Op-Ed

The 10^th Anniversary of the National Broadband Plan offers a chance to reflect on the progress made in the past 10 years and lessons for the future.

We are now in the third generation talking about getting broadband out to all our citizens. We are nowhere near getting the job done. It’s a market failure. It’s a government failure. And it’s a national embarrassment.

In October 1944, my grandfather William B. Benton delivered a clarion call in the pages of Fortune magazine.

Among smart city enthusiasts, digital inclusion — the idea that nobody in the city should be deprived of digital technologies — is an oft-repeated social objective. Despite lofty commitments, the smart city is still a work-in-progress and its reco

What happens when a prime time TV show becomes a potential healthcare policy direction, plus a side helping of broadband adoption strategy? An episode of the NBC TV medical melodrama New Amsterdam inspired a five-city telehealth pilot pro

Libraries Without Borders sought to replicate its digital inclusion strategy in underserved rural and suburban manufactured-housing communities. The project began in Minnesota, with a town hall-style meeting where residents of the Park Plaza Coope

We don’t need to rank in importance the issues of special interest money, ludicrous redistricting, and big media.  They are each part of a linked democratic challenge.  There can be no real democracy without curbing big money.  There can be no rea

When I was a young scientist working on the fledgling creation that came to be known as the internet, the ethos that defined the culture we were building was characterized by words such as ethical, open, trusted, free, shared.

Building new broadband infrastructure is a big investment for any municipality.

In their recent Op-Ed in the Washington Post, “Cities, not rural areas, are the real Internet deserts,” authors Blair Levin