Europe May Show Us the Way

The 25 European Commission member countries and nine accession countries have all signed up for a plan that could make accessibility to the Internet mandatory. The 34 countries all signed an agreement in Riga, Latvia, last week, committing themselves to the "Internet for all" action plan, designed to ensure that the most Web-disadvantaged groups can get online.

The EC has now pledged to increase broadband coverage across the continent to 90 percent by 2010. Rural areas are still underserved, according to the Commission, with about 60 percent penetration. Urban areas fare better and are already at the 90 percent mark. The EC has also committed to putting new measures in place to increase people's skills in using computers and the Internet by 2010.

The question of accessibility for disabled people also looms large in the EC's plan for inclusion. The Commission is studying the possible introduction of mandatory accessibility standards in public procurement, to be brought in by 2010.

What makes this amazing is that this is 34 separate countries all coming together to agree on the importance of high speed communications, specifically the Internet, for the future of their countries.

We live in one country and we cannot make this happen. We seem to be controlled by politicians who put their own fund raising and political agendas ahead of the good of our country's future. Now you know a big reason why our place as the economic leader of the free world is quickly slipping away.

This lack of leadership and vision is not just at the federal level, but extends all the way down to our local areas. In some areas, leaders are working hard to provide high speed Internet to all their citizens, while in others, people with forward looking vision are in short supply.

Here in my own area of Grant County, Washington, we have a marvelous fiber optic system put in place by our Public Utility District...created by people with a vision for our future. These folks knew that because our County is largely a rural one, no communications corporation would spend a dime to help us out, leaving us in the communications stone age. They made it happen, albeit with some mistakes and errors in judgment along the way.

While the large urban areas of our county are pretty well connected via the system, the rural areas are unfinished because the people with vision have largely been replaced by people with no vision...Bean counters with no imagination or view of the future. These people seem to be on a mission to destroy our fiber system and stop all future development. They shut down the Network Operations Center that monitored the system and they have surplused all the video equipment to provide television alternatives, and of course they fired the vast majority of experts that understood and believed in the system. While these leaders claim they are not anti-fiber, their actions show just the opposite.

The good news for us is that Microsoft and Yahoo are moving into our area and forcing the PUD to continue fiber operations. To turn down their requests for continued fiber growth would be a political death knoll for the anti-fiber politicians who control the PUD Commission, although one commissioner did vote against a rate system to help bring these companies into our area.

Hopefully, the voters of our area will wake up and replace these bean counters over the next couple of years. If you are reading this and don't live in my county, I hope you will ask your leaders the hard questions about your area's communications plan for the future. And, maybe with luck, our federal government will follow the lead of the European Commission and make high speed Internet a mandate for all areas of our country.

It is just hard to believe that one great country like the U.S. can't do the same thing that 34 European countries just agreed to do. I fear for our future when we continue electing fools on a local, state and national level.