Digital Arroyos: An Examination of State Policy and Regulated Market Boundaries in Constructing Rural Internet Access

Perhaps the greatest development in rural communication technology in the middle of the 19 th century was an eight foot board tied to the back of a horse. The King Road Drag scraped along country roads leveling humps and filling potholes. 1 The flat roads permitted rural postal deliveries, the development of parcel post and eventually a flood of information from catalog companies and publishers bearing goods and news from the big cities. Postal roads are two-way channels, of course, and although rural people could not take advantage of the commercial potential by mailing their livestock and produce, they could engage friends and relatives through letters as easily as order from Sears & Roebuck. Communication and community were encouraged by a combination of public policy, technology and commercial investment. Geography conditions the ability of citizens to access to modern telecommunications networks as well, and to take advantage of communication technologies as a political, economic and cultural resource. In terms of the Internet, geographic factors comprise a kind of " capital. " Similar to human capital or social capital, geographic capital can be most easily detected by its absence; the absence of geographic capital leads to an absence of functional Internet access. Geo-policy barriers are chokepoints, mechanisms of control created through the interaction of geography, market forces and public policies. Geo-policy barriers not only constrict access but also construct both communication and communities, often in unintended ways. Geographic capital, therefore, can be impinged by three factors: the