At some point, probably sooner rather than later, the country will be fully connected with gigabit-speed internet. And when this happens, we’ll know — the term “gigabit” is a concrete benchmark that is either met, or not. At the moment, however, our goal is the much more nebulous “broadband”. We’ve all heard this term from internet service providers, from the media, from the government… but there is still no exact definition beyond “reasonably fast internet”. …
The FCC’s announcement of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) was met with approval from the broadband industry. Now that we’ve had time to digest the plan, and have heard more about the internal mechanisms, new questions are arising regarding how it works and how it might go wrong.
Key advantages of RDOF
One of the big advantages of the RDOF, even over the Connect America Fund (CAF) that inspired it, is the ability to move more funds away from price-cap carriers. Looking back at the CAF rounds, incumbents won a relatively small number of bids for relatively small funding awards, and this trend is likely to continue through the RDOF. …
- Our current financial system adds to income inequality
- DeFi opens up the financial opportunities that have historically only been available to the wealthy to the rest of the population
- VEVA is at the bleeding edge of this revolution and has pioneered a new financial structure to take advantage of the DeFi movement.
More than ever, we live in a stratified world. We’re simultaneously dealing with the digital divide, income inequality, and even broadly paint entire countries into “first-world” or “third-world” boxes. A disturbingly large component (if not all) of this is due to an imbalance in resource allocation. Some of us are wealthy, some of us are not, and the few in the middle are increasingly separating towards one extreme or the other. Visual Capitalist pins this squarely on centralization — the idea that most of our financial system is controlled by a relatively few entities — noting that, “the spoils have gone to the people who are best connected to the financial centers of the world”. Niharika Singh takes a different (although equally appropriate) tact when she focuses on the loss of economic freedom that comes along with monolithic entities acting as the gatekeepers to financial services. While there is no absolute, guaranteed solution, one of the most promising ways forward is through decentralized finance, or DeFi. But what, exactly, do we mean when we talk about DeFi? In this paper, we’ll run through a brief primer on this convoluted topic. First, we’ll explore the idea of decentralization, especially as contrasted with centralization. …
About
