And a Pony

Good news, Americans! Our president says that everybody ought to have affordable broadband internet by 2007!

And a pony!

OK, he didn't actually mention the pony, but as long as you're just wishing for things, you might as well wish for it all.

I have nothing against affordable broadband internet to the home. I used to run a web site over a pair of 64Kbps ISDN channels and switched to 384Kbps-upstream SDSL as soon as it was available where I live. I'd upgrade to something faster, but higher speeds aren't available on my block. And perhaps more importantly, I had a dream-come-true not-quite-a-job-offer fail to materialise because the outfit that was going to hire me - a development studio specialising in bandwidth-intensive rich media projects - couldn't find enough work to pay my salary. Apparent there simply aren't enough people with broadband connections to make these kinds of projects worthwhile. It's not quite on par with, say, affordable healthcare or reliable retirement income, but ubiquitous broadband would be a very good thing for this country to have.

But hang on a sec. About healthcare and retirement income. Those really are more important. Those are needs, pretty far down near the base of Maslow's hierarchy. Shouldn't the president be spending more time working on those?

It's rather ironic that Bush should be trying to score points with voters by promoting internet access. Four years ago, he and his proxies were ridiculing Al Gore for claiming to have invented the Internet. Gore actually made no such claim; that was a lie promoted by the Bush campaign. What he'd said was that "I took the initiative in creating the Internet." And you know what? He did. Not as a geek inventor (a word he never used in this context). But as a Representative in the 1970's and as a Senator in the 1980's (before you'd even heard the word "internet"), he was instrumental in providing funding for the inter-networking projects which would become the publically available "information superhighway" we know today. He didn't just vote or it, or co-sponsor the bills; he wrote them. All Bush is doing here is jumping on a bandwagon that Al set in motion back when George was still dodging... military service.

The difference is that Gore made it happen. He provided the funds. Bush is just wishing. He has no plan for paying for it. He has no plan for making it happen. He just thinks it "ought" to happen. Hell, if that's what it takes to be elected president, I should have won four - or even eight - years ago. And he's going to worry about creating competition in this market only after there's an entrenched incumbent in every market.

But maybe now we can return the favor by propagating the lie that Bush is claiming to have invented broadband. And the pony.