Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I'd like to hear more about this.
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...
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
...Ford is making the transportation gap worse by producing vehicles that the poor can't afford, and I am making the car analogy gap worse by making car analogies people who don't read Slashdot can't see.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Who is paying this shill?
...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."
[Google] offer[s] a better service for what seems quite a bit less money.
This.
I don't see how charging a one-time fee of $300 for the initial hookup is "putting broadband out of the reach of the poor" when the competing companies charge upwards of $60 - $100 per month for service. If anything, it's doing the exact opposite.
Is Michael Brick employed by ComCast or something?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You can't hold back progress just because not everyone has gotten aboard the train. That train is leaving just as soon as it can make a buck.
Po'boy can't get no youtube lickitysplit on an ol' busted DSL line, but he can still browse wikipedia. And back when he couldn't get wikipedia he could still hit up a library. And I imagine people will complain that the poor unwashed masses with their slow and broken fiber lines won't be able to access the hivemind as quickly as and as comfortably as his rich relatives.
You're bitching that the digital divide is increasing because someone is plowing ahead. The poor will always be playing catchup. It's part of what makes them poor. And sure, that sucks. But would you blame the Wright brothers for keep the poor downtrodden and earthbound while making a device that only the rich could afford? No. So please, kindly, GTFO of the way of progress. CHOO CHOO!
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.
It's worse than that they could pay $25 a month for 12 months to cover the install cost, and get free internet from then on.
No sir I dont like it.
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