Yahoo! News – Bush Seeks More High-Speed Internet Access, Tax Ban
“Bush complained that the United States was ranked 10th in the deployment of broadband, or high-speed access. To help boost that rank, he signed an order for the government to make it easier for broadband facilities to be built on federal land. ”
It’s a disgrace. The land of Al Gore, inventor of the internet, ranks number 10 in broadband access. Seriously, though, the internet is a product of the US Dept. of Defense and it is ridiculous that the richest country in the world and original home of the net is number 10. Kudos to Bush for seeing through the haze and realizing that, aside from the low population density in rural areas, it’s the tangle of regulations and taxes that stands in the way of expanding broadband access. We’re still paying a “temporary” tax on telephone service from the Spanish-American War; we have to nip taxation on internet access in the bud or we’ll be putting America at a competitive disadvantage economically in the next century.