From 1993 to 1997 Hundt led the FCC through revolutionary decisions and partisan battles that helped start the New Economy wave of entrepreneurship, and helped make the United States the world's leading Internet economy. As a major driver of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Hundt helped create new funding mechanisms and communications-driven educational reforms that enabled schools, for the first time in history, to provide classroom access to the Internet in thousands of U.S. communities. Your funding programs have succeeded in wiring most of the classrooms in the United States, a major accomplishment by any measure. That s the largest amount of money spent on any new education initiative in history. Under Al Gore's original vision it was never about schools, but it was always about classrooms.
Many schools have access to the Internet for administration purposes.
Our goal was to get the keyboards to the fingers of teachers and students. None of that has proved true. Our program worked because we didn t tell the schools what to buy. They re not mandated to buy anything at all. Another competing idea was that we should order the telephone companies to provide networking for no cost to schools.