The digital divide debate continues

It's not surprising that the world's fastest-growing communications technologies would engender strong opinions. On December 3, 2011, Susan P. Crawford published an op-ed, The New Digital Divide, in The Sunday New York Times, arguing that the nations poor are being relegated to wireless while the rest of us have both wireless and wireline broadband. High-speed access is a superhighway for those who can afford it, she wrote, while racial minorities and poorer and rural Americans must make do with a bike path.

Crawford calls for policies that equalize access, noting that governments that have intervened in high-speed Internet markets have seen higher numbers of people adopting the technology, doing so earlier and at lower subscription charges.

While opposing opinions appeared almost immediately, two recent articles have critiqued some of Crawford's positions. In the more substantive one, David Honig of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council in The Huffington Post, wrote that "Susan Crawford is a heroine of mine," but that her analysis, while raising the important issue of the digital divide, contained errors.

Wireless, Honig claims, is a solution, not a problem. Crawford wrote that a hand-held device is insufficient to type a resume or get a college degree, and that, few people would start a business using only a wireless connection. Honig, on the other hand, contends that thousands of business owners do just that and are able to stay in business because wireless service costs don't drain their bottom lines. He offers no statistics in evidence, and one wonders how many businesses with no wired computer access are able to remain competitive. Nevertheless, wireless is often a step up for low-income people looking to expand their work opportunities.

Honig also critiques Crawford's ill-considered suggestion for broadband expansion, forcing fiber optic network owners to, as Crawford says, "sell access to parts of their networks to competitors and regulated rates, so that competition can lower prices." If this were ever a reasonable solution, it's now too late.

Network operators have invested tens of billions of dollars in private capital to build next-generation wired and wireless networks based on a view that they will realize the return on that capital. Policymakers cannot now require them to open up privately-financed networks for resale at regulated rates to competitors. In fact, it was only when the FCC ruled that network operators would not have to unbundle their lines that the companies began to make multi-billion dollar investments in next-generation broadband.

Although it is true that people with lower income levels rely more on wireless, Honig says, quite rightly, that this is not primarily a technological problem.

"...a computer usually must be purchased out of wealth, not income, and about half of African American and Hispanic families have no positive net wealth or savings they are living month to month, scraping by. Thus, how to break the digital divide is really an issue of how to break the cycle of poverty itself."

In the end, Speed Matters believes that wired broadband and wireless access are not substitutes for one another, but are complementary. Wireless networks depend upon robust wired networks to transport traffic, whether from the cell tower or the Wi-Fi connection in your home or at a coffee shop. One solution to the spectrum constraints on wireless networks is to build fiber networks deeper into neighborhoods.

On January 4, 2012, legendary Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf published a New York Times op-ed, "Internet Access Is Not a Human Right." While Crawford never used the phrase human right, she did claim that public life in the United States absolutely required full access to the Internet. And the U.N. said that the Internet had become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights.

For some reason, Cerf found that tying rights to access was insupportable. Instead, he said that this argument, however well meaning, misses a larger point: technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. He argued that engineers have not only a tremendous obligation to empower users, but also an obligation to ensure the safety of users online.
It seems a bit peculiar to ask that engineers, who specialize in technical and not political expertise, should be the guarantors of public access.

What is clear is that the digital divide is worthy of intellectual debate, but also that it will require massive resources to bridge it.

The New Digital Divide (The New York Times, Dec. 3, 2011)

More Wireless Broadband Is What Consumers Want, U.S. Needs to Close the Digital Divide (The Huffington Post, Jan. 3, 2012)

Internet Access Is Not a Human Right (The New York Times, Jan. 5, 2012)