Ambitious N.Y. Broadband Plan Unveiled by Spitzer

Philadelphia’s city council last week finalized a deal to blanket that city’s 135 square miles with high-speed access. The system could be in place by late 2007. To move his state in that direction, Spitzer said, he would have N.Y.’s Public Service Commission reform state rules that impede broadband expansion. And the federal govt. should “wake up” and expand Universal Service Fund (USF) coverage to include Internet service, Spitzer said.

It’s disappointing to see a widening digital divide in N.Y. and across the U.S., compared with other nations’ higher rates of broadband penetration, Spitzer said, attacking “3rd world service at first-world prices.” In the U.S., broadband service costs twice what it does in China and 30 times what it costs in Japan, he said. No wonder the U.S. has plummeted from 4th to 16th in high-speed saturation, Spitzer said.

N.Y. is a variation on conditions nationwide, Spitzer said. Its lawmakers assume upstate rural areas’ lack of resources and infrastructure means broadband can’t be a reality, Spitzer said. “But that hasn’t stopped Canada,” he said, citing ambitious Canadian high-speed deployment programs that have boosted penetration past 50%. Downstate N.Y. fares little better, Spitzer said, with countless city-dwellers lacking fast, affordable Web access. Many in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park and Red Hook areas have only dialup access, and there’s no comprehensive plan to address this disparity, he said.

N.Y. may be able to move citizens and goods but can’t move information and ideas, Spitzer said. S. Korean kids have far faster Web access than those in the 5 boroughs, he said, putting residents at a disadvantage. “We must make New York State the most connected, most technologically advanced place to do business in the world,” he said. Universal broadband access is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity, Spitzer added.

A statewide broadband plan could cut small firms’ costs and link them in real time with customers and suppliers around the world, Spitzer said. Farmers could run irrigation systems from anywhere and students, teachers and parents could access 24-hour distance learning and educational resources faster and more thoroughly, Spitzer said.

Better broadband penetration could aid first responders’ emergency communications, while improving govt. efficiency and transparency, he said. Some areas are exploring options, Spitzer said. Suffolk County is looking at creating a Wi-Fi network covering its 900 sq. miles. The effort, pushed by County Executive Steve Levy, has a 15-member panel at work on a business plan and timeline. Spitzer slammed efforts in some states by telcos and cable companies to thwart municipal broadband. About a dozen states have “actually passed laws and regulations that limit instead of expand broadband access,” he said.

Most of Spitzer’s ideas wouldn’t cost more, but would leverage existing economic development dollars, he said. “I'm not proposing that government get into the business of wiring the Empire State. I'm not proposing that all New Yorkers get broadband for free,” he said: “I'm talking about making it affordable to access high-speed, high-capacity broadband throughout the state.” “History is littered with naysayers,” Spitzer said, but to those who argue that ubiquitous broadband can’t be achieved for the state, “I say why not?” -- Andrew Noyes

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In a Q&A with ABC Political Dir. Mark Halperin, Spitzer addressed other Internet matters. Criticisms leveled at the Web -- such as for unleashing unchecked, unsubstantiated content - have been “made against every form of technology that promotes the more rapid dissemination of information,” he said: “The marketplace will and must distinguish over time.” Commentators who don’t care about accuracy degrade the whole medium, he said. Monitoring the blogosphere is a “collective responsibility” but it’s hard to enforce. More accountability among bloggers will boost public confidence, he said, adding, “The element of good taste doesn’t hurt.” Spitzer also said he sees bloggers as journalists “with a different mode of communication.” He said the debate on taxing e-tailing will continue “as more and more commerce moves there.” A tax on all Web products and services is very probable, he said.

Personal Democracy Forum Notebook

Technorati’s relationship with the Washington Post Co. will deepen next week, the blog search firm’s creator, David Sifry, said Mon. The firms partnered in 2005 to show readers “who’s blogging” on stories posted on the newspaper’s site and other properties like Newsweek.com. As part of the paper’s opinion section, online readers will be able to access some of the Web’s most prominent political bloggers, he said. Those “informative and influential” posts will be linked from individual pages on washingtonpost.com and from Technorati’s site, Sifry said. More than 30,000 “enormously influential” political bloggers are active on the Web, he said, without saying how many would be part of the new service.

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Bloggers have been slow to localize, barely competing with traditional media, speakers said. Outside a few markets, bloggers don’t compete effectively with daily newspapers and TV stations, Townhall.com Gen. Mgr. Chuck DeFeo said. N.Y. Daily News blogger Ben Smith called the Big Apple “notoriously slow” at it. Last election cycle, Smith said, he was alone in blogging on local issues. But Technorati.com founder David Sifry said change is afoot. In 2005 his firm set up a way for bloggers to tag posts with a ZIP code, location, specialized topic or other identifier. “It’s been a surprise how well that’s taken off,” he said, with more than 2 million bloggers tagging themselves. Technorati searchers can find tagged blogs ranked by relative influence based on the number of other blogs linking to them, he said. But much is left to do in localizing blogs, he said. Technorati’s effort is “by no means comprehensive” nor is it 100% accurate but it’s a good start, he said. ----

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of 2004 Democratic VP hopeful John, is an Internet addict, she told the Personal Democracy Forum conference Mon. Edwards said she’s online from the moment her kids go to school until 11 p.m. some nights. She was among the first to sign up for a dial-up account through Compuserve and later AOL. In the early days of the Internet, she participated in Usenet, AOL forums and struggled at forming e-mail distribution lists before it was a breeze, she said. Edwards was key in making sure her husband had a Web presence during his political campaigns, she said. In 1996, in memory of their late son, she and her husband opened a computer lab at his high school, where she still volunteers, she said. Edwards said she first tried her hand at making a Web page on Geocities.com, recalling it as “woefully inadequate.” Edwards loves blogs, too. She posts to one of her own and religiously reads Talking Points Memo by Joshua Micah Marshall because “I think of him as a real journalist,” she said. She respects Marshall’s reporting on the scandal involving jailed former Rep. Cunningham (R-Cal.), she said. At first, Edwards said, she didn’t think she'd like celebrity blog collaborative Huffington Post but has come to appreciate “lots of voices on there.” Edwards reads countless local blogs, including those on the North State Blogs network, “who are really close to both the needs of the community and people in the community.” As a celebrity’s spouse, Edwards said, she’s frustrated she can’t always be as candid online as she'd like. “One of bad parts of celebrity such as it is is you can’t always blog and give your own name. I'm looking forward to that day in the future where we don’t have IP addresses,” she joked. She feels “very strongly” about net neutrality, she said. The Internet could be “the most democratic way of communicating,” she said. Tiered high-speed access would erase the Web’s multiplicity of voices, she said: “I don’t think that money is free speech. I think it buys you a bigger megaphone… you can’t hear the guy next to him who doesn’t have the bigger megaphone. We have to, at all costs, avoid that.” Edwards used the event to tout a new One America Committee (OAC) site, “aimed at building a community of people focused on lifting more Americans out of poverty and helping elect Democrats across the country.” OAC produces a program, JRE-TV, that follows her husband on trips across the U.S. -- www.oneamericacommittee.com.