From a national broadband policy to open government proposals to federal financial incentives, President-elect Barack Obama is being swamped with high-tech ideas for his new administration. Getting Americans connected to the Internet, though, remains almost everyone's top IT priority.In the immediate days after the election of Barack Obama, technology
leaders, academicians and consumer groups can't seem to hold enough meetings,
roundtables, Web seminars and conference calls to push their ideas to the
administration in waiting.
If there is one area of universal agreement among the groups, it is that
high-speed Internet connections for Americans should be a top technological
priority for Obama. President Bush, of course, said the same thing in 2004,
setting a national goal of affordable broadband access for all Americans by
2007.
It didn't happen. Bush put his faith in the free market, but—for whatever
reason—the United States tumbled to the middle of the pack among industrialized
nations in broadband penetration, falling behind Denmark, the Netherlands,
Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Sweden, Korea, Finland, Luxembourg, Canada, the
United Kingdom, Belgium, France and Germany.
"If you look overseas, most of the world's leading nations have half a
dozen or more companies offering a similar broadband product," Ben Scott,
policy director at Free Press, said Dec. 2 at a Capitol Hill tech conference.
"They're competing on price. They're competing on speed. They're competing
on the attractiveness of the services they offer on top of their broadband
package."
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