Building A National Broadband Policy

I'm going to step aside from the Blagojevich chronicles for a minute to address a crucially needed investment for our future - a national broadband strategy. The United States is 15th in the world in broadband penetration, and offers download speeds at 10 times slower rates than in Japan, for example. This is despite the costliness of broadband usage in this country (we are 18th in cost per megabyte).

Over the weekend I was able to take part in a first-of-its-kind town hall meeting put together by Internet for Everyone and its parent company Free Press. The program featured speakers and short videos stressing the need for universal broadband access and a network-neutral Web, but the main thrust of the meeting was to start a conversation. Internet for Everyone introduced four topics:

Access: Every home, business and civic institution in America must have access to high-speed Internet.

Choice: Consumers must enjoy real competition among Internet providers to achieve lower prices and higher speeds.

Innovation: The Internet should continue to create good jobs, spread new ideas be an engine of economic growth.

Openness: Internet users should have the right to freedom of speech and commerce without gatekeepers or discrimination.

Attendees strategized around these topics, came up with possible solutions that could be taken by municipalities, federal government, business, and citizen groups, and worked toward consensus on a national broadband strategy. Free Press' Tim Karr described it to me as "an experiment in deliberative democracy." While the perspectives of those involved in the meeting were not quite as diverse as needed for the conversation, there were nonetheless a variety of good ideas discussed. One thing that is key is debunking the idea put forward by telecoms that bandwidth is finite and those who use more of it must be sanctioned through greater fees. In reality, the companies are creating scarcity where it doesn't have to exist, and perhaps with incentives to fatten the pipe and increase access, these so-called scarcity issues would melt away, exposed as just an attempt to create a new revenue stream. Not to mention the fact that this artificial scarcity has caused the United States to fall far behind the rest of the world, reduce competitiveness, and become marginalized on the Internet for the first time since its inception. This has major impacts on job creation and countless other issues. For instance, a wired country is a country that can handle expansions in telecommuting, can cut down greenhouse gas emissions through driving and the wasteful use of paper, reduce unproductive time spent waiting for downloads, etc., etc.

The digital divide (only 35% of households making under $50,000 a year have a high-speed Internet connection) is a large impediment to equal participation in society today. Lower-income communities have substantially lower access to the Internet, which impacts education, economic output and political engagement, among other things. As society increasingly ports a fair degree of the tools for civics online, in an effort to be more efficient and inclusive, they are simultaneously shutting out needed voices among communities of color and the poor. Mandating universal broadband would be an update of President Roosevelt's rural electrification policies in the 1930s. It is just as important to economic and social growth to provide access to a free and open Internet for everyone.

Fortunately, we now have a President-elect who understands the broadband issue as an infrastructure issue. In his most recent weekly address, Barack Obama highlighted the need to bring broadband access to every corner of the country.

"It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption," President-elect Obama said in the address. "Here, in the country that invented the internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they'll get that chance when I’m President -- because that’s how we'll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world....[and] the economic recovery plan I’m proposing will help modernize our health care system -- and that won’t just save jobs, it will save lives."

Technology leaders have been cheered, not just by the commitment but by the understanding of the issue as one that effects jobs, upward mobility and economic growth. As Sara Robinson notes in a larger piece about investing in America:

Yes, making these investments will create more debt, which in turn will cast a shadow on the health of the American dollar for the next few decades. But if we choose our projects wisely and well, they will create more -- much more -- than enough wealth to enable us to pay those bills. After all, the infrastructure and education investments of the 30s and 40s were the foundation of the tremendous prosperity we saw in the 50s and 60s, which more than enabled us to discharge the debt.

Free-market fundamentalism was wrong in the 1880s, wrong in the 1920s, and wrong in the 1990s, too. Anybody who's still hanging onto that 30-year-old conventional wisdom -- or who thinks balanced budgets are so important that we should sacrifice our entire economy on that altar -- is not only admitting that they're incapable of rational, objective thought; they're also demonstrating that they're too ideologically addled to understand the clear lessons of history, let alone understand what's going on around them now.

It was Keynes's theories that got us out of the last depression; and if we're betting our futures on this (which we are), we'd be wise to follow that course again. Our choice here is clear: Invest in America and get our people back to work; or shrivel up and allow ourselves to become a third world country.

The free speech of the 21st century increasingly depends on a broadband connection. I think we need Internet in the same way we need an electrical outlet in every home. Access is essential to keep this country as an economic leader.

Obama's West Virginia Problem

So after locking down the nomination, Sen. Obama is going to get his hat handed to him tomorrow in West Virginia. It's not going to be close; if Obama gets up to 40% it'd be a miracle. Kentucky is going to be the same way. And people are justifiably asking why, and just as justifiably chalking it up to race.

Like most people in Mingo County, West Virginia, Leonard Simpson is a lifelong Democrat. But given a choice between Barack Obama and John McCain in November, the 67-year-old retired coalminer would vote Republican.

“I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife’s an atheist,” said Mr Simpson, drawing on a cigarette outside the fire station in Williamson, a coalmining town of 3,400 people surrounded by lush wooded hillsides.

I think making it entirely a racial construct misses the mark, however. While there have been a number of stories written with essentially this same racial theme in mind, they're all largely anecdotal. There does seem to be a trend with Obama doing the most poorly in counties in Appalachia. I'm going to attribute this to a couple of factors:

1) Demographics - if you're living in the Appalachian mountains, you're likely to be older than the general population, less likely to have a college degree, and almost certainly white. Demography has been destiny for the better part of this Democratic nomination fight, and these are some of Clinton's most favorable areas. There are plenty of mostly white areas where Obama does well, but they are higher-education whites, more affluent whites, and generally just a different group than you have in Appalachia.

2) The Digital Divide - West Virginia is one of only a few states without a Drinking Liberally chapter. There isn't a very powerful netroots there (there is in Kentucky, but it's largely the product of people in the college towns like Lexington and Louisville). The places that Obama fans congregate online are harder to find in Appalachia. And it's harder to get news of the non-corporate media variety, and we all know Obama has been pounded by corporate media recently.

3) People vote like thy neighbor - this was the subject of a great New York Times piece this weekend, and I've been saying this for years. People have self-segregated to a higher degree than ever of late, choosing to live in the same neighborhoods as their ideological soulmates. This has the effect of doubling any cultural divide or polarization. I think part of this is class and age, and part is just people congregating with who they find comfortable. In bigger states there is more of a diversity of regions within the state to balance these echoing effects out - not so in West Virginia, at least.

On the whole I agree with Attaturk - if there are those for whom race is a hurdle they can't get over in choosing the most qualified candidate for President then it's THEIR problem, and they can catch up to the non-racists rather than us having to hold back history for them. But I think he may be overstating how that's playing out in a place like West Virginia. There are other factors at work. And Obama hasn't chosen to really attack these other factors and present himself in a more palatable way to these voters - he's basically checked out on both states. I didn't agree with all of George Packer's disquisition on the subject, but I do think this is sound advice.

McCain began his speech in Inez by saying, "I’m not the son of a coal miner. I wasn’t raised by a family that made its living from the land or toiled in a mill or worked in the local schools or health clinic. I was raised in the United States Navy, and, after my own naval career, I became a politician. My work isn’t as hard as yours." His modest disclaimer seemed unnecessary—the local pol who introduced McCain had just finished calling him a son of Kentucky at heart, and the crowd was entirely on his side. But for Obama, who’s bound to strike people in places even less isolated than Inez as alien, this kind of self-presentation might be essential. Rather than analyzing them out loud, or pretending to be one of them, he should speak about the differences (and race is far from the only one) directly, candidly, in the blunt, personal language that made his Philadelphia speech so memorable. He should say that in spite of these differences, in spite of what he doesn’t know about or share in their life, he knows what Presidential leadership can do to improve their lives—as did Roosevelt, who was an aristocrat, and Kennedy, who was rich and Catholic.

Obama doesn't need to win West Virginia or Kentucky in the general election but he would do well to use this kind of presentation when speaking to those kinds of voters.