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Encouraging Broadband Deployment From The Bottom Up, Edward J. Feser

Edward J Feser

State governments that have elected to make investments to increase the availability of affordable broadband service in rural areas and low income urban neighborhoods should organize their efforts around a strategy that encourages and leverages locally-driven initiatives, rather than follow a top-down approach that seeks to identify and close all broadband service gaps in a comprehensive fashion. A bottom-up approach to state broadband policy has three major advantages. First, it is a conservative policy response in an economic arena in which the appropriate role of the public sector is highly contested and in which private sector deployment is proceeding rapidly, …