Bill Moyers has a website dedicated to issues in America. He picked three topics and one of them is a technology related topic. The Net at Risk series delves into the importance of the Net on our society.
COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS
"The Net @ Risk" takes viewers to Lafayette, Louisiana, where residents and officials took on their phone company, BellSouth, and their cable company, Cox Communications, and built their own high-speed fiber network after the firms refused to bring true broadband connections to their community. Both telcom giants lobbied the state legislature to block Lafayette's plan, citing unfair competition. Ultimately, lawmakers put it to a vote to let residents decide. The measure allowing the community-built network passed overwhelmingly. BellSouth then filed suit, delaying construction by more than a year, before losing their case in court.
The Community Connections section resonates with Ken Dozier's presentation (skip to slide 31) at the Softec Symposium. Ken talked about a small community that decided to bring fiber to their homes as a community project. Bill Moyers also highlights a small town that decided to take on broadbad access as a public utility. He talks about how the economic and political vitality of small towns is greatly affected by their broadband penetration. Thomas Friedman in the "World is Flat" also talks about how we are far behind in our Broadband penetration compared to the rest of the industrialized world and how this will affect our competitiveness in the information age. As a remote technology worker this issue hits home. My ability to work effectively is directly proportional to by bandwidth (both down and up). I'm also in the gaming industry and it's amazing to see the breakthough's in the Korean and Japanese markets due to broadband and wireless penetration.
Should the Information Super Highway be a public utility like the commerce highways are? What role if any should associations like softec play in bringing up these topics into the local politics?
1 comment:
I think that broadband is important but I also think how we get it is important. Keeping broadband competitive is a valuable principle. Government Interne tprojects often make the news but I have found from firsthand experience that they struggle with the fast moving Internet world.
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