Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that gets you smarter on the collision of tech,

business, and politics.

Sponsored by AT&T.

I'm Dan Pramack.

On today's show, Trump again sticks his Twitter finger into a media merger and big questions

about the day's largest IPO.

But first, the return of America's digital divide.

Now, you might remember the term digital divide. It basically meant that rich people had access

to new technologies, particularly the internet, while poorer people didn't. And so not only did that

mean richer people had a better quality of life, you know, what else is new, they also would

continue to have a leg up when it came to future jobs, since they were the ones more

fluent with the sort of gizmos and programs that employers were seeking. You know, so, for example,

imagine trying to get a white collar job today, or candidly, even most blue collar jobs,

without knowing how to operate something like a smartphone. Now, that digital divide does seem to have

significantly narrowed over the years, but its ripples are still being felt by those in their 30s and 40s and 50s

who were on the wrong side of it. And now we might be heading into a brand new digital divide,

which is as much about location as it is about income. And it's something that Axiosus Kim Hart wrote about

this morning on the website and we'll talk to her soon. So here's how it goes. The idea is that lots of

telecom companies want to spend billions of dollars rolling out what they call 5G, which is this super

fast network that can enable all sorts of cool things. But almost all of these rollouts are happening in cities, leaving

suburbs, ex-verbs, and certainly rural areas far behind. Why it matters is that in our rush to

innovate, we could be creating kind of a new economic underclass and one that either leaves

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