Welcome to the tech policy podcast, the only podcast not sponsored by Squarespace. I'm Evan

Swartzraber on today's show. Trump's infrastructure plan. It's been getting a lot of attention.

It's one of his big priorities in the new administration. And many in the tech community are wondering

if as part of a giant national infrastructure plan, will broadband be included?

And what has happened before when government has spent money on broadband?

And is this a good thing for government to be doing.

Joining me to discuss this is Will Reinhart, director of tech and innovation policy at the American Action Forum.

He's got a new blog out.

How well do rural broadband subsidies

work? Will, we'll be talking about that today. Well, thanks for joining the show.

Thanks for having me. Well, it's really good to have you discuss this topic because you're

probably in like the top 1% of internet speeds in the world living in here in D.C.

That is indeed correct. But though, to push back on that a little bit, I'm actually

from, and I spent, you know, I'm originally from central Illinois, and I spent a lot of time

down in rural Illinois, and I'm very well aware of some of these challenges. So one of the

reasons you moved away from rural Illinois is because they had bad internet? Well, one of the reasons I moved away was actually Illinois because they had bad internet?

Well, one of the reasons I moved away was actually just because of economic development.

I mean, we can get into this.

And indeed, this is exactly what we should be talking about, which is that this is kind of a the question about, you know, which came first, the lack of economic development or the lack of fast internet speeds.

It's a really, really big and important question.

But no, but more to the point, you're exactly right.

I mean, D.C. does some cities in D.C., Virginia, Maryland, have some of the fastest speeds in the world.

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