Today in Bad Ideas

Elle sent me the link to this post by Jamilah King at Colorlines about former Federal Communications Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate's proposed plan (pdf) "to hand out vouchers for broadband service in poor communities, presumably in place of ensuring affordable high speed Internet in every household"—vouchers to which she's given the rather stunning name "broadband stamps." Y'know, like food stamps.

"Rather than new indiscriminate broadband spending initiatives, perhaps certain eligible Americans could have 'broadband stamps,'" she writes in her proposal. The stamps would "allow certain low-income eligible citizens to purchase broadband services on a technology-neutral basis from a cable, telephone, wireless, or satellite provider."

In Tate's view, the vouchers represent a logical alternative to keeping what she termed "Big Government" away from "dictating what Americans 'should' get or what is 'best for them'" when it comes to broadband. The news came just days before Google announced a deal with Verizon that aims to preempt federal regulation of wireless Internet services, a move that could spell trouble for many users of color. And an almost immobilized FCC is scrambling to make good on its National Broadband Plan promises to significantly increase services in rural and urban communities, though first it has to outline its position on how — and if — to regulate service providers in order to make sure that increase happens. So far, it's not looking too good.

King quotes Nate Anderson's description (pdf) of how the plan would work: "The idea is to give low-income Americans a broadband voucher that they could use to order a 'minimum broadband package,' with 'minimum' in this case meaning 'enough bytes to surf the Web and send e-mails to family members.' Tate wants to make sure that this 'circumscribed' broadband offers only rudimentary Internet access so that those who want better service will put some skin in the game and add their own money."

Mmm. Call me cynical, but I don't think encouraging tech corps to subsidize this idea is the reasoning behind Tate's advocacy of truncated internet access at all; I would stake money on the real reason being that she imagines, with breath-catching horror, giving poor people internet access only for them to use it to surf porn and play online poker instead or whatever vices she imagines they'll indulge instead of spending their time reading dispatches from the RNC and Focus on the Family.

There are simply too many layers of irony through which to plow in a proposal that asserts to keep "Big Government" from "dictating what Americans 'should' get or what is 'best for them'" by providing vouchers that allow access to limited content arbitrarily chosen by…well…someone! Who isn't Big Government, that's for darn sure!

I'm all for expanding broadband access; the US is significantly lagging behind other developed countries in terms of its broadband infrastructure, particularly in rural and poor urban areas, and we need to be making serious investments in our digital infrastructure as desperately as we need to be rebuilding roads and bridges, if we've any interest in maintaining a marginally competitive economy in the near future. But this proposal just, as Elle said in her email, misses the point.

Not only is its potential efficacy dubious at best; it condescends to the people whom it purports to want to help—people who are already routinely patronized for being "out-of-touch," or some variation on that theme, as it is, by virtue of being too poor to be well connected (in both senses of the term).

And I truly wonder how many of the homes Taylor Tate imagines will qualify for her "broadband stamps" are even in a position to benefit from them. One of the big barriers to poor and/or rural people—at home, at school—getting online (never mind online via broadband service) has long been the cost of the actual technology. PCs are a lot cheaper than they used to be, but that doesn't make them objectively cheap.

A "broadband stamp" won't be of much help to someone who doesn't have $500 for a computer in the first place.

There are better, way better, ideas than this. Of course, they're of the socialist sort, the BIG GOVERNMENT sort, that makes people like Taylor Tate cover her delicate ears with the invisible hand of the market.