Susan P Crawford, Columnist

How Maine Saved the Internet

Free, locally owned fiber networks can help keep jobs in small-town America.

August 13, 2014 at 7:20 PM UTC

Susan Crawford, the John A. Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School, is the author of "Captive Audience." Her book "The Responsive City," with co-author Stephen Goldsmith, will be published in September. In 2009, Susan Crawford served as special assistant to President Barack Obama for science, technology, and innovation policy. She is a former law partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale). She is the founder of OneWeb Day, a global Earth Day for the Internet held each Sept. 22. She earned a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, and a law degree from Yale University.

Don't mix up the fishing lines with the fiber.

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Rockport, Maine, population 3,321, is trying to solve the existential dilemma of small-town America: How do you get people like Meg Weston's students to stick around?

Weston is the president of Maine Media Workshops + College, one of Rockport's primary economic drivers. When she took office in 2012, she saw that the college couldn't survive without a better Internet connection. Her students needed to upload and download enormous digital files using three or more devices each; she says the school hit a wall with its existing communications capacity.