ALAMEDA, California -- The broadband dream needs a little push. For several years, politicians, pundits and tech executives have sold the public a vision of the "Information Superhighway" -- of fast, ubiquitous digital connections piped into every home.
But that vision has hit more than a few technical and financial hurdles along the way, with only a meager portion of households currently enjoying the fast Internet.
Those snags point up the need for government aid for broadband, according to Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut), who gave tech executives and workers here a preview of his National Broadband Strategy Act of 2002, legislation that he will introduce in the Senate next week.
Lieberman, Al Gore's running mate in the 2000 presidential election, said the government needs to draw up a "roadmap" for broadband deployment so that we may usher in a "broadband boom" in the economy.
"We can't let this fertile field of technology lie fallow," the senator said, one of several times during his 10-minute speech that he employed elaborate poeticisms to illustrate the societal need for broadband. He also emphasized the importance of "looking over the horizon" toward 100-mbps connections that would "transform the very nature of instruction" and "transport our economy into the future."
Poke through Lieberman's rhetorical haze, though, and you find very little substance to his ideas.
For all the senator's talk of fallow fields, the Strategy Act does nothing more than ask the Bush administration to "recommend a coherent, cross-agency national broadband strategy in a series of key government policy areas," according to a 62-page report (PDF) on broadband prepared by his office.
If the act is passed, the Bush administration will have six months to develop that strategy and deliver it to Congress. But Lieberman did not say what sort of strategy he expects the administration to devise, which parties should have a hand in developing that strategy, and whether any federal agencies will be in any way bound by the strategy.
Were the administration to choose a pro-business strategy as its strategy -- or were it to choose "no strategy" as its strategy -- would anything in broadband change? In other words, after you have a strategy, what's next?
Lieberman pointedly avoided any specificity in his ideas, saying that the government should refuse to endorse any single company or technology in its plan. His slogan, he said, is "broadband positive, technology neutral."
But Lieberman is apparently neutral -- or at least undecided -- about many of the other issues swirling around broadband. Asked by a reporter about his solution to the notorious "last-mile" problem -- the difficulty of connecting homes to neighborhood network locations -- he said that his legislation offered no real solutions but that it deserved some study.
His office's report notes that in the next few months, Lieberman will introduce several more broadband bills to increase the Federal Communication Commission's role in broadband, to offer tax credits for some broadband deployments and to bolster federal research and development efforts for broadband. Maybe one of these will tackle the last-mile issue.
Lieberman also refused to comment on the Tauzin-Dingell broadband bill, which would allow "Baby Bell" phone companies to enter the broadband market. After an intense lobbying campaign that pitted the regional Bells against other telecom firms, the House passed that bill in February, but it has remained stalled in the Senate.
Lieberman declined to take a stance on it but he said the bill was another example of lawmakers becoming "mired" in short-term "skirmishes" while missing the technological utopia that's just around the corner. He repeated his slogan -- "broadband positive, technology neutral."
And that's a curiously obvious slogan, it must be said. After all, aren't all government officials broadband positive and haven't they been so for awhile? Was Lieberman out here to say nothing more than the fact that he, too, liked broadband?
No. He likes California, too. During his speech, he spoke glowingly of Northern California and the people here whom he says fueled the last tech boom. Only in passing did he mention the region's tech bust, which is at least in part attributable to an over-building of network space for which, it turned out, there was no demand.
