WASHINGTON-The Clinton administration’s campaign to narrow the digital divide has come under attack by the American Electronics Association, the National Telephone Cooperative Association and some Republican presidential candidates.
The digital divide is a term coined by the administration to describe what it sees as a developing gulf between the information haves and have-nots in society.
“It’s a phrase without a lot of empirical data,” said AEA President William Archey at a briefing last Monday on the trade group’s high-tech agenda this year. AEA’s members build components that drive wireless telecom products and services.
Two weeks ago, NTCA cautioned lawmakers about mandating advanced digital services in rural areas when they have yet to be fully deployed in urban areas.
“The policy-makers cannot lose sight that this stuff is not 100-percent deployed in urban areas. You have to be careful about mandating [broadband] in rural areas when it is not even deployed in urban areas,” said Tom Wacker, NTCA director of government affairs.
The administration’s push to close the digital divide piggybacks on an E-rate program in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that gives discounts for Internet connections to schools, libraries and rural health-care facilities.
Some Republicans have been critical about how former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt implemented the E-rate component of universal service and current FCC Chairman William Kennard’s unwillingness to veer from his predecessor’s policy.
Kennard, travelling in Europe, was unavailable to comment on Archey’s remarks. FCC spokeswoman Joy Howell declined to comment as well, but pointed to Kennard’s many public statements on the need to fix the digital divide.
The NTCA belief that there is not a digital divide is premised on its members delivering advanced services to their customers but sometimes these are only narrowband. Once customers taste narrowband, then they want-and are getting-broadband, Wacker said.
One member, South Central Telcom, a subsidiary of the South Central Telephone Association of Medicine Lodge, Kan., is offering local multipoint distribution service at 28 GHz on a commercial basis. Two others, PVT Networks, a subsidiary of Penasco Valley Telephone in Artesia, N.M., and Central Texas Telephone Cooperative, are testing LMDS service. PVT will launch commercial service by the end of the second quarter and CTTC will launch by the end of the year, said Asgeir (Gerri) Arnason, NTCA manager of business and technology.
CTTC’s system “is functioning but it has no customers,” Arnason said.
On the LMDS front, NTCA Jan. 21 filed comments with the FCC, urging the agency to let the LMDS sunset date of eligibility expire, as scheduled, on June 30. The rules prohibit local exchange carriers, including NTCA members, from being awarded licenses in their LEC-service area.
NTCA’s campaign is meant to blunt lobbying by the regional Bell operating companies that want Congress to pass legislation that would allow them to offer long-distance data services.
“We are concerned that they [the RBOCs] not be given this opportunity on a silver platter when there is an established procedure in place,” Wacker said, referring to the telecom act, which includes a 14-point checklist that RBOCs must meet to prove their markets are open to local competition. Once the RBOCs meet the checklist, they can offer long-distance service. Bell Atlantic Corp. was the first RBOC to meet the checklist. In December, the FCC said it could offer long-distance services in New York.
The United States Telecom Association and others are sponsoring a variety of broadband bills that would allow the RBOCs to offer long-distance data services-an effort these entities believe would narrow any digital divide.
For its part, AEA would like to move the political dialogue away from the digital divide to other high-tech initiatives, such as getting congressional approval for permanent normal trade relations status with China, raising the high-tech visa caps, simplifying sales and use tax rules, and legislation to exempt stock options being used to calculate compensation.
“We get a little concerned,” said Archey. The digital divide “is premised on something being bad … We think the marketplace-particularly wireless technology-will go a long way to solving this problem.”
Thomas Wheeler, president of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry, agrees that wireless technology could help solve the digital divide. “In developing countries and even in first-world powerhouses like Japan, a move is afoot to skip the wired Internet phase and jump straight to wireless,” said Wheeler in a speech in Seattle last Thursday. He said U.S. policy-makers should recognize that wireless technology can bridge rural America’s digital divide.
When told of Archey’s comments, National Telecommunications and Information Administration head Gregory Rohde shot back, “Read the digital divide report.”
In July, NTIA| (a Commerce Department unit that advises the White House on telecom policy) released a report titled “Falling Through the Net: A Report on the Telecommunications and Information Technology Gap in America.”
At that time, then-NTIA chief Larry Irving said the digital divide was “fast becoming a racial ravine.”
Art Brodsky, an NTIA spokesman, said the NTIA study used U.S. Census Bureau statistics to show that poor, black and rural citizens have less access to digital technologies than others. “We stand by the product,” said Brodsky.
But AEA, even in the face of the NTIA report, refused to back down from its position.
“We’re taking issue with it being a rhetorical tool rather than a precise problem people are having,” said John Palafoutas, senior vice president of domestic policy at AEA.
At the same time, Palafoutas said AEA is not saying a problem does not exist. “It comes off more like a political phrase … It’s become a rhetorical football,” he said.
For sure, `digital divide’ has made its way into the political lexicon of official Washington.
In his State of the Union message last Thursday night, President Clinton declared that opportunity for all requires access to a computer and the knowledge to use it. “That means we must close the digital divide between those who’ve got the tools and those who don’t.”
The president, noting Internet links to schools and libraries are just a start, said the budget being sent to Congress on Feb. 7 will include funds to create technology centers in 1,000 communities to serve adults.
The day before Clinton’s address, the digital-divide issue surfaced in a debate in New Hampshire among GOP presidential contenders.
“There is no need for the government to pretend that it needs to take leadership here. I think that’s just political posturing,” said Alan Keyes, an underdog GOP presidential contender.
Keyes said there is sufficient profit incentive in the private sector to give citizens access to the digital information superhighway.
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), well-positioned to win the New Hampshire GOP primary on Tuesday, disagreed. “I believe we do have a problem and that is there is growing gap between the haves and have nots in America.”
At the same time, McCain said tax benefits and other incentives were preferable to direct government intervention.
Publishing magnate Malcolm “Steve” Forbes said school choice, not technology, is the key to providing under-privileged children with a solid education. “Government getting involved in this will just breed corruption, a lot of interests raking off money on this,” said Forbes. Forbes, noting plummeting computing prices, said the best way to achieve universal access is to let technology flourish.
Gary Bauer said children in rural and urban areas are being left behind in the information revolution, something he said he would address by using the bully pulpit of the pres
idency, tax surplus and some of the budget surplus.
“The marketplace is great but it doesn’t always work perfectly,” said Bauer.
Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the GOP presidential front runner and favored by polls to win the general election in November, said the fast pace of technological advances makes direct government intervention into digital access dangerous.
“I worry about government funding and government programs that are haphazard and will be obsolete before they’re even funded,” said Bush.
Almost before Bush finished the sentence, McCain reminded him that it was a government program that invented the Internet.
