If any of this is not factual, please let me know. Our satire is http://gnoblog.org/
Clinton promised broadband for everyone, 12 years late and without a realistic plan. WP noted these are old ideas. Except for 5G wireless – still cloudy – most of these ideas could have been recommended in 2008 and they were. In 2004, George Bush promised “affordable broadband for all Americans.” Obama made the same promise in 2008. Since then, our prices have gone up about a third. The U.S. and Canada still have the highest percentage unserved in the developed world. She’s proposing adding more money to BTOP, RUS, and Connect America. The best estimate is BTOP and RUS wasted half their money. Connect America recipients are bragging to Wall Street about how much is going straight to their bottom line. Nearly all the Clinton advisors are D.C. lawyers and similar. They are often brilliant, all hard-working, and mean well. The fog of D.C. lobbying is blinding and they need people with strong network experience to ground them. Hot air here.
(I will vote for Clinton as I did for Obama. Readers should know my bias. Several of the people here are old friends and I was tempted to kill the story. But it’s my job to report as closely to the truth as I can.)
U.S. Global Connect Program plans to reduce Internet users by 500,00,000
Kathy Novelli, 18 foreign ministers and a bi-partisan group in the U.S. Congress express extreme pride in their “ambitious” goal of adding 1,500,000,000 more people to the Internet between 2015 & 2020. That’s the heart of the U.S. “Global Connect Initiative. Top analysts had previously predicted > 2,000,000,000 adds; the $50 cellphone is changing the world. I don’t see any way the program will result in 500,000,00 fewer connections. Not to worry; the proposal is so ineffectual it will have virtually no effect in either direction.
Vice President Biden noted that Global Connect was “…as profound as what happened in our country in the ‘30s in the Tennessee Valley Authority bringing electricity to vast stretches of my country, only it’s more profound because there’s access to education just by turning on your smartphone.”
(Many staffers at State knew of these figures several months ago and did not contradict them.)