Personal Democracy Forum - #2

New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is calling for universal broadband access in his keynote speech at the Personal Democracy Forum. He pointed out that the US fell from fourth to sixteenth in broadband access when someone in the audience yelled out his numbers were outdated. It was already worse. At this moment broadband access is thirty times cheaper in Japan than it is here. Spitzer thinks this is a disaster for our infrastructure. Certain parts of NYC like Red Hook are still on dial-up. The digital divide, according to Spitzer, lives and is costing our society vast sums of money. He didn’t get into the tax implications of his proposal, but his argument, I imagine, would be that affordable high speed internet access would pay for itself by through economic stimulation. Spitzer thinks we (particularly) are falling behind in technological innovation.