Walker Deregulated, stopped Broadband! Gov. Evers now offering Broadband State-wide, helping rural Republican areas.

It's no secret that rural farm communities vote Republican, but what is unknown is what they think their getting for that. Deregulation is big, got it, but that only makes their water undrinkable and dangerous (that's a direct anecdotal comment from a conservative farmer I talked to). Farmers and small towns are also being ravaged by local bankruptcies and mega-farm takeovers that wipeout families and over produce milk.  

Thank Scott Walker for Lousy or No Internet, hurting Jobs, Public safety, and Rural Businesses: Yup, that's the other thing rural voters are getting for their GOP loyalty. Yet even this hasn't move the needle for them to support Democratic Gov. Evers, or his plan the serve every corner of Wisconsin with fiber optic high speed broadband. 

And the media needs to do more to assign blame. It's either not brought up, or it's buried deep within the article. The following was mentioned halfway into the story, and didn't point out how legislators should have come up with new rules to meet the needs of the new technology? 

In 2011, the telecom industry in Wisconsin was deregulated under Gov. Scott Walker’s administration. Supporters said it freed companies from a maze of arcane rules based on an era of landline telephones, and that the growing popularity of cell phones and other technologies would foster competition in internet service.

The changes largely stripped the Public Service Commission's authority to hold internet service providers accountable to the general public. “We don’t set rates. We cannot tell them they have to go into a sparsely populated part of the state,” said PSC Chairwoman Rebecca Cameron Valcq.

Love deregulation?

What Scott Walker did and didn't do for 8 years is haunting us now. It's especially noticeable after COVID exposed everything Republicans didn't bother to update or solve. 

It's 2021 Republicans, and the "Market Forces" didn't Work, and Republicans made it difficult for local communities to be broadband providers. 

If Gov. Evers efforts take off, this can happen...

Amelia Gagliano manages the Errand Solutions customer service center in Land O' Lakes. The Chicago-based firm was able to open an office in the small town in Vilas County, Wis., because it has high-speed internet. Many business professionals now work remotely from towns in the Northwoods, provided they can get a decent internet connection.

Gov. Evers, not Walker, is urgently trying to help farmers and rural communities survive and thrive, especially after seeing how bad things got in the pandemic. This was never on the Republicans list of must-do's, and even now, instead of increased funding for broadband rollout they opted instead for another tax cut:

If broadband isn't the No. 1 issue in rural Wisconsin, "it's got to be close to it," Gov. Tony Evers said in a Journal Sentinel interview.

The importance was cited 124 times in a state of Wisconsin rural prosperity report last December covering jobs, education, health care and other topics.

"Working-class parents can't work if they have to sit with their children in the car to access public Wi-Fi hotspots," the report said.

The pandemic cast the problem in even sharper relief. When schools went to online learning, the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance polled districts about their challenges. Dozens cited home internet access.

“This is an equity issue for rural families and has a deep impact on rural economic growth," the Adams-Friendship School District, in Adams County, said in response to the poll. "It has to become a priority like rural electrification in the early 1930s.”

The state Department of Public Instruction asked school districts to survey families about the depth of the problem. More than 400,000 people responded. In some districts, 25% of the survey respondents — one in four families — said they didn't have any home internet access, let alone broadband. It was nearly half of the families in a handful of districts.