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Is Google Making the Digital Divide Worse?
theodp writes "As Google Fiber forges ahead into new metro areas, Michael Brick reports on worries the fiber project will create a permanent underclass. Building the next generation of information economy infrastructure around current demand, experts say, will deny poor people the physical wiring needed to gain access while the privileged digerati advance at hyperspeed. 'The fiber service deployment means multiplicity of the digital divide, multidimensionality of the digital divide,' says Eun-A Park of the Univ. of New Haven. 'You can see it in Google's trial in Kansas City.' Speed matters, explains Google, 'because a world with universal access and 100 times faster internet could mean 100 times the learning.' Without universal access, as is the case in KC due to pricing that's out of the reach of many of the city's poor, one presumes the outcome could be 100x the learning divide. Another case of the unintended consequences of good intentions?"
Wow, if only there were some kind of organized system of, say, i don't know, governance for ensuring that under-represented members of our communities get equal access to economic resources? Like a set of written guidelines or maybe rules that all members of a community need to abide by...
"...'because a world with universal access and 100 times faster internet could mean 100 times the learning."
Oh, you funny crazy optimistic Google guys. You confused 'learning' with 'pornography and memes'.
Besides that, what about people in rural areas? What about people who still rely on dialup? They're already in existence but because some rich people in certain cities will have stupid fast Internet, there's suddenly an Internet class divide?
Yes. It's a fascinating idea really. Seems it could really speed things up. Instead of taking 20 hours to finish that course from The Learning Company, I could finish it in only 15 minutes.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The only people harmed by Google's high speed access are the CEOs of companies that have sucked down billions in government money for providing high speed internet access while doing nothing to actually provide it.
So, a faster speed is bad because some won't have access to it? How is not implementing a faster speed option going to help them? This is the exact same problem with, for example, real estate: Since some people can pay for better houses, should we prohibit such houses because it gives them an unfair advantage? It seems that the author does not realize that the problem is of much greater dimensions than: "Google is discriminating people by income." Capitalism is discriminating people by income, and if that is his complaint, then his article sucks at conveying it.
Yes, the company offering free service if you pay a one-time fee for the hookup (a fairly reasonable one, at that) is totally making the digital divide worse. Clearly.
The pricing of their gigabit offering is fantastic. And while that price is undoubtedly out of the reach of poor people, so is almost everything. If it's really that important to have gigabit internet for the nation's poor, then that's something the government (as well as charitable organizations) needs to subsidize, just like with anything else that is deemed necessary (but too expensive for the poverty-stricken to afford). In no way can Google be reasonably found to be at fault here.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
That's what I call Google fiber: this goddamned company is trying to control anything, from the OS (Android) to carrier to search engine to the entire freaking internet.
Don't you see? It's not the digital divide we should fear, it's the Google monopoly. Once they control everything, they'll dictate what you can do and not do on their internet.
Super-fast internet connectivity attracts internet users like honey the proverbial fly. That's why Google offers it. Once we're stuck in the honey though, we'll be in real trouble...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Behind the snark lurks a valid point. If it takes me 20hrs to download the materials, but it takes you 15mins, then yes, you could finish faster and move on to something else.
But if it takes > 20 hours to actually read and understand the material, then your download speed is trivial and not an issue, I believe was his point.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
...Another case of the unintended consequences of good intentions?...
It is more a case of leaping blindly into unsubstantiated conclusions based upon the cherry-picking of information that suits your intent.
This seems as good a time as any to dust off Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
Cities that want to help business should embrace fiber and use their dollars to help build it out, instead trying to attract business via cheap loans or tax relief. Spend the tax dollars to improve everyone's life.
As we all know, Google's charter starts with the phrase "First, Do Evil".
Look, there's literally a 100 GB/second pipe in the building I'm in, and two more just 2 blocks away, and 40 GB/second pipes all over the UW Seattle campus and the UW Tacoma campus.
Almost all top tier US and Canadian research universities have this, and we could easily build this out within a few miles if we actually wanted to fund that as a National Priority, just like we went to the Moon when we wanted to.
There are choices.
We just aren't prepared to fund them as a nation.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Especially since I suspect more learning happens when you're at LOWER bandwidth, where you can access text reasonably quickly enough, but as soon as you try to stream videos, or even perhaps load pictures of cats, it chokes out.
That's true, but I'd say that the economic divide sending some people to Stanford and others who started with equal skill to Chico State is a much larger learning division than 100 Mbps vs 56 kbps. To think that somebody getting 100 Mbps downloads is learning 100x faster than somebody getting 1Mbps is ridiculous. The guys who developed the atomic bomb communicated using their voices, shoes, and chalk boards.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The idea here is that when a significant portion of the internet population has 100mb/s connections then web site owners will start building services that cater to those people and require that quick of a connection. This will leave the people that are wayyy on the other side of the curve that much further behind. There is not analogous effect in real estate, i.e. if 10% more of the population has larger houses then it doesn't eventually make your small house less functional.
Anyway, I disagree with your argument but not with your point. I think a better analogy would have been car ownership. It's very hard to get around and keep a job (outside of the inner city) without a car. The infrastructure of our society has become so dependent on cars that only the very poor don't have one. However, if anyone seriously tried to argue that making better cars was promoting the class divide they would be laughed at. It misses the point.
Some people having slow connections instead of fast connections is clearly superior to everybody having slow connections.
The fault in causing the digital divide lies not with Google for being fast, but rather with every other ISP for being slow!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz