It's Election Season: Time For Presidential Candidates To Announce That The Internet Is Good

from the but-what-are-you-going-to-do? dept

Remember back in 2004, when both presidential candidates spouted totally meaningless statements about how important universal broadband connections were? If you go to that link, you'll see that President Bush stated that his plan (which didn't include any details, of course) would be to get "universal, affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007." Ah, how did that work? Oh, right. This is politics, where you say a lot of stuff that people want to hear, but there's no reason to back it up. So, don't put too much stock as each of the new candidates for the job talk about the importance of investing in the internet either. First up, we've got Hillary Clinton, who is making some news by announcing her "Connect America" plan, which is designed to get broadband companies to offer broadband where it isn't. What, like the Universal Service Fund, which was designed to get telecom access to underserved areas, and instead became a way for big telcos to pocket extra money from customers with bogus fees? So, yes, improving the broadband access in the country is a worthy goal, and I'm sure we'll be hearing lots of presidential candidates on all sides of the political spectrum talk about it -- but it will be quite amazing if any of them comes up with anything substantial or, for that matter, real enough that we'd ever see it in practice.

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