Some really good points Here from Sascha Meinrath on the essential nature of having open communication systems in a society that wishes to envision itself as one of democratic equal opportunity. As he states in his piece, internet access is more than a commodity – it’s a public good. The US should be seizing the opportunity to invest in broadband internet as part of any economic stimulus. It seems unfortunate that one has to turn to foreign newspapers (in this case the Guardian U.K.) to get this kind of salient analysis on America’s communication infrastructure.

We live in a civil society – a place where primary education is freely available to all, where anyone can enjoy a walk through our public parks or down our sidewalks and freely drive through the streets. Libraries across the country loan out books for free – literature that you can read on a spring day in our parks or beneath the streetlights on main street on a warm summer’s evening. You don’t have to tip the firemen who show up at your house or pay for police protection – in a civil society, public safety is freely available to everyone.

We enjoy myriad services and resources that we don’t pay for each and every time we use them. Yet each of these key facets of contemporary society was part of a new social contract, often adopted only after years of battle and turmoil to overcome a prior status quo (from private fire and educational services to for-fee libraries and parks). Eventually, however, new models are seen to provide such an enormous benefit to the entire population that we’re willing to invest in ideas that lift all boats. We realise that, as a society, each of us is better off when certain basic services are freely available to all.

At the dawn of the digital era, during this first decade of the 21st century, the most important new commodity is internet access. A growing canon of research has documented the enormous benefits that accrue to those with broadband access (and the increasing detriments faced by those without it). Within many civil societies, in much the same way the agrarian revolution helped eliminate famine, the industrial revolution brought manufactured goods into everyone’s lives and the computer era integrated machines (from laptops to PDAs and cell phones to iPods) into our daily regimes, connectivity is the currency of the information age.

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