Barack Obama made sophisticated use of technology during his run for the White House. And throughout his campaign, the BlackBerry-addicted candidate stressed the transformative power of technology, making a high-profile promise to provide high-speed Internet access to all Americans.
But when the House unveiled a preliminary version of the economic stimulus plan, crafted with some input from President Obama’s advisers, the amount of money allocated for broadband Internet development was much lower than experts had anticipated. In the $825 billion proposal, only $6 billion was aimed at broadband, far short of the $12 billion to $30 billion that industry experts estimate it would cost to wire the nation. The House bill allocated the same amount of money to weatherizing the homes of low- and moderate-income people.
The stimulus proposal still has to make its way through the Senate and may be changed substantially before it’s signed by the President. But many in the tech industry are contemplating some tough questions: Why did broadband get slighted? Will the technology get more government funding in the future? And does the debate over broadband foreshadow how the technology community will be treated in the future by the Obama Administration?
More Money in the Future?
Blair Levin, a former senior official at the Federal Communications Commission, was a top technology policy adviser on the Obama transition team. In an interview with BusinessWeek, he says that more money could be allocated to broadband in the future. “Did we leave the door open to additional money?” asked Levin. “I think the answer is the door is open and should be open.”
Levin and other technology leaders say there are several reasons that broadband got less money than expected in the stimulus bill. For starters, there is no track record of the federal government funding broadband networks. That made it harder to…