Narrowing the Digital Divide

The great digital divide may be narrowing between rural areas and their urban neighbors. Last week Vice President Joe Biden outlined the $4.7 billion loan and grant program that will be used to deliver high speed internet to rural areas that have been left behind in the advance of the modern communications infrastructure. There are those that are strongly opposed to any government stimulus package that is used to improve rural internet access; going so far as to say that rural broadband funding is akin to “building a cyber bridge to no where”. These people are displaying not only an extreme arrogance but ignorance as well. To leave a large portion of our country out of the nation’s communication infrastructure is to condemn them to obscurity.  Farmers and ranchers who have internet access use it to monitor commodity prices, weather conditions, markets and even run irrigation systems. Those rural communities yet to be connected to high speed internet access have the same right to service as their predecessors, who decades ago were connected to electricity and phone services through federal funding.