 Thanks, everybody, and welcome back after our afternoon break. I just want to introduce our fireside chat panelists for our fireside chat panel mix-ups, whatever we want to call this. So joining us today to talk about what is public interest technology and how it relates to MLab, because you've all even asked me. And I said, good thing that's the first prompt question. You'll get to know all about it. But to discuss it, we have our lovely panelists. So we have Afua Bruce, who is the director of engineering for New America's public interest technology program. Afua joined New America after spending several years working in federal government at the White House and at the FBI. From 2015 to 2017, Afua served as the executive director of the Office of Science and Technology Policies National Science and Technology Council at the White House. In this role, she oversaw 100 different federal inter-agency working groups tackling challenges on environment and sustainability, homeland and national security, science, technology, and STEM education. Prior to joining the federal government, Afua was a software engineer at IBM. Sasha Meinrath is the Polymer chair and telecommunications at Penn State and director of XLAB, an innovative think tank focusing on the intersection of Vanguard technologies and public policy. Prior to founding XLAB, Sasha was vice president here at New America Foundation, where he founded the Open Technology Institute in 2008 and co-founded Measurement Lab. Sasha's research focuses on distributed communications, digital feudalism, digital craftsmanship, telecommunications, and spectrum policy, cybersecurity and privacy, and disruptive technology, and is a testament to his lifelong commitment to promoting social and economic justice. Larry Peterson, the other end, is the CTO of the Open Networking Foundation and the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science Emeritus at Princeton University. He's the co-author of the best-selling networking textbook, Computer Networks, A Systems Approach, and has been the technical lead on several internet-scale distributed systems, including the widely used Planet Lab and Measurement Lab platforms. And the Koblet CDN, now commercially licensed by Akamai. He is currently working on the Cord Access Edge Cloud and leads Cord's tech steering team. So our first prompt, and I will help drive us through these prompts, is how would you define public interest technology and what are some examples? OK. OK, well, so I would start from my unbelievably biased position of saying that OTI is the epitome of public interest technology. And it points to me, in many ways, to how the conversations changed. Because I can remember sitting on a stage, not unlike this one, at our old New America haunts with Vint Cerf, talking about why we were going to launch this crazy contraption called Measurement Lab. And we talked about broadband transparency and the need to get data into the hands of key decision makers. When we would sit down, whether with NTA or FCC, they'd say, well, we don't have the data. And so we were going to solve that problem with a experiment, which is how this all began. Today, I would say the battle has shifted. So public interest technologies then had to prove that technologists in the room were important. Data, science, statistics, scientific methodology, those were important. Today, the battle is much more about getting people to actually act. We've seen this for decades in other spheres, the climate debate, for example, where America is just lunacy. Today's public technology, public interest technology, has to be about focusing not just on the data collection and making that available and accessible and all that. But in many ways, and I'll stop after this, looking at how do we force reluctant leaders to actually abide by the implications of our data and research methodologies and outcome? How do we get people to actually act when the evidence, in many cases, is overwhelming? And yet our leadership of both parties is for a variety of reasons, either reluctant to move forward or adamantly opposed to moving forward. That seems to be the two buckets. I think, to me, public interest technology, it's very simplest, is using technology to advance the public good, whether that is using data and putting it in the hands of decision makers, whether it's making sure that as people create policies that are going to affect large swaths of the population, that they include technologists at the table, or whether it's technologists thinking through, how can I develop solutions, develop applications that can reduce homelessness, that can positively impact my community, that can take a lot of the nonprofits that I see around me, or the state and local governments, especially, to increase their capacity and help them operate more efficiently and better serve their end users and their target populations. I think those are different ways that we see public interest technology. With New America's public interest technology program, we have a variety of projects. Some of them include working, for example, in LA County to help LA County stand up a new office to give police officers a new option, an option other than incarceration when they first encounter minors, working in Rhode Island to help them redesign their foster care placement system to drastically decrease the amount of time it takes families to go from saying, I would like to have a foster child someday to actually being able to get through that system, also looking at mapping the opioid epidemic and putting into the hands of people ways to share stories about loved ones, but also to find resources and to drop off excess prescriptions that they have. So just the wide variety of different ways that you can use technology to advance the public good. So you're starting off by pointing at how hard it is to get any action out of all the great technology we're producing sets nicely opposed to the way I was going to approach this, which is the technology, like water, runs downhill and it's going to do what it's going to do, and we know where it's going and it's going to get there just a matter of time. So I'm thinking that the way you get people to act is you just continue to do the technology. So let me give you a little example. It's kind of come out here a little bit that there's sort of the policy into things and there's the technology and how do we bridge that gap. So I've been hearing about, we definitely have questions we want to ask and we want answers to and we want to convince people and that's based on the data. The data, we have the data because of the methodologies and collecting the data. We collect the data because we have platforms that we can run the collection on. And if you kind of go back to the history, that's where Planet Lab's involvement was. It was just the plumbing underneath. It was the platform. And so I was here on that same thing and as I come in this morning, the carriers were all in the room and they were really skeptical of what we were going to do with MLab. Well, it turns out that my other job, I resigned at Princeton, but I'm now with the Open Networking Foundation and what we're doing on the behalf of and in working hand in hand with the carriers is taking that very same technology that we had underlying MLab that's now generating the data that has the potential to influence policy and that's the technology that the carriers are now wanting desperately to put into their appointments. And the key was that that technology is open and it allows for innovation, it allows them to be more agile in the same way it allows us to be more agile and creative. And so I guess to try to tie this up a little bit more cleanly, the public interest, the way that I approach this and everyone approaches it differently, certainly, is make the technology available and keep it as open as you can and enable innovators. And it's through that innovation that you just eventually will do the end run around a lot of the policy and then they will be catching up, of course. What are some of the components, I think Larry started his pieces, oops, sorry, Mike just came on. What are some of the components that make a successful public interest tech initiative or that make a public interest tech initiative successful? What do you do as the roles of government, academics, civil society, companies and people in everyday life? I think you've all talked to some of that a little bit, but if you wanna dig in on those. Sure. And I can talk a little bit about what happened before MLAB because I was working with Casey Claffey over at CADA back when it was the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis on the Commons Initiative, the Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Network Systems. Can you tell we're academics? And that was, in essence, an attempt to do broadband measurement at national scale that failed miserably. And what we learned, in essence, failing was the answer to this. So what works? Well, it turns out having good corporate partners with deep pockets, when you're talking about something at this scale, that's essential. So it's great to be able to actually work with Google on a project while simultaneously beating against Google on the privacy side of the equation and realizing the non-monolithic entities that these corporations are. That, I think, was essential. And I think what was also really important was we had a policy problem that we were directly addressing. In this case, what's the broadband speed in the United States? Nobody knew, right? In 2009, a lot of people wanted to know the answer to that, but no systematic effort had actually been done and the information we're getting, which is like everything's light speed from the providers, we were like, I am skeptical. But the data sets, the open publicly available data sets, didn't exist. And so we had to solve that problem. Turns out it was very difficult to solve and people are still solving it and doing things that we thought were science fiction 10 years ago. Like, I mean, looking at how far MLab has come in just one decade is awesome. It's really inspiring. And I also feel like the dedication of so many people over such a long period of time. No one in their right mind would come and work for MLab and yet here we all are, spending our time and energy on something that should never have worked. It should have been failure 2.0, but instead, it's the largest open data set on the planet regarding broadband measurement information. That's amazing. And so I think those components are at least some of the key facets. I won't say it's all of them by any means, but this policy need, the dedication of people that were willing to spend time and energy, provide their expertise. It was sort of like a technical stone soup to make MLab work. I think it's still kind of a stone soup and maybe a stone soup with many courses or something to extend the metaphor. But I do believe that this endeavor should be one of many as opposed to one of the few operating at this scale and impact, which is a question for what's the next decade of public interest technology look like? Well, I think we're still struggling to figure out, particularly with a current administration that is hostile to such things as data, reality, et cetera. Great to follow that. I think successful public interest technology projects really come down to partnerships and having diverse teams. So as you mentioned, it's incredibly important to have a partner, whether it's a big corporate partner who can fund the work, but also partners that truly believe in the value of the technology and in the mission that you are trying to accomplish. Without strong partners, the technology is going to go nowhere. But also having diverse teams is incredibly important. I mean, by diverse teams, not just having engineers or technologists on the team, but also having strong policy people who understand the issues and having strong design people who can make sure that what you're designing is actually going to meet a need. I think oftentimes we can fall into the trap of building something because it's cool and we think that we know what the problem is and what the need is, but by having strong partners and having teams with a lot of diversity of thought, you can actually build something that will be used, not just build it and we hope they will come, but build it and have something that can make an impact and be sustainable. That's a great answer. So having the funding is necessary, but not sufficient. I've seen too many projects where people come along because there's money there and they didn't work, but I've seen other projects where there was no money, but the individuals had the right incentives to jump in and they'd figure out how to get it funded as they went and they would get it funded because it was good work. And so I think one of the keys is that you have to enable people to go where their interests take them. Some of them it's in the policy direction, some of it's in the technology direction. So NDT is one of the key tools within MLAB and I know it wasn't built to measure home connectivity. So the story is it was to answer a particular question in a local area network, an engineering problem that you had to solve. So that was like very clear incentives, but we've got flashing by all the other MLAB experiments is because some researcher had the incentive to go do something. You put, I'm an extremely strong believer in the attractive force of some artifact in projects like this. So you can easily draw a parallel to open source. You're not just randomly talking about doing stuff, you're actually doing stuff. And so if there's a code base that you can check out and you can add your improvements to or if there's a platform that you can go deploy your experiment on, that's absolutely critical as opposed to just talking about doing stuff. And that creates the center of gravity and when they work it's because you get this critical mass of people that wanted to contribute to the same thing, but that's because for a moment their incentives were aligned. And that's the critical thing and MLAB was in the right place at the right time because there was some platform, there were a few tools to get started and there were interesting questions to be asked. What does success look like to you and what are common obstacles that you see for public interest tech projects? Well, I'll engage in a couple of quick anecdotes depending on what success is defined as. I think one of my all time favorite successes, I'd been at the FCC for I guess about 18 months battling it out with and it was basically like myself and Thomas Gideon who was the old technical director for OTI sitting in a room not much smaller than this one talking to the FCC about how they should do broadband measurement, the methodologies that should be used and et cetera. Around the entire rest of the table and the outside chairs were ISP lobbyists and we were just getting hammered. We were getting hammered on like everything. And it boiled down eventually to them saying like you just don't understand how the internet works, you don't understand TCPIP, blah, blah, blah, blah. Continued over email. We knew the next meeting was coming up and we were just gonna get absolutely annihilated. So here we are at the FCC, 40 or 50 industry representatives, two public interest technologists knowing that we're gonna just get reamed because we don't understand the technology and luckily we had a couple cards to play. So in walks, then surf. And you look around the room, some people recognize them, right? And their faces immediately fall. And true to form, Vincent walks in, he's like, hello, are we talking about TCPIP and broadband measurement? He's like, my name is Vincent. As if no one would know, like what was about to happen? To me, that's what success looks like is that no matter how much in that, that's a room where every hour they're burning through, I don't know, 40, $50,000 in retainer fees on one side of the battle. But where you have not just expertise, but like the expert, TCPIP, on your side of the battle. And at moments like that, you can radically shift the conversation. That's exactly what happened. It went from people saying like, we're going to make MLab non-existent in the FCC's thinking around broadband measurement to being unassailable as a utility that should be used, should be in the mix in how we define, how we measure broadband speeds. I think another big success is still to be determined. I feel like in doing this kind of work for 10 years, we've laid the foundation for really remarkable, much needed shifts in what a 21st century society looks like. But what the success has to be is getting people to act on that. And that's an open challenge to us all because I feel that this is my third administration that I've worked in DC with. I'm looking forward to the fourth. But in the interim, like what I have seen, especially over the last eight years, are multi-stakeholder processes that engaged many people, but didn't get to the actual meaningful change that needs to happen. And so the success in many ways is still to be determined. But then again, we wouldn't be here if we'd already won all these battles, right? It's what we do over the next few years, I think that's gonna matter a lot to that success. Success to me in the public interest technology space is when policy makers or corporations or non-profits look around the room and ask where's our public interest technology person? The policy makers are the ones who are initiating and saying, here's a need for us. We need in order to make sure that we have developed good policies, we need to make sure that we have good technical solutions and we have access to the data to get this done, that we can't do it by ourselves with just the policies that we've done in traditional ways, but we need to be acting on the data. We need to make sure people are capturing the data, sharing the data, making it available and consumable. I think to me, that's what success looks like in the public interest technology space. As far as challenges to get there, there are quite a few. As I'm sure many of you in this room know, but building that demand, figuring out common languages to use both ways, both from the technologist side, how do we communicate in a language that the policy makers or the nonprofit organizations will understand and see as valuable and see as desired and required? But how do we do that? How do we also provide opportunities and make this field and this work attractive to people coming out of school and people in different careers? How do we build that interest from the actual people who are going to be doing the work to actually do the work and to make a difference in this way? So let me give a different kind of answer. I'll go back to the technology side of public interest technology. To me, success in this MLAB space is that we get the technology to the point that we've totally democratized the access network, that you don't have to be a global carrier to offer access technology to end users. And that means it's lowering the bar to deploying that technology. The internet lowered that bar the first time beyond all telecommunications was through the telcos. And that was really good for a while. And anyone in theory could stand up an IP router and you would have connected to the internet. That doesn't quite get to the access technology but we're at the edge. And things like MLAB have been instrumental in taking us to the point that we can lower the bar to entry to be in your own ISP. And that's when you get the competition that actually changes the equation. So for me, success in the space of MLAB is that we have completely democratized the access network. And I think the technology can take us there. Now we have to keep the policy from preventing that but there's an opportunity to leapfrog ahead. Most surprising learning from the projects that you've been involved in that you think we get to share. The most surprising? Or the most surprising thing. What was the moment for you that you were surprised in the projects you've been involved in? Like, I don't know, every time you talked about the... Like it's fake, it's 10 years before you are. Yeah, that's okay. Well see, now I think that's fast, right? Like if we go, it's only 10 years to build this crazy idea into this global platform. That seems like, we should capture that lightning in a bottle again. I've got one. This is a tough question. I've got one. And then maybe they've got some questions. So here's the most amazing thing about MLab. It has been running continuously for 10 years. There are servers out there that have been running continuously answering queries without going as a service going down for 10 years. And actually, he hasn't gotten any credit so I wanted to point to Mike over here who has been back at Princeton keeping the machines that's the control plane, the management for MLab running and delivering the software stack that gets run. And it's one part-time person doing that and that's absolutely amazing. And it's, for me, the most surprising. I shouldn't say that's enough. Of course it was going to work. Yeah, I think one of the most surprising elements of all of this has been just the resiliency of the status quo did not do anything. It's, I really, when we created MLab and I founded OTI, we were having a totally different conversation 10, 12 years ago, which was to say if only we had the technical expertise, if only we had the data, if only the transparency were there, these were all battles that had to be won and I don't want to pretend like we've won them but we're winning those battles. And what's surprising to me is even when you have gotten that far along, we're still facing this reluctance. I mean, it's like denial about technological reality that's everywhere. And every time I go up onto the hill and talk with folks there and I'm like, okay, so here's how whatever it is actually works. So there's denial about denial. It's like meta-denial, yeah, I don't know. I mean, but it is shocking to me that we can go straight from if only we had data to, you have too much data, which is actually how the FCC initially responded to MLab. And yet here we are 10 years later, we still don't have a functional broadband map for end users, right? And that's crazy to me. And we still have all of these places where we've kind of mortgaged the decisions as if we didn't actually have to pay the opportunity costs. And technology is one of these places where it's here, it's creating increasing dramatic stresses on rule of law on the legal foundations for a civil society. And I would say you'd be hard-pressed to show meaningful transformations of our rule of law to address these technical realities. The gap between technical reality and legal realities has never been greater than it is right now. Okay. I'm not sure. Yeah, I was like, I'm not sure, no. Larry's trying to think of a positive learning that all of mine were also negative. Also, as has been said, especially the amount of time that it often takes to go from here's an idea that we think will matter to actually convincing people that it is an idea that will matter to then convincing them to act. It surprises me every time. We have 10 or 15 projects now with the New America's Public Interest Technology Program and every time that our timelines shift, I'm like, man, someone should have predicted this every single time. So that's probably for me one of the biggest challenges and frustrations. Okay, I think we do have another prompt up here, but we can also open it to questions. I'm open to making that shift if people want to start asking questions. Okay, I see some hands, so let's do that. Rich, do you want to come? Okay, our Allison's right behind you with a mic. Cool. Yeah, hi, thank you for the presentations so far. And I was really interested in the very broad definition of public interest technology that you gave early on and part of me is very excited to be a part of Measurement Lab and I think the kinds of things that we've achieved and hope to achieve are very much in the public interest. My question is around the broader definition of that and what role the public needs to play in assuring that the success sort of definition for either the technology group or the policy group is in fact in their interest. There's what role does the public get to play in that partnership and I'm wondering if you have any experiences you can talk about related to that. Well, so at some level the public ultimately needs to be able to vote with their feet and their checkbooks and I mean the whole idea behind making broadband usage transparent was then that you could make informed consumer decisions based upon that data. If it's totally transparent you still only have one option then it wasn't really doing you much good. So that's where for me the end game has to be that we have the means or the technology to lower the barrier to being an ISP and giving the option and my option is no throttling no all the good stuff at low cost. So I mean that's, we can change policy to try to steer in that direction or make it harder to steer in that direction but ultimately I guess that would be where you would wanna be. I think in there are different cases where the public can actually take an active role in providing data and helping to develop solutions. We had one fellow with public interest technology program who worked on financial mapping and for that project she trained students at a local community college on how to do data collection and they went to their local neighborhoods to collect different financial information and then map that for the area to create some really interesting lessons learned on what the true wealth was in those communities and that over time how it impacted people's individual wealth and so by finding ways to engage and to provide information or go seek out information I think that's another way that the public can take an active role in making public interest technology a bigger thing. And I think we also must be students of history. Right, I always used to joke but I think it's kind of true. If universities, if I was an academic if I did my job think tanks wouldn't need to exist. Right, why have kind of another institution that's informing policy makers about research analysis that's happening in real time but we've cloistered ourselves. We were in my academic head, cloistered ourselves away in many ways from policy relevance and that's a great disservice and we should learn from that. It's also the case that when we shifted from an agrarian to an industrial society, it created profound shifts in what society looked like and led directly and explicitly to some of the worst, most egregious, painful, detrimental outcomes for society at large. Led to the Great Depression. It led to having to construct a new social contract of which the social security, various safety laws, wage laws, et cetera all came out of that. One catalyzing period in our country's history. And the same attention needs to be paid when we're transitioning right now from an industrial to a digital economy. And if you learn from history, you know like the trajectory is already set and we as people who are able to see at least some strands of where these trajectories lead have to be more proactive if we wanna avoid the kinds of detrimental impacts. Job displacement writ large. You think the opioid epidemic is bad now? Like when you displace truckers, long haul truckers, the number one job for men in America, 3.5 million. What do you think happens to those communities in rural America where it's the last job? Now, unfortunately, a public interest technologist is kinda like Cassandra, right? We see these futures but are never believed in real time. And that is our curse. But I think by, I hope, I'm an optimist in belaying what I'm saying, but I believe that by learning from these histories, that we can avoid those pitfalls and put in place far more proactive policies. This is why I say we have to transition from getting into the room to holding key decision makers to account. We have to be more relevant than our institutions, whether the universities or what have you in order to affect changes to prevent those, what I see is dystopian outcomes that are all but guaranteed without our active intervention. It's been again. I'm just thinking about success. And my guess is that one measure of success of this whole program would be if it became the norm to design and build these systems so that the measurements are made normally and the transparency of their performance and data is also the norm as opposed to something we have to extract by kicking and screaming and fighting and so on. Just making this standard practice would be an extraordinary success in my opinion. Getting lots of nods, okay. Other questions for our panel? And it also points to just build off this, it points to me to sort of the ludicruciity of DC, which is like when we're talking about scientific methodology being the radical position at this point in time. Right? And we aspire to having that be the norm. It shows you where we currently are in history and why our intervention, our work is so critically important. So, okay, we have another question in the back. It's like, otherwise we'll end on one of my prompts as a last question, but. That is, I'm paraphrasing, but that was kind of the premise of the question. So if I'm a technologist, why would I ever come to the table with a policy person? Because the career directory perhaps is not as lucrative. So, with that being said, let's table that on the side for a second and let's say, let's take the M lab thing and let's say, okay, all right, somebody, what is your advice for resiliency is kind of the question, right? For someone that's looking for a career in public and international technology. If I'm a talented technologist and the private industry has a lot more to offer, why would someone aspiring university student come into the public technology space knowing that there's gonna be a 10-year battle and perhaps not much action is gonna happen? Well, when you phrase it like that. I mean, I think at some point, right, as we make the argument for people to enter public interest technology versus going into the private sector, I think we have to acknowledge some of the differences between public interest technology and private sector. And I think one of the biggest differences is your satisfaction and the impact that you can have on the world is going to be very different when you're working on problems for the public interest than it likely will be if you are working in the private sector. There are a host of benefits that we all know that you can get from the private sector. But I think some of the challenges and the impact that you can have in public interest technology is what makes it worth fighting for. I think, especially as conversations in the broader public sphere happen around, it's important for people to be part of a community and for people to not just like something on a social media site or complain about something, but to actually become engaged in process. This provides a very real, concrete way that you can take engagement and take fashion and channel it into a way that will have a real tangible impact. So technologists want to have impact and impacting public policy is one of the valued impacts today. And this organization's probably had as much to do with that as any out there. And so there are absolutely researchers who are thinking if I can do this experiment then I can influence the discussion on this public policy point. The second thing I'd say is it's not quite such an either or situation. There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there who are taking the technology and running with it that are not the incumbents and they're trying to leapfrog. There's a startup in San Francisco that is franchising bringing up an ISP. So it's ISP in a day. They're going one apartment building at a time. And that's the kind of, that is another outlet in there that will change the equation. I can also think of nothing that I've done in my life except for kids. It has been more fulfilling. At the end of the day, not only do I sleep well doing this work but I know that the challenges that I'm facing are because I'm trying to leave the world a better place. Before my time and it is over. Maybe it's like kids helps drive that but I really do believe like the world that we live in and the world that future generations will inhabit that trajectory is being set right now. So that the work we're doing is so critically important it's an inoculant on a global scale with the potential to shift the entire future of civil society. Like how powerful, how wonderful, what an incredible opportunity that is. And then when I'm old and gray, I can tell my kids that thing that you take for granted today, there's a crazy group of people meeting in Washington DC in August of 2018 that was the genesis point for that. How great is that? Last question, so Greg, go for it. I'm a little just working here. I'm a little reluctant to wade into this. For one thing, it makes me think like the MLab is not the important thing that I ought to be working on but your comment about putting five million truckers out of work seems to me. It's only 3.5 million. 3.5 million, okay. It seems to really make very, very clear a huge problem that is coming toward us pretty rapidly. And it seems to me that there's a big separation between people who kind of either intuitively or idealistically understand that there are certain social problems that we need to address in order for the world to keep working well. I was at IBM years ago when they were ramping up big emphasis on diversity and they basically made a very strong business case for it. And I think that they actually helped sell that business case in the rest of the world, in the rest of the country at least. And it seems as if on the one hand there are some problems you can kind of make some progress on by collecting really good data and then beating on people. But I wonder whether how many, I wonder how many of the problems we could solve more effectively if we could actually convince wealthy people and corporations that it's in their best interest to solve this problem. As opposed to, hey, here's some new technology, how can we ring a few billion dollars out of it and move money from poor people to rich people and make this problem even worse. So I wonder what role public interest technology ought to be playing in figuring out why we ought to solve these social problems and what the impact of solving these social problems would be. Well, comrade, I feel like you've put your finger on some serious tensions within modern neoliberal capitalism. But I would caution against maybe dismissing the import of what MLab is doing. It seems divergent, but let's game this out for a moment. 3.5 million truckers, that's a big number and that's a big impact on a national, in fact, a global scale. The only hope we have of being able to address this problem, I, autonomous vehicles are coming, especially for that use case. And in fact, society will benefit from that writ large. I'd just like to avoid the decimating externalities of that. On the other hand, the only chance we have to address this looming problem is to find a way to bring broadband connectivity because it's the future, right? A service economy for these communities is the only hope you have when all the manufacturing jobs are gone and when the last job is gone. We can't even get there until we acknowledge the extent of the problem and we can't do that with the creptacular data set that's the official broadband map of the United States. So to get the funding, the multi-billion, the multi-tens are hundreds of billions of dollars that need to be spent to upgrade our 21st century national infrastructure in order to help truckers whose lives are going to be detrimentally impacted within the next five to 10 years. We need the data to show key decision makers. No, your map that shows mission accomplished, there's connectivity here, isn't even close to done. And when we finish that task, then we as public infrastructure technologists can talk about the training programs and all these other massive investments that we must make as a society. This is not an option. It's a requirement. And MLab I think plays a crucial pivoting role in that of making it impossible for a decision maker to ignore the problem that's coming, not in the distant future, but like in the next administration. More hands, but also we're a little over time and I don't wanna cut our breakout short. All right, Ken wants the last one, okay, sorry. All right, one last question, and then it'll come on. As you start talking, it'll come on, yeah. One of the things we've done in California is actually done a very good map of mobile broadband. And one of the things we've discovered is exactly the places where those 3.5 million truckers today have three-fifths of the broadband that an urban user has. And they've had it for three years. And it's a constant trend in every measurement that we've been able to take. They are the neglected class in the United States. And as we move to 5G, as for those of us who know the physics of 5G, it works like great over 100 meters, which means that the challenge for rural users is about to explode. If current technology is only three-fifths, can imagine what's gonna happen when urban areas be seen and ramp up to 100 megabits and beyond, but it only can work in urban areas. The problem is immediate. So on that note, let's, thank you for that good, let's give a round of applause to our fireside chat panel. Thank you.