Mira Patel

Mira Patel works at the intersection of spectrum policy, broadband access, and media ownership, analyzing how decisions at the Federal Communications Commission shape who gets connected and what information they can reach. Her lens is rooted in a straightforward material fact: digital infrastructure is public infrastructure, and the digital divide tracks the same fault lines as every other American inequality. She reads the broadband question through the prism of universal service — the Lifeline program, the Affordable Connectivity Program, E-Rate subsidies for schools — and through the question of what happens to local journalism when media ownership concentrates among fewer corporate owners while private equity picks apart newsrooms.

Patel draws on a lineage of structural analysis: the Benton Institute's work connecting broadband access to democratic health, Public Knowledge's defense of net neutrality as the user-side default, Susan Crawford's account of how spectrum and fiber policy created incumbent advantage, and Tim Wu's genealogy of how communications networks oscillate between open protocols and proprietary control. She reads spectrum auctions not as abstract transactions but as redistributions of public airwaves, and she tracks the specific communities that lose access when the FCC raises media-ownership caps or weakens low-power FM rules.

Her distinctive move is to follow the line from policy change to loss of access — to ask, precisely, which users disappear and which markets stop supporting local voices when particular rules change. Rather than defend net neutrality as an abstraction, she anchors it in the fact that ISP opposition has never been about innovation but about the ability to extract rent from other people's content. She reframes media consolidation not as an industry question but as a question about whose story gets told in which neighborhood, and whether anyone remains to hold power accountable when the newspaper folds.

Net neutrality, universal broadband, local-journalism sustainability, anti-media consolidation.