Spreading the Broadband Revolution

[rodeodance]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/21/opinion/21kennard.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print

October 21, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Spreading the Broadband Revolution
By WILLIAM E. KENNARD

WASHINGTON

LAST week, Google announced that it would pay $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube, a video-sharing Web site started only 20 months ago. At the same time, CBS announced a content-sharing arrangement with YouTube. This is the new world of interactive television, all made possible by fast broadband connections streaming video over the Internet.

Television is becoming a two-way, interactive experience that offers viewers the digital agility of the computer, the display quality of a movie theater and content that can be summoned on demand. It will take us from what an F.C.C. chairman, Newton Minow, referred to 45 years ago as a “vast wasteland” to a vast interactive world of limitless content — a long way from our couch-potato past.

Any serious discussion of the future of the Internet should start with a basic fact: broadband is transforming every facet of communications, from entertainment and telephone services to delivery of vital services like health care. But this also means that the digital divide, once defined as the chasm separating those who had access to narrowband dial-up Internet and those who didn’t, has become a broadband digital divide.

The nation should have a full-scale policy debate about the direction of the broadband Internet, especially about how to make sure that all Americans get access to broadband connections.

Unfortunately, the current debate in Washington is over “net neutrality” — that is, should network providers be able to charge some companies special fees for faster bandwidth. This is essentially a battle between the extremely wealthy (Google, Amazon and other high-tech giants, which oppose such a move) and the merely rich (the telephone and cable industries). In the past year, collectively they have spent $50 million on lobbying and advertising, effectively preventing Congress and the public from dealing with more pressing issues..........

[acmejack]

1. Moyers had a wonderful special on this very topic Wednesday!

See it here at this link!

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/net/watch.html