developed what I call the five pillars of rural broadband to answer some of these questions. So broadband is necessary for economic development, which includes both business and residential growth. For instance, did you know that a fiber optic connection to your home raises your home's value by 3.1%? True. The next is education. 70% of teachers assign homework online, but 18% of rural students lack broadband access. Health and telehealth. Rural America is older and sicker than urban America, but suffers from fewer doctors and fewer health centers. Civic engagement, access to news and information and local leaders. And lastly, quality of life, because quite frankly, we all hate it when the recent episode of Sabrina is buffering. So I'm not trying to make a technologically determinist argument here. The mere existence of fiber optic cables or fixed wireless in a community does not solve rural inequality, but the lack of connectivity certainly does not help. So said differently and to borrow a great phrase from one of my interviewees, Bernadine Jocelyn from the Blandin Foundation of Minnesota. Everything is better with better broadband. So the reasons for the digital divide are myriad, income, age, interest, location and race prevalent amongst them. The fact of the matter, however, is that the digital divide exists because of a failure of the private market to provide the essential service and a failure of policy to create the necessary market conditions or better yet, categories broadband is a basic utility. Economists would call this a market failure that is a condition that exists when the private market is unable or unwilling to provide for a basic social or public good because of a lack of return on investment. There are simply not enough people living in rural America to merit private market investment in broadband. Piling on top of this, the lack of broadband also becomes part of what is known as the rural penalty, which describes the material and figurative costs paid by rural residents and businesses for their geographic distance away from the centers of commerce and culture. It has been hoped first with electricity, then telephony and now broadband that a quote distance killing technology would abate the rural penalty, that the urban rural digital divide persists into the broadband age, suggests, however, that the digital divide is not a technological or a neutral or a natural problem, but rather a problem of political economy and of policy. And in this case, public policy has failed. And I actually, I wanna spend the kind of meat of my talk talking about what I call the three failures of rural broadband policy. And these are meaning, mapping and money. So let's start with meaning. Like I said, the FCC currently defines broadband as an always on connection of 25 megabits per second download and three megabits per second upload. This definition is woefully inadequate. It is estimated that our digital lives require about 54 megabits per second to adequately power. Moreover, the average download speed according to Ukla in the country is now 93.98 megabits per second upload speeds are even more worrying. If download is about consumption streaming, gaming, chatting upload is about production from Skype and FaceTime precision agriculture and telecommuting and our asymmetric definition of broadband privileges consumption over production. And there are of course many ways that Americans can access the internet. There's DSL, fixed wireless, cable, fiber, satellite and cellular among them. And of course 2.1 million Americans still use dial up. In an effort to privilege one technology in an effort not to privilege one technology over another, however, and potentially exclude a yet to be invented technology, the FCC has adopted a policy of what they call technological neutrality. Technological neutrality means that policy and policy makers should not favor one broadband technology over another. More specifically, that companies deploying a particular technology will have an equal chance to compete for funding. But not all connections are created equally. And instead of being technologically neutral, I argue that our current policy infrastructure is technologically blind. The problem with technological neutrality as a policy principle is that it equalizes technologies suggesting that it doesn't matter how you access the internet, only that you do. So for instance, it ignores the fact that the median download and upload speeds for DSL, which is the most common technology in rural America for broadband. These are the copper wires from your telephone company. That median upload is only 10.1. It also ignores that a fixed wireless system are subject to weather conditions in line of sight. Or that coaxial cable dramatically favors download over upload. Or that satellite internet is prohibitively expensive, contains notoriously low data caps, is vexingly slow and plagued by latency. To the FCC, however, all of these are broadband and all of these are good enough. Susan Crawford in her book, Fiber, argues that fiber is the only way to go, stating money spent on wires other than fiber is wasted. Fiber is fast, fiber is symmetric and fiber is future proof. The problem, fiber is expensive, averaging about $27,000 per mile if strung up aerially or $100,000 per mile if buried under the ground. This is the rock in the hard place that unconnected communities find themselves. Do you use an outdated technology because it's cheaper or do you take the risk and invest in fiber? Telecommunication companies in rural America, most notably CenturyLink, AT&T and Viacat, meanwhile, have been incredibly successful in lobbying for technological neutrality because it keeps their technologies, most notably DSL, the old copper lines, or satellite in the mix for funding. In fact, current funding programs dramatically favor telephone companies over all other providers. So when we look at the problem of meanings then, we find two issues, the definition itself of broadband and that of technological neutrality. Let's move on to the second failure policy, which is that of mapping. Remember when I said that 26.4% of rural Americans lack broadband? Well, we're actually not sure about that number. There are numerous flaws in how the FCC collects broadband data, which has led to confusion, frustration and accusations. Recent studies by Penn State University, for instance, found that the FCC's data is off by at least 50% and a shocking release from Microsoft found that 50% of all Americans, 162.8 million people, lack access to broadband speeds. Part of this confusion comes from what the data is actually reported to the FCC from broadband providers. So currently, the FCC uses something called Form 477, which is filled out and submitted by annually by ISPs. Currently, broadband deployment is not reported at the individual location, however, but rather by the census block. And here, a provider simply has to claim that one building in an entire census block is served or has the potential to be served in 10 days and the entire census block is considered served by the Federal Communications Commission. Making matters worse, ISPs only have to report advertised speeds rather than actual speeds, leading to distortion as to who of the connected are actually receiving broadband. And thanks to the policy of technological neutrality, the FCC also considers satellite internet as a broadband technology, where anyone who has satellite knows that this is furthest from the truth. This has led, as I've previously stated, to a gross exaggeration of broadband connectivity in the United States, specifically in the sparsely populated but geographically vast census blocks of rural America. But in addition to being overcounted, there is also the issue of funding eligibility. Once a community or a census block is considered served by the FCC, it is ineligible for future funding consideration. So these communities are either unconnected or stuck in the dial-up age. And I wanna take us through an example from Louisa County, Virginia. Louisa County is about an hour away from Charlottesville, South, located in Central Virginia, a county of about 10,000 people, and a largely agrarian community with no major towns. According to the FCC, Louisa is 100% served with at least one broadband provider offering 25-3, 25 megabits per second down, three megabits per second up. That's the map. Blue is good, we like blue. If we take satellite out of the equation, we suddenly find that 40% of the county is unconnected. Now, if we look at a table from MLab, which uses crowdsource data, they found that the average download speed of Louisa County is 3.91 megabits per second, upload or download, and 1.69 megabits per second download. This does not meet Netflix's minimum standards of broadband, let alone our standards of broadband in 2015, let alone our standards of broadband today. Louisa County, however, is uneligible, ineligible for any FCC money. They are left behind. So let's talk about money for a second. Despite these flaws and drawbacks, the United States spends, like I said, about $6.4, $6.5 billion a year on subsidizing rural broadband deployment, and about $10 billion a year in total on broadband deployment writ large. This money originates with two sources, the Universal Service Fund, managed by the FCC through the Universal Service Administration Company, or USAC, and the United States Department of Agriculture. The FCC, through three different programs, controls roughly $4.9 billion, and USDA controls upwards of $800 million in loans and grants, plus $600 million appropriated for Congress in a new program called the ReConnect Program. The problem here in my mind is not the amount of money that is being spent, but how it's being spent. All of the FCC's programs disproportionately favor legacy telephone companies, and the largest of those specifically. Let's look at a couple of FCC programs for a second. The first one is the Connect America Fund Phase II, which allocates roughly $1.2 billion a year from 2015 to 2020 to the nine largest telecommunication companies, like AT&T, CenturyLink, Frontier, and Winstream. In return, they have minimal build-out standards, they only have to connect to 10-1, and don't have to upgrade their connections. In short, they are still able to connect rural America with old copper wires in exchange for billions. Both CenturyLink and Frontier, meanwhile, also fail to meet their 2018 build-out requirements in certain states that face no discernible consequences. That's $1.2 billion for nine companies. A second pot of money, called the Alternative Connect America Model, spends $1 billion between 200 smaller telecommunications companies who have higher build-out requirements. They have a 25-3 build-out, and most are laying fiber rather than copper, and these are typically local telephone cooperatives, particularly American Midwest. That's $1 billion spread amongst 200 companies, versus $1.2 billion spread around nine companies. And there's a final pot of money, just $148 million a year called the Connect America Fund Phase II Auction, and that's shared between 103 companies, including cooperatives and satellite, electric cooperatives and satellite providers. So, both the mapping of rural broadband and the funding of rural broadband in some of the policies of rural broadband drastically and unequally favor the largest incumbent telecommunications providers. As one of my interviewees said to me, no one ever got in trouble at the FCC for supporting the telephone industry. Meaning, mapping, and money all represent policy failures in the realm of rural broadband, and therefore stymie any and all attempts at deployment and digital inclusion. My solution to this gridlock is a national rural broadband plan. We actually had a national rural broadband plan in 2009, something that was ordered by the 2008 Farm Bill. The plan was authored by then FCC acting chair, Michael Jacobs, who's a personal hero of mine, and was written after extensive public consultation. Unfortunately, it was eclipsed and made redundant the following year by the 2010 National Broadband Plan, which laid out America's digital future, but shifted the conversation away from the rural and towards our more national ambitions. I wanna suggest to everyone in this room that we need to reclaim this plan and reinvent it for the 2020s. And for precedent, I looked to the 1930s and the Rural Electrification Administration, a new deal-era agency tasked with wiring rural America with electricity through loans and grants to local cooperatives coupled with outreach to local consumers and the most amazing posters and advertisements you have ever seen. Founded in 1935, it took the Rural Electrification Administration 15 years to move rural electricity from 10% to 90%. In 1949, it was given authority to finance rural telephony and within 20 years, penetration rates were near universal. So strong is this parallel that one of my interviewees, a rural broadband provider, simply said broadband is the next electricity. When it comes to broadband, however, the FCC has been at it for now 10 years and it's come nowhere close to the success of REA for either electricity or telephony. And I argue that we need to reclaim the zeitgeist and the purpose of the Rural Electrification Administration. To do this, Congress needs to appoint a lead agency to cut through the regulatory clutter. And I have long suggested that this agency be USDA, rather than the Federal Communications Commission, as it removes partisan politics from the issue and harnesses USDA's presence across the country. Now, to be sure, USDA suffers from its own political maneuvering. Many of you may be aware that the current administration is carving up USDA and moving its research division to Kansas City, apparently because it disagrees with its findings and conclusions. But the FCC has demonstrated in its most current iteration that it cannot be trusted with the public interest and the public good. Its structure, meanwhile, tied as it is to the fortunes of the presidency, make it unpredictable and contrarian. Despite its flaws, meanwhile, USDA has a trusted presence across the country, unparalleled by any other federal agency. It also has a legislative mandate to champion rural America. So to be sure, USDA, FCC, NTAA all have important roles to play. The FCC, of course, controls the bulk of the money, to rural broadband deployment, while NTAA sets national policy. But we need an agency to lead the charge, to require data and knowledge sharing and to author America's rural broadband plan. And this plan would ideally include a number of elements. First and foremost, it would set a realistic but ambitious definition of broadband. One that maintained maybe an ethos of technological neutrality, but would set forward-looking speed thresholds, like 100-100, as recommended by John Sellat of the Benton Institute. That way, technologies are not excluded on the surface, but must be able to deliver these speeds on day one. This is actually the policy of Minnesota. Minnesota will fund any technology for broadband deployment so long as you can offer 100-100 on day one. The national rural broadband plan would also revise the broadband mapping methodology and stop relying on industry self-reports. Instead, it would amalgamate a host of different data sets, including leveraging the crowdsourcing that MLab has found is so valuable. It would also include a challenge process so that rural communities would have an avenue to protest if they are over-accounted. It would eliminate state barriers to cooperative and municipal broadband that have by and large been passed at the behest of large telecommunications companies. It would democratize the funding process and stop privileging the largest telecommunication companies. This would also include allowing cooperatives, municipalities, and new entrants to bid on funding and draft strong punishments for defaults. It would streamline the funding process and throughout my research, one theme that I've heard repeatedly was the difficulty of applying for loans and grants, specifically if you're a small local ISP. I have a great quote that I just want to read you all. This is from a rural broadband provider in Minnesota. You know, of all the things I've tried to do in my life, the hardest I've ever tried to do is navigate how to get USDA funding, how to get federal grant funding. I cannot, A, afford to figure out how to navigate it, nor can I hire someone to figure out how to write the grant such that we would receive grant money, nor can I figure out how to navigate how to put myself in the position to either receive grants or loan guarantees. And if you can tell me today how to do that, I'm all ears. We need to make it easier for rural broadband providers to apply for this money. A rural broadband policy would also include funding for digital inclusion, specifically computer access and skilled development. Like I said, broadband that just sits there unused is all but worthless. And lastly, but certainly not least, it would give serious reconsideration to 5G deployment. Right now, the FCC is mobilizing 5G through what's called high-band spectrum or millimeter waves. While this bandwidth delivers ultra-fast connectivity and low latency, the signal reaches roughly 800 to 1500 feet before requiring a boost. As such, we've heard a lot in recent months about small-cell deployment. Because of its geographic limitations, however, millimeter wave 5G is unfeasible for rural America.  You would need a small-cell repeater every 1500 feet. The FCC needs to reconsider its prioritization of high-band spectrum and begin experimenting more with mid-band to deploy 5G in rural America. I'm not arguing for a nationalized broadband system. But rather for a multi-stakeholder broadband system guided by insightful public policy and funded through numerous democratized revenue streams. A national rural broadband plan would show that this country is serious both about global competition and quality of life of rural communities. As it stands today, a lack of universal broadband means rural communities are suffering. We are failing to ameliorate these conditions because we are not taking all stakeholders into account. We are failing because of a lack of coordinated and coherent policy. We are failing because major telecommunication companies get the bulk of funding and fail to deliver. We are failing because the agencies in charge of rural broadband do not even know who has broadband and who doesn't. A renewed federal commitment to rural broadband would encourage states to take on greater coordination roles which would then empower local communities to make informed choices about their connectivity. It's this last point on which I wanna end my talk. Despite of what I've just said, rural broadband will not be solved by incumbents, by regulators, or by states. The rural urban digital divide is going to be solved by local communities, local companies, and local digital champions. That said, robust, coherent, and comprehensive federal policy can make their efforts so much easier. We've done it before, both with electricity and telephony, and we can do it again with broadband. Thank you. So I was told to maybe have some good prompting discussion questions for us, but I'm also happy to take questions from the audience, but a couple of questions that I thought to get everyone thinking about your own broadband experiences is to think about who is your provider? How much do you pay? How frustrated do you get when things don't work? Another question I would have for you all to think about is should broadband deployment be about immediacy? That is to say, should it be about connecting the unconnected with something just as long as something is there? Or should it be future and forward-looking, which would be much more expensive, and which may delay deployment? And lastly, something to think about is that both the United Nations and the European Union have declared broadband access to be a human right. In Finland, broadband is a legal right with government obligations to ensure that every fin has access to broadband. Is this something we should do? Should we follow their lead? And if so, what are our obligations if we do so? So this is just a little food for thought, but of course I'm happy to take any questions or comments about anything we've talked about or things we haven't talked about. Yes. Thank you so much for the talk. My name is Dave Cruso from Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Great. This resonates. We serve about 4,700 sites across the country and quite a few of them lack access. My question has to do with your recognition that champions are necessary to help connectivity. My wonderment is, given that ISPs are challenged in their spaces, who are those good champions? Who are the people who can work across the network of local communities, providers, and probably the government's really pushed this through? That's a great question. In my research and in my travels, the two that I can really point to, the first are libraries and librarians who have been incredible in rural America. Oftentimes they're the only place in a town that might have a broadband connection outside of maybe a McDonald's. So the libraries and librarians have been incredibly valuable. The other thing has been county board of supervisors. When they take up the challenge, they're actually eligible for a number of grants and loans if they can partner with a private provider. Now, part of the problem has been convincing certain boards of supervisor that this is an important issue to take up because it's expensive. It's expensive to even get started. But I've found that librarians and libraries and county board of supervisors for rural America have been incredible at championing connectivity in their communities. Thank you. The government providers who were benefiting from current policy, some of whom I'd never heard of, I noticed one famous company that was definitely not listed which was Verizon. Are they totally absent from this field? They're not totally absent, but their rural footprint is less. Verizon sold off a number of their rural connections to frontier communications about 10 years ago. A lot of their copper wires. So frontier has taken up a lot of that. Now, Verizon will be eligible, for instance, for the 5G fund if it ever develops such as it is. So, third-miles. Well, but files doesn't exist in rural America. I would sincerely doubt it. Yeah, again, because of this market failure, right? There's no incentive, there's no market reason for them to go out to rural America. Sorry. Hi, I'm from Europe and I just wanted to point out, well, I think it's a great idea to declare a plot and access the human right. That doesn't mean it's the reality on the ground. Like in Germany, we have a very similar situation where copper-based technologies, vectoring in particular, is just declared a broadband technology because the incumbent technology company happens to own all the copper wires. And so one thing that I think has worked pretty well in Finland is for municipalities to actually build the fiber network and then to have market competition on the network. So I wanted to ask if anybody in the US is doing this or whether that might be an approach that's still, you know, it's not a public or state-owned telecoms provider. It's just a state-owned network. Right. But then the providers are operating on the market. That's a great question. Thank you very much for bringing that up. Municipal broadband is definitely an option. What's happened, however, well, I'll give you a good case study. Amon, Iowa is amazing. Idaho, excuse me, Amon, Idaho, don't want to say Iowa. And they've actually built out a fiber network and then allow private ISPs to sit on top of the network so you can actually switch your broadband provider online, which is pretty cool. 19 states, however, in this country have either prohibited or inhibited municipalities from investing in their own broadband networks because it distorts the quote-unquote free market. So that's one of the reasons why I would argue that Congress actually needs to step in and preempt a lot of these laws to allow communities where there's no provider coming in and servicing them in the first place to do it themselves. And I'll give you a great example. In Minnesota, Minnesota is kind of the hero of my research. There's a county called Rock County, Minnesota. It's in the southwestern most pocket. Population, roughly 9,993 people, sits on the border of South Dakota. They bonded themselves for a million dollars, got a $5 million grant from the state, partnered with a South Dakota telecom company, and now have 99% fiber to the home in a rural county. I mean, this was amazing, but Minnesota has a state legal system that would allow municipalities to do it, whereas, for instance, Texas outright prohibits it. Hi. I previously read that, and I think this kind of goes into what you were just talking about with the last question, but that there's like pre-deployment barriers and local regulations that often make it a lot more difficult for these internet service providers to even kind of launch in those areas. And so we're just wondering if you came across that in your field work and your research as well, and if you could talk about that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I go on the same thing, that there's a lot of state barriers against municipal investment in broadband networks. Virginia, for instance, one of the odd laws, so it's one of the states that I would say inhibits but doesn't prohibit. So in Virginia, a municipality is allowed to fund its own broadband deployment, but its prices cannot be lower than the incumbent. So it kind of defeats the barriers, because oftentimes when municipalities do it for themselves, it's a faster connection and a lower cost, or a lower price, excuse me, but Virginia doesn't allow that to happen. So that's really a disincentive for municipalities because when they do their feasibility studies, one thing they need to be able to promise is a kind of a take rate. So that's been a major barrier to entry. There's also a number of states, although this number is dwindling, that prohibit or make it a rather legal gray area for electric cooperatives to become retail ISPs. Why electric cooperatives, you might ask? Well, because smart grids in electricity, the electric cooperatives are connected by fiber, so they have a middle mile fiber network, and a lot would like to get into offering retail broadband to their residents, we see this a lot in Virginia, but there's a number of state laws that prohibit it or make it a legal gray area for them to move into an industry outside of electricity. And so again, thinking through the laws and state policies that we need to get rid of are preempt, that would be one as well. Thank you. Hi there, my name is David, I'm from Wisconsin and this is a big, big issue in rural parts of Wisconsin.  Right, a lot of the cost is the labor because for instance, if you're gonna dig up a mile of ground, it's gonna cost you more. Getting permission to string fiber on poles has been a major issue as well. Who owns those poles? Do you have to negotiate with them? Do you have to, does every company that owns every wire have to bring someone out there in order to figure out how to reconnect those, or restring those wires has been incredibly expensive? The other thing that's been incredibly expensive is railroads, getting rights of way to either go above or beneath a railroad and railroads have been pretty hostile with communities trying to connect themselves. I think the best way that I've seen communities be able to defray some of these costs is actually with state money. A number of states have gotten into funding broadband to a modest degree, although Illinois just recently announced a $420 million rural broadband investment, which is kind of exceptional. But being able to kind of parlay that state money has been useful to defray some of those costs. I'll caveat that however by saying that the FCC in their new Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, or ARDOF, has said that any community that receives state money for broadband is now ineligible for FCC money. So they are now ineligible for that $20 billion that the FCC made available. So they're not making it easy for rural communities to connect at the speeds that we all take for granted. Thank you for the question. Hi Christopher, it's good to see you in our Ferris City. I'm Saul Cannonbaum, I'm from Cambridge. I am a co-founder of Upgrade Cambridge, UpgradeCambridge.org, which is trying to build municipal broadband here in Cambridge. And to answer your discussion questions for us, my broadband experience is terrible. Our provider is Comcast. It is the monopoly provider here. There are edge cases where you can get something else. If you happen to live in a big town building with line of sight to the Prudential Center, you can get fixed wireless. But if that's not the case, forget it. So we do even in Cambridge have a significant people, number of people still on DSL, and when you go track them down, either Verizon has been lying to them and telling them that this is broadband, what are you complaining about?  But like every other community, Verizon is decommitting from copper wires. There's an old copper switching station about a half mile from here on the other side of the Harvard campus that used to be full of switches. It's now a co-working space because they've just taken out the switches. It's really crazy. And if your copper breaks, you can wait a couple of weeks. How frustrated do you get? Well, I think I've just answered that. But, and this is real, and this is repeated around the urban areas. And I'll ask you the same question I sort of were chatting about earlier. What happened to the urban digital divide? Has that just simply disappeared as a political issue? Is there any government work on that? Or is it up to folks like us to actually get local governments to do something? That's a great question, Saul. And thank you for sharing your experiences. I would imagine that a lot of us can relate to the frustration of working with our broadband provider, potentially just Comcast. If everyone wants a little fun YouTube video, I would recommend Googling or YouTubing a Comcast call from hell, which is a half an hour long customer service call. No, but you raise a really good question. And it's something I didn't address in my talk, which is that the rural urban digital divide is one of many that exist. The urban digital divide certainly exists. The low income digital divide, digital divides amongst minority communities, amongst newcomer communities all exist and they are not separate. They're intersectional, right? African-Americans living in rural communities, for instance, are dramatically less connected than wealthy and white communities in rural America. I think we have seen, though, and this is kind of where I started off this talk that with this current administration of focus on the rural to the detriment of all of these other digital divides that I just mentioned. In terms of our policy apparatus, there is, you know, it's called the E-rate program, which is for schools and libraries. And there's some money from the NTIA for the National Telecommunications Information Administration, lots of acronyms, I know I'm sorry, that offer a modest amount. But there's, it's really been an ignored issue both at the policy level, but also just kind of at the popular conversation level. You know, if you look at what the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post or New York Times are publishing, they're publishing about rural, and I published about rural in the New York Times, so that's kind of captured this kind of political imagining. I think where we are seeing some change, though, and this is not great for anyone living in a big city, but are kind of in mid-sized cities, is the push for a municipal broadband, which isn't really viable anything lower than a county seat, there's just not enough people there. But, you know, Chattanooga is the town, the city that everyone holds up as the example of being a gig city in Tennessee. So I think some of these mid-sized to smaller cities are finding the benefits of being able to come together to deploy their own networks. It's certainly a risk, it's certainly a financial risk for the town or for the city. Not really viable in big cities, though, and that's part of the problem. So urban, those living within an urban digital divide have really found themselves without a voice, but without money, the potential for money as well, and that's been frustrating. There's been a couple of companies, so I know you're working on this company called Monkey Brains on the West Coast is doing a lot to solve the urban digital divide as well, but it's certainly not getting the attention. If I could just parlay that in to say that the other digital divide that's not getting attention is the tribal digital divide. First Nations people in the United States are dramatically disconnected and are dramatically undercounted, so perhaps an ex-book for me will be a deeper dive into the digital divides that didn't make it into this research. Thank you. Hi, my name's Heather. I'm one of the people Saul was talking about. I have Verizon DSL. My switch, I live two miles from here on the other side of Cambridge and my switch is in the building that Saul was just talking about. And I will not have Comcast on my property. They've vandalized it several times and I will not pay them money since they've done that. And I agree, there's a huge problem. Yeah, I grew up in the sticks and I suspect that where I grew up has better service than Cambridge does. And every single person in the government of Cambridge should be ashamed of that. Thank you for sharing. Hi, my name's Glenn. I'm from rural Nebraska and this what you were basically displaying was very much resonant, but like my experience with fixed wireless like trying to do my law school applications on fixed wireless, yeah, good time. But I think to kind of more to your second point, I don't think internet that's inconsistent is internet at all that you can rely on and use. I think my parents are getting fiber in they said their timeline is three years and they're really excited about that three year wait because at least they're on their radar. So I think, yeah, you're right in that the solution going forward is fiber and not the previous, but I'm curious what you think about, how do you educate those county seats and things about the opportunities and all the funding that is available through USDA? Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you for asking that. It has been rather difficult. I mean, you've got some that have kind of hex savvy folks who are maybe on a board of supervisors and that makes it a whole lot easier. For those that aren't, one of the major challenges that I found and I'm starting to increasingly work with some counties is a general confusion about what broadband is and the different technologies because a company, a major company with CenturyLink will come out and say, well, we do broadband, right? And we'll roll out DSL, give us six million bucks and we'll help you out. But then you find out that you're ineligible for all these other grants because you're now connected according to the FCC. So part of the work that I've been doing is just going out to counties and having a conversation about the different technologies and giving them a space to ask what questions that a consultant, they're concerned about asking to a consultant.  But everyone, a lot of folks will understand that we need broadband, but part of the conversation is, well, what exactly does that mean? And this is where I actually think USDA could play a much larger role, but they need the resources to be able to play that role. I mean, they are embedded in rural communities across this country and in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s, they had, every extension office had an electrification person and a telephone person. Imagine if we had a broadband person to answer some of these questions. The other thing I found that's been incredibly valuable, both for communities to vent their concerns, but also to have this, or town halls, there's been a number of town halls, there's a scholar by the name of Roberto Gallardo, who's working in Mississippi and Indiana, kind of criss-crossing those two states, holding town halls and talking to folks about their broadband experience and asking questions like, what is your connection like? Why are you frustrated? What can't you do? And those I found have been a particular valuable way to figure out who could be the digital champion in the community and then can we empower that person or that group of people to go forward. This is a plug, but there's a great organization called Next Century Cities that also will work with communities to figure out their broadband needs or the connectivity needs to empower them to at least be able to make those choices. But it starts at the grassroots level and I think it starts with conversations like this, like town halls. But I wish, again, USDA were empowered to be able to answer some of those questions. Thank you. I'm perfectly happy to dismiss class early. If there were out of questions, I'm gonna stick around to any final thoughts. Well, if not, in that case, I wanna thank you all for your attention. Thank you all for inviting me here today and happy to stay around and keep the conversation going. Thank you so much.


On June 14th, 1777, the U.S. adopted the first American flag. The original flag had 13 stripes alternating red and white while there were only 13 white stars in a blue field. It wasn't until 1950 the flag had 50 stars and it remains one we use today. The 13 red and white stripes stand for the original 13 colonies, while those stars represent the union of our 50 states. So if you have a flag, get it out for flag day on June 14th!