If only it were that simple. First off, the term “broadband” is so degraded today that it is of little use in a discussion about the future of Internet access for all. Instead, we should be talking about a national advanced communications and information technology policy that encompasses all aspects of public safety and civic participation, and recognizes that structural social and historical barriers to Internet access remain pervasive. The “digital divide” in our nation is vast and deep, threatening our national health and education, national security and economic prosperity.

Fortunately, public policy tools are on hand for the incoming Obama administration and the 111^th Congress to promote the common good through effective, science-based advanced communications and IT policy. They have at their disposal proposals to prioritize these policies in White House deliberations, congressional legislation in place to gather the data necessary to understand how to close the digital divide, and a new set of wired and wireless spectrum policy proposals to create a digital public square that is every bit as open and diverse as our founders and the progressives who followed them envisioned. These policy tools need tweaking, to be sure, but they are available and should come quickly out of the toolbox in the first year of the new administration.

The Role of the White House

Advanced communications and IT is vital to public safety and civic participation, something that President-elect Obama’s transition team clearly understands. But the idea of an IT czar, or federal chief technology officer (as belated as such an office is), does not quite capture the importance of advanced communications and information technology in today’s world. A great deal is known today about the importance of access to advanced IT in relationship to economic development, education, and health care. But equally vital is the relationship between advanced IT access and public safety and civic engagement. I have written on the relationship between advanced IT and public safety in “Ubiquity Requires Redundancy: The Case for Federal Investment in Broadband.” Here, I will examine briefly the relationship regarding advanced IT and civic engagement.

Federal investment in communications services for the purposes of strengthening our democracy is a deeply-rooted American tradition going back to the founders’ substantial investment in the U.S. Postal System. The rationale underlying much of U.S. communications policy is tied to the value of ensuring all Americans access to competing sources of information to support robust democratic discourse. In addition to democratic discussion, supporting the ability of citizens to actively engage with government is also a long standing tradition. Both democratic deliberation and civic engagement must be protected in the digital age.

Increasingly, being able to take part in an open government requires access to the Internet. As government records, administrative proceedings, requests for proposals, tax forms, job announcements, even school closings and emergency warnings go online it is increasingly important for all Americans to have access to advanced telecommunications services.

The Obama campaign and the Obama transition team demonstrated a unique understanding of the importance of advanced IT, enabling them to go around traditional gatekeepers and speak to and hear from the American public. The online activity of this historic campaign and transition is far deeper and far more engaging than the mass media interviews, and it encompasses not only record-breaking fundraising but sophisticated policy discussions.

Unfortunately, not every American has equal access to either government records or on-line policy discussions. Libraries and schools are all too often only occasional access points for the community, and many employers discourage non-work related access to the Internet. This leaves too many Americans with very limited access to advanced IT. Yet access to participate in a local, state, or federal proceeding should not be determined by the unwillingness of the private sector to deploy new fiber or Wi-Max connectivity to particular communities. And access in already-wired communities cannot continue to rest upon a local library’s limited number of computers or whether it can keep its doors open long enough for those working two jobs. This inequality in access to important civic information and engagement should not be tolerated in a democracy.

That’s why the Obama Administration needs to ensure that its IT czar or chief technology officer and all the other relevant federal office holders are given a wide remit to craft advanced communications and IT policy to open online civic participation to every American. The director of this new office, however, must then grasp that closing this digital divide will first require extensive, data-driven investigation.

Defining the Digital Divide

Structural barriers to widespread and speedy Internet connectivity are stubborn. The Obama administration needs to get the data and then get going. The barriers that cause the digital divide will not come down on their own, and they will certainly not come down if we fail to look for them in the rush simply to roll out more broadband. Alas, progressives are not at all immune to the powerful dream of free market competition or ever-advancing technology as solutions to the problems of discrimination or isolation.

Even since Herbert Croly, who in 1909 penned the progressive manifesto “The Promise of American Life,” there is a strong strain in progressive thought that believes somehow the combination of new technologies and free markets will solve the persistent problems of inequality. Without denying the importance of either free markets or technological advance to the general improvement of living conditions around the world, the early 20^th century progressive intellectual (and eventual Supreme Court Justice) Louis Brandeis teaches us to look clear-eyed at the world as it is, and to make policy and law that promotes the public interest.

In the world as it is, there are still very high barriers facing women, people of color, people with disabilities, the poor, and those Americans in the isolated regions of Appalachia, Indian Country, and the hundreds of small black communities in the rural South. These structural barriers, the vestiges of a not-so-long-ago America where women could not vote, Mexican Americans were stacked in barely habitable migrant camps, and Jim Crow laws were strictly enforced, have not been torn down. There remains a danger that as advanced IT becomes increasingly important to our economic prosperity, our educational system, our health care system, our ability to respond to natural disasters and threats at home and abroad, and our ability to engage as citizens, the structural barriers of sexism, racism, poverty, and geographic isolation will reinforce the advantages of a few and make it even more difficult for children living in the other America to ever catch up.

Simply assuming that the market and continued technological advance will address the problems faced by those Americans we do not see until a levee breaks is taking too great a risk. There is still inequality in America because of the continued challenges of gender preferences, racial segregation and rural isolation, and there is still a digital divide.

Despite the marketers’ best gloss, this divide will not be bridged by access to cheap cell phone service. Access to a powerful personal computer linked to a truly high-speed Internet service is far better than even a Blackberry for doing homework or communicating video rapidly with a remote medical center.

But before we tackle the problems of technological inequality in America we must get a solid handle on who has access to advanced IT, where IT is deployed, at what speeds and at what cost. We do not have that data now. The Broadband Data Improvement Act has passed both houses of Congress but is not funded. The new 111^th Congress must do so promptly. There is now, after many years of argument, a consensus about the importance of mapping advanced IT in the U.S. As Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) has said, we cannot fix what we cannot measure.

But as the new administration gathers this necessary data, it also needs to fund what we know works—the so called universal service program, particularly the program extending telecommunications services to schools and libraries. Despite the on-going attacks on the E-Rate program, which provides discounted telecommunications services to schools and libraries around the country, more American children than ever have at least some access to the Internet because of this program. There are consistently more applications for support than these programs have been able to handle.

There is also very good evidence that the moribund Technology Opportunity Program, which brought together the private and public sectors to develop new advanced IT communications solutions. This program, which still exists but has been inactive in the Bush administration, created important incentives for public-private collaborations and innovations regarding IT applications.

There is legitimate concern that the universal service program, which provides discounted telecommunications services not just to schools and libraries but to rural communities across the country, needs to focus more on access to advanced IT and focus less on supporting plain old telephone service. The current universal service priorities are no longer sufficient in 21st century America. Once the Obama administration has the data it needs to identify the digital divide, it needs to act quickly to provide all Americans access to the online public square.

Spectrum Policy for a New Century

First of all, analog wireless technology—the free “AM/FM/TV channels” we grew up with—has been obsolete for over a dozen years and must be replaced. Smart radio technologies, combining Internet-like protocols and signal scanning, now make a much more efficient use of the public spectrum possible. We need policies and regulation that catch up to the new technology.

We need to move all current analog broadcasters to digital service as soon as possible. There are much more efficient ways to use the spectrum, but they cannot be put in operation as long as old analog broadcasters, including radio and low power television, are taking up more space than the information they carry really needs.

We also must move forward on the transition to digital television, even while we prepare for the fact that too many Americans will not be ready for this transition. Plans must be put in place immediately to first determine where and exactly what the problems are going to be when the switch-over takes place on February 17, 2009—such as unexpected interference with the digital signal, a digital broadcast range that does not match the old analog range, consumer confusion—and to respond to those problems with real people, ready and able to help both on the other end of a telephone call and just a few miles away, who can come to assist where needed.

This will require a massive help-your-neighbor campaign to make certain this ongoing transition to digital occurs across America. One way or the other we must move quickly to get all of the old analog broadcasters to switch to digital services and free up that spectrum.

Then we need to craft new spectrum polices. As economist Greg Rose and I have written in the past—in “The Failure of FCC Spectrum Auctions”—the auctioning of spectrum does not work to encourage new entrants. The Obama administration must find ways to ensure that women, minorities, and small businesses have an opportunity to participate effectively in the advanced IT structure of the future. Current spectrum policies limit opportunities to new players and will continue to do so as long as we continue to play by old rules that tend to benefit powerful old telecom incumbents.

Allowing innovators access to the spectrum in exchange for clear public interest benefits, such as serving marginalized communities or creating platforms for public safety workers, in place of auctions is a way to open up opportunities for those who cannot compete at auction against large established companies or well-funded investors. Creating free unlicensed access to spectrum that can be dedicated to fixed protocols, such as Wi-Fi, but with multiple applications might also increase innovation and access.

Establishing incentives to immediately put public spectrum to use, to create opportunities for women, minorities, rural communities, and small businesses, and to limit spectrum squatting by auction winners might also work to bring U.S. spectrum policy into the digital age. A new spectrum policy for a new century will create greater access to advanced communications and information technology for all Americans.

Many of the old battles, of course, remain to be fought even as the Obama administration moves forward with far-sighted spectrum policies for the 21^st century. Public access media in communities such as Chicago and Burlington are still fighting under a set of policies that puts them at the mercy of their competitors. Public service media in the United States also remains under-funded and subject to political interference, and there is too much concern about sex and vulgarity and not enough concern over hate and violence. Finally, the public trustee model regarding broadcasting is broken, and the anti-trust rules are a farce.

But a new administration gives us many reasons to hope that as officials craft fundamental telecommunications and information technology policy, these other fights can also conclude and encompass the best progressive principles. The first order of business, though, must be complete online access to the public square for all Americans.

Mark Lloyd is an affiliate professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a member of the advisory board of Science Progress.

Opening these airwaves could lead to the possibility of building a nationwide wireless network and spur innovation in Internet technologies. If the FCC votes in favor of the proposal—as it is expected to do unanimously—huge portions of wireless spectrum will be available all over the country, including 40 percent of the spectrum in the Dallas-Ft. Worth and 74 percent in Juneau, Alaska.

This could be the easiest way to bring high-speed broadband access to all Americans. The available spectrum can penetrate walls, relay large amounts of data, and travel longer distances than signals on other frequencies, which would allow it to reach almost everyone in the United States. And a wireless system operating on these spectrum bands would definitely be less costly, time intensive, and disruptive than laying wire across the entire country.

But major TV broadcasters, including ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC, strongly oppose such a project, along with some sports groups such as Major League Baseball and NASCAR, who argue that an increase in signals could disrupt their own broadcasts and communication.

Even former FCC Chief Economist Thomas Hazlett and Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith—despite opposing the proposal—pointed out in the Wall Street Journal last month that, “today’s digital transmissions can be tightly packed. It is now easily possible to deliver 50 digital signals using just eight TV channels of bandwidth.” The FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology confirmed this conclusion on October 15th, saying that its laboratory and field tests show that opening up the airwaves will not disrupt signals. The FCC’s report further recommended that requiring portable devices to have sensing technologies and a geo-location database would ensure protection for broadcasters.

Opening the airwaves is supported by groups ranging from Google—who launched a “Free the Airwaves” campaign in response—to the New America Foundation, the Wireless Innovation Alliance, and Free Press. This support is for good reason. Access to the powerful, new broadcast spectrum will expand possibilities for wireless innovators of all stripes and potentially give more Americans better access to the Internet and new technologies that we can’t even imagine yet.

UPDATE: As projected, the FCC voted 5-0 to open the white spaces.

The bill proposes a combination of tax incentives, grants, loans, and supports for current federal development programs to spur the growth of widely available and affordable Internet in rural America.

Policy that helps spread the benefits of high-speed communications infrastructure to all citizens is a good thing. In his report, “Ubiquity Requires Redundancy,” Science Progress advisory board member Mark Lloyd explained how Internet connectivity in rural areas is a critical component of homeland security and natural disaster response. Broadband can also improve rural healthcare, education, and economies, argues Nancy Scola, who examines successful programs in Virginia in her article Science Progress, “Broadband Done Right.”

Minor is, improbably, the official blogger for Rose Hill, Va., a tiny mountain town tucked deep in Virginia’s tobacco and coal-mining country, who came to live there because of the state’s unique broadband policies. “You know the magazine Fast Company? They did this issue on people who work from all these bizarre locations—like a monastery on an island somewhere,” she explains with a hearty laugh. “What all those places had was a broadband hookup. And that was my inspiration.”

Minor moved to her Appalachian oasis after catching word that high-speed Internet was on its way. As recently as two years ago, as Minor tells it, getting online to run her grant-writing business required actually meeting the Internet halfway. “I used to drive over the hills for 45 minutes to Duffield because that was the farthest point west the Internet went.”

Virginians are clustering, but not always by packing themselves into easily wired urban areas.

But while the federal government limps along with its fortune-cookie message of a broadband policy—“The market will provide”—in Virginia the global communications network is being pulled and cajoled into every corner of the state where Virginians want and need to get connected. This approach not only gives the state a much needed economic shot in the arm. It also demonstrates a realist approach to bringing broadband to Americans where they make their homes, giving them the tools to live the lives they want to lead.

This is Virginia’s broadband-development model—or more precisely, a collection of models that marry together state, local and federal funds with private industry participation, creating new jobs in parts of the state that have been losing them for decades. What’s more, the Old Dominion model is proving itself up to the task of delivering demanding online applications, much need medical care and training, and small business opportunities to Joan Minor and millions of others in the commonwealth. The approach underpinning the successful rollout of high-speed connectivity represents technology policy innovation at its best.

Demand-led Innovation

Virginia is in a state of demographic flux, with the commonwealth’s growing population of 7.5 million rushing headfirst towards metropolitanism. But that’s not to say the state is becoming citified. Virginians are clustering, but not always by packing themselves into easily wired urban areas. And, as with Rose Hill, the state still retains its deeply rural pockets.

All of which makes bringing broadband ubiquity to Virginia challenging, but the desire is certainly there. Aneesh Chopra, Virginia’s Secretary of Technology, recalls hearing about when the town of Rose Hill called a meeting several years ago to hash over the need for indoor plumbing. Only a handful of town folk turned up, he says. But a recent meeting about laying high-speed fiber-optic cable lines pulled in more than a hundred— in a town where the 2000 census found 714 full-timers. “That’s just how viscerally people feel about broadband,” he says.

“How do we get broadband to a community where the private market isn’t going to go anytime soon?”

The nuts and bolts of how broadband came to Rose Hill is a story of leveraging local funds—cash from the state Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission charged with developing Virginia’s tobacco country—to draw in federal grant monies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s rural Internet program. The Rose Hill model is being replicated down the road a piece in Ewing (population 436), and the even smaller coal-mining community of St. Charles (population 159).

As Karen Jackson, the state official heading up Virginia’s broadband efforts, puts it, “If you’re up a holler and around two mountains, you’re still going to be hard to reach.” Which is why the state puts such an effort into wiring all of its rural communities, she adds. (See sidebar for a detailed look at the policies and programs behind the wiring of Virginia.)

And that’s how broadband came to Rose Hill, but it’s certainly not the only model on view in Virginia. Leave Rose Hill, head north on Route 81, and eight hours later you’ll arrive near the shores of the Chesapeake Bay in King George County. The county is home to the Navy’s celebrated Dahlgren base and is equidistant to Richmond and Washington DC, making it attractive settling grounds for many Virginians. And King George’s population is indeed exploding, having grown by a third since the start of the decade.

Yet the county remains low-density, and hard to network. “You can live on 20 or 30 acres of land out here, but there’s no broadband,” says Brian David, King George’s administrator. “People who work at the base or for military contractors like Lockheed [Martin] drive home and only have dial-up. Newcomers are coming in from Northern Virginia, Charles County, and Prince George’s County in Maryland, and are frustrated. It’s a quality of life issue. The question is,” says David, “how do we get broadband to a community where the private market isn’t going to go anytime soon?”

Just last month, King George County settled on an answer: lower the capital investment by making use of the municipality’s water towers and water tanks, and use its stellar credit rating to borrow and then re-lend the proceeds to a start-up broadband provider with expertise in modern wireless technologies. King George is betting that with a little public sector creativity it can indeed meet its broadband needs. Nearby Spotsylvania is now copying the King George plan.

Or consider how the mountain towns of Danville and Martinsville, lying smack in the middle of the state’s southern border with North Carolina, drew new jobs to their cities via new broadband lines. One of the commonwealth’s earliest adopters of new ways of working, the state’s Department of Taxation, recently took a chance on a pilot telework program, opening up customer service jobs anywhere broadband now reaches—including more than 50 slots allotted to Danville and Martinsville.

“They were absolutely astounded at what they got,” recalls Jackson. “These are not high-paying jobs, but the sort of people who applied are the sort of people who in the Richmond area are already employed. But here the people can stay home. They don’t have to drive into Richmond to get to work. The department got to pick from the cream of the crop and the attrition rate has been next to nothing.”

Broadband for Health and Education

The delivery of broadband to Virginia over the past decade is akin in many ways to the New Deal mobilization to bring electricity to the American countryside. Rural electrification of the ‘30s bridged the divide between rural and urban America, shaping the destiny of many an American, including a Georgian boy named Jimmy Carter. The former president has called the arrival of electricity “the event that transformed our family’s lives most profoundly.” For one thing, artificial light opened up the possibility of reading in those dark hours before morning chores of after the evening meal, a tremendous boon for eager learners such as Carter.

But lighting up the American countryside shares with broadband the “up a holler” problem—low-density is the enemy of networking. In the dreams of a central planner, the most efficient way forward for a state like Virginia might be to turn into one big Dulles Corridor, that high-tech cluster where short hops from one house to the next school to the next industrial park make it no real challenge to string the Internet from one place to the next. Some Virginians, however, want to live outside of suburban tech clusters but remain employed in the wired world; others have never lived in urban or suburban communities and would rather have the wired world come to them.

But the change wrought by broadband isn’t just about neat apps and educational outreach.

So the trick is to network them in a way that spreads broadband’s benefits even as the Internet itself evolves into an ever-more-bandwidth-hungry medium. Says Jackson, “there was a time that as long as you had dial-up and weren’t getting dropped, people were pretty happy. That’s changed.” More critically, Chopra describes demanding medical- records software deployed at health centers serving Virginia’s neediest areas that can’t survive the dial-up link. “People are literally dying because they can’t get the broadband they need to run the software,” He explains. Cutting-edge software applications may demand enormous pipe, but today even successful surfing calls for 200Kbps.

Asked how the people of Rose Hill are using their new broadband hookups, blogger Joan Minor points to people seeking medical information. “We have a high disability rate,” She notes. Indeed, it’s more than twice the national average. “And we don’t have access to large medical facilities,” she adds. “So we have people getting information that they then use to know when to go to our local doctor and when to leave the area.”

In fact, on the health front, Rose Hill has to contend with a double whammy. Its residents confront high rates of sickness and disease. And the area is home to too few medical professionals to treat them. “We have a hard time getting health professionals to live and work here,” admits Minor.

High-speed broadband attacks the problem from three angles. The first is by reducing the need to have medical experts living and working in the communities they serve; via a high-speed video hookup, a pediatric cardiologist at Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth University can monitor the progress of a struggling newborn and deliver instant guidance to local physicians.

The second is distance-learning programs, in which medical residents are trained to do more basic procedures—an approach international aid groups like Doctors without Borders are using to meet many far-flung health needs. And the third way broadband can reduce illness in a community like Rose Hill is simple but powerful: opening up career alternatives to the dangerous and draining jobs such as coal mining, logging, and tobacco farming that contribute to Appalachia’s poor health.

“Virginia Tech has one of the highest-speed computing platforms in the world, explains Virginia Tech’s Dr. Jeffrey Reed, an engineer who heads up the school’s Wireless @ Virginia Tech research program. “But anytime you have high-speed computing, you limit its capability if you don’t have high-speed broadband.” But the change wrought by broadband isn’t just about neat apps and educational outreach.

Chopra, for one, is well aware that wringing out the full value of the Internet is going to take cultural shifts. Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare initiative, for example, is at the bleeding edge of Internet education, with the institution placing course materials free online, making them accessible to anyone with a broadband hookup from Roanoke to Rawalpindi. Along those lines, Virginia is working with Old Dominion University in coastal Norfolk to host introductory nursing classes online, says Chopra. “We don’t know as a society how HR departments will value that you’ve taken 30 hours of MIT coursework.”

Chopra, who sees himself as Virginia’s high-tech storyteller and cheerleader, is hopeful companies will take chances on workers whose credentials are less than traditional. And inspired by the thinking that wiz-bang gadgets and apps can only serve to prove the value of high-throughput connectivity, a team of researchers headed by Virginia Tech’s Dr. Reed and Old Dominion University’s Dr. Nancy Cooley are working to detail a new set of broadband-enabled innovations for a report due on Governor Tim Kaine’s desk this summer.

Keeping Virginia Rural

Asked how the people of Rose Hill are using their new broadband hookups, blogger Joan Minor has quick answers. “eBay is a big one,” she says. “People across all economic lines here are using eBay. Franchisees are ecstatic to be able to communicate with headquarters, who had been telling them they were going to pull their franchise if they didn’t get broadband.

A recent post on Joan Minor’s Rose Hill Blog also highlights Black Bear Blast, a gathering of scientists and locals in Cumberland Gap National Park. Another details Kite Day, a local tradition tracing its roots “way back yonder when,” says Minor. She’s delighted to promote these rural get-togethers, the better to help preserve the small town’s unique way of life. “You look at this town’s demographics, and they’re depressing,” she says. “The people of this town are poor, and they’re sick, and they’re old. Our best and brightest have been leaving and not coming back until they retire. But there’s still a whole lot of pride in these communities. One of the points of the blog is to celebrate that, so the younger generations will want to stay. Now they can figure out how to use the Internet to find a way to stay.”

From Rose Hill to Danville to King George County, the freedom of choice that broadband delivers for Virginians to better their job prospects, their businesses, and their health defines a broadband policy that works. It’s a practical approach aptly summed by Karen Jackson: “We try to find what the barriers are,” she says, “and then we knock them down.”

Nancy Scola is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY.

“Portable, high-speed connectivity provides new options to help create business expansion in rural communities,” Rural Development Under Secretary Thomas C. Dorr noted. “Communities that lack broadband are often bypassed for new economic development investments. “Broadband is as important today as providing rural telephone service was 75 years ago, and we’re proud of our role in fostering public-private partnerships to bring broadband services to rural America.”

In his Science Progress report, “Ubiquity Requires Redundancy,” Mark Lloyd emphasizes the importance of broadband access–especially in rural America–to homeland security and natural disaster response. He makes the case for Federal investment in broadband access to ensure the U.S. has robust, reliable, and redundant networks with which to respond to emergencies and promote public safety. This partnership could be one project along that path to nation-wide connectivity.