The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Does Not Compute
The Federal Communications Commission today unveils “its much-awaited ‘broadband plan,’ which, among other things, will explain how the government plans to get nine out of 10 Americans online by 2020,” CNN reports:
That’s no easy task, considering less than two-thirds of people in the country have high-speed Internet access at home today, according to a 5,005-person survey published by the FCC in February.
Considering that the number of households with broadband was zero a little over a decade ago, it’s hard to see why we need a “national plan” to go from 67% to 90% in the next 10 years. CNN builds its story around what is supposed to be a tear-jerking human-interest story:
Like a photographer without a camera, or a mechanic who doesn’t own a car, Kelli Fields is a webmaster without high-speed Internet access.
By day, the 42-year-old uses a broadband connection at work to update a university’s Web site, which she built and codes from scratch.
But when she goes home at night, the rural Oklahoman struggles with a dial-up Internet connection so slow, she does chores to pass the time while Web sites load.
When we were young, we hiked five miles through the driving snow in our bare feet to use a 300-baud modem. Well, OK, we made that up, except the part about the 300-baud modem.
If you bother to read all the way through the story, though, you find that the reason Fields doesn’t have high-speed Internet is she doesn’t want to pay for it:
Fields is considering scraping together the money to get satellite Internet at her house. But she doesn’t want to give up services like TV to free up money for an expensive Internet connection.
So if the FCC wants to make broadband more widely available, maybe it should try making television less available.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
