The real risk we run is recreating a welfare state ethic in cyberspace. Of all the misconceptions surrounding multimedia innovation and digital superhighway metaphors, none is more misguided or misleading than the belief that access to new telecommunications technologies is somehow central to determining wealth and poverty in the Information Age. This is a pseudo issue that better reflects the paternalistic pretensions of a public policy elite than compassion for the less fortunate. It's bizarre that certain pundits and prognosticators want to focus on high-tech network access subsidies for the masses barely three months after the Department of Education published a survey claiming to show that fully half of American adults are close to functionally illiterate. Telecommunication does have a populist role to play.
Lifeline subsidies are as essential as the services they provide.
On the surface, expanding this system of telecommunications subsidies to include new telecommunications services seems a noble goal. In practice, however, the more you examine the idea, the sillier and more convoluted it becomes. If that were true, it would be far more logical and cost effective to give people subsidies for newspaper and magazine purchases and keep the public libraries open longer. We would also run our society as if we cared about literacy. Ted Turner may disagree, but it's not.