3 August 1993

The Internet and the Poor


"Public Access to the Internet"
JFK School of Government
May 27,1993


Richard Civille
Center for Civic Networking


DRAFT

A country that works smarter; that enjoys more efficient, less costly
government--guided by a better informed citizenzry; that supports job
growth through small businesses; that promotes life-long
learning--will be a country laced with a high-speed infrastructure for
information with civic purpose. Much of this infrastructure will be a
successor to the Internet. Information infrastructure promoted by
government should target important non-market applications such as
preventive health-care, job training, informal education, enhance
civic participation in governance, and reduced costs of delivering
services.

Federal policy for a National Information Infrastructure which
leverages private investments through partnerships, research or tax
credits, must also demonstrate positive effects on low and moderate
income families, and a potential for lifting Americans out of poverty
rather than creating a two-tier society of information haves and
have-nots.


American Poverty is Growing

There are 35 million poor people in the United States, about 14% of
the population. Minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation for well
over a decade. Many working poor cannot escape poverty with full-time
jobs. Only 5% of males in their prime earning years, between the ages
of 35 and 54 had low annual earnings in 1974. This percentage shot up
to 7.5% in 1989 and then again to 8.9% in 1990, one year later.
Dispite popular opinion, most of the poor in this country are not
minorities. They're white. Over 50% percent as a matter of fact in
absolute numbers. Not only that, but the poverty rate for white people
in the United States is higher than any other industrial democracy,
and it is acclerating, from 9% to 14% over the past two years. One in
five children are poor. I don't mean to gloss over poverty among
minority groups. Over 50% of children under six years old are
poor--and black. This past recession has driven over 4 million more
people into poverty. Many are still there.

Even with four years of college individual earnings--on
average--started heading south in 1987. Yet the cost of a college
education is rising, and without it things are far worse indeed.
During the great depression, real household income fell by 25 percent.
Two years ago, young male and female high-school graduates earned 26%
and 15% less, respectively, than in 1979. Everything costs more, like
rent. This means flipping burgers, living at home, and hanging out.
The Slacker generation does not generally show up as a statistical
group because so many still live at home and are carried as dependants
by their middle class parents. As Wayne from Wayne's World once said:
"OK, so I'm still living with my parents. How bogus. How unoriginal."
From 1981 to 1989, among Americans age 25 to 29, the number of
homeowners declined by 11 percent, while the number of renters rose by
16 percent.

The Urban Institute has found that "Lifetime incomes are becoming more
unequal. The bad jobs in our economy are now paying less in real terms
than they did in the early 1970s and the people who hold them aren't
moving out of them with any more frequency than before. We can expect
their lifetime incomes to be lower than those of people who held these
jobs in the past." Indeed, the United States now has the largest
low-income class, the smallest middle class and the third largest
high-income class of the eight major industrial democracies.


The Information Highway has become a Personal Library

An accelerating income gap in the United States over the past ten
years may well be related to a widening knowledge gap through the
rapid expansion of a two-tier information society of haves and
have-nots as the economy is further restructured away from its
industrial antecedent.

Resource discovery tools such as Gopher and WAIS have the effect of
transforming the Internet from an information highway with virtually
no "roadmap" to locate resources into a highly personalized research
library which can be casually browsed without difficulty or much
expertise. The metaphor which shapes perception and policy debates
concerning the Internet is shifting. The information superhighway is
rapidly becoming a personal library to the more than 10 million
individuals worldwide who have the privilege.

Resource discovery tools have recently made it easier for smaller
institutions and individuals to create new information services--to
"hang a shingle" on the net. Ease of locating resources combined with
a dramatic increase of them represents a fundamental shift of what the
Internet is, who it is for, and how it can be used by the public. It
also raises the specter of a widening gap between information haves
and have nots. Internet access is important but does not in itself
begin to divide classes of people. However, when the Internet suddenly
becomes more useful--a personal research library--access politics
assume new importance. Those who lack access will be left even further
behind, and more rapidly so than ever before. Because of the recent T3
upgrade and emergence of good tools for organizing, searching and
browsing, this "Cyberspace Cohort" stands to gain from accelerating
opportunities to use information strategically, particularly as the
network is used as a vehicle to deliver government services and
information. The change of metaphors describing the Internet--from a
highway to a library; from a transportation system to a public space;
who it is for and how it is used reflect fundamental changes in access
politics which the federal government should respond to.

Increasing the ease and convenience of network use can accelerate a
condition of haves and have-nots very rapidly as the network expands.
This condition has important implications for minority communities who
tend to lack access to advanced information technology. This condition
will also affect whether states move ahead or are left behind due to
economic differentials affecting investment capabilities in
information infrastructure.


Reframing the Debate: State of Current Research

In March, the Competitiveness Policy Council recommended overhauling
the Communications Act of 1934. This may signal that the
communications policy debate has finally begun to shift away from "Big
Pipes for Big Science" or "Home Delivery of Terminator III" to the
real socio- economic benefits of improving government services and
their delivery, broadening access to education and job training, and
promoting civic participation down home in real communities where the
economy is directly affected.

Yet while equity issues gain currency, we have to become very
concerned with the current state of research in this area. The study
of socioeconomic impacts of a growing national information
infrastructure is pretty much in its infancy, and hasn't really moved
beyond the early phase of rhetorical debate and assertion of moral
imperatives. This kind of academic work must begin to parallel basic
computer science research. If government is going to invest the public
purse in high performance computing and networks with the full
assumption such technologies will become a primary domain of commerce
and livelihood, we have to start finding out whether these networks
will tend to lift Americans out of poverty --and help make work pay
--or drive them futher in while accelerating the widening income gap
the country has seen over the past ten years.

Ron Doctor of the University of Alabama reviewed the literature and
found that it is characterized by vast differences of opinion
regarding "how our political and economic systems will change as we
move into the information age. The extremes are represented by
technological optimism on the one hand to neo-Luddite reaction on the
other". Commentors from one extreme to the other make impassioned and
reasonable arguments for their points of view. They support their
arguments with a wealth of anecdotal empirical evidence but with
little systematic data. The situation is characteristic of a new
policy research area that is striving for definition."

It is difficult to describe information gaps and how they are changing
over time. We don't have good data on the geographical and
socioeconomic distribution of information resources or how they are
used by individuals in non- institutional settings. We have
fragmentary or out of date data, much of which is not very coherent.
We have to rely on inferences. This situation is unacceptable and must
change.

What do we need to know about network literacy --the functional
equivalent of driver education for the 21st Century, and how do we
change curriculum to help prepare all students? How can we go about
examining census and labor statistics to begin to see the effects of
network growth on various sectors of society in the creation of
opportunities or the elimination of them?


Towards a Definition of Information Poverty

Network Literacy

In an accelerating information-based economy, good jobs require
analytical research skills, not simply the ability to read and write
and follow instructions. Many workers are becoming, according to Labor
Secretary Robert Reich, "symbolic analysts." Is a farmer a researcher,
faced with sophisticated analytical demands of modern agriculture,
where critical choices balancing integrated pest management,
environmental regulations, weather and cost must be factored into
assessing commodity prices for future global markets? Is a high school
college counselor a researcher when she must become increasingly aware
of minority institutions and scholarship opportunities and package
such information for particular low-income students? Are elementary
school students researchers when they participate in climate studies
by collecting local weather and water quality data as demonstrated by
the National Geographic KIDSNET?

Reich says there are now three general types of jobs, two of them
dead-end--which most poor and middleclass children are prepared for in
school--and one with great promise--which our most fortunate children
are groomed for. These three are routine production workers, in-person
service providers and symbolic analysts. For example, data entry
operators (whose jobs move off shore), janitors (the work can't move
offshore, though your employer could), or an architect. A lawyer could
be a symbolic analyst if creative--that is inventing new ways to sue,
or could be just another routine production worker--churning out the
same wills and contracts day after day. We have cheap software to
replace that guy already.

The American educational system was designed to prepare workers for
smokestack industries and bureaucratic management, not symbolic
analysts, generalists and entrepreneurs for the information
economy--and it still does. 17% of all seventeen year olds are
functionally illiterate, yet another 20% are being well prepared to
become marketing strategists, film producers, writers, software
engineers, sound engineers, research scientists--symbolic analysts.
20% of our children have attentive teachers, small classes, get good
health care when they need it, attend good suburban public or elite
private schools and are tracked through advanced courses in the
company of their fortunate peers. They have access to computers, good
science laboratories, video systems in class, and increasingly--the
Internet. They are taught the art of abstraction--of finding the
pattern that connects, as Gregory Bateson once said, of system
thinking--seeing the whole, the big picture, how to experiment, test
and fail, and most importantly, how to collaborate, work as a team,
and to negotiate. They are learning network literacy. Most students in
the United States are not taught this way, and do not have access to
these kinds of resources. For them, meaning is imposed, not discovered
or owned. Interpreting reality or determining fact from fiction is
someone else's responsibility. However, in low-income areas where
dropout rates are out of control, there is the potential for backlash
in actually increasing the intensity of this kind assembly-line
rote-memorization instruction rather than embracing the need for
fundamental change. Low-income neighborhoods are often very tradition
bound. Parents often wish their children to be taught as they were.
Poor children are not taught in the same manner as the elite, and the
jobs they are being prepared for increasingly no longer exist.


Network Growth as a Measure of Information Poverty

Consider the growth of the Internet as a measure of information
poverty. By many accounts nearly 20 million people are connected to
the Internet, most of them in the United States. This number keeps
growing. Many users have the abstract, analytical skills to use the
net well as a research tool, a personal library, and to collaborate
with working groups in productive, symbolic work. The growth rate is
about 5% per month, roughly doubling once a year. At this rate, we
could expect the number of individuals productively using the Internet
to equal--or surpass--the number of Americans below the poverty line
within perhaps as soon as two years. When the number of Americans
productively using the Internet for symbolic work equals or exceeds
the number of Americans below the poverty line, will we have
quantified the elusive definition of a two class society of
information haves and have nots? Two years is not far off.


Acquaintances, the Internet and the Job Market

Two weeks ago I met with a group of concerned parents at a nearby
public school. The group calls itself CAST, for Citizens Advocating
Science and Technology. The school librarian had become involved in
the National Capital Area Public Access Network (or CapAccess) which
among other services, provides free electronic mail access to the
Internet to anyone who registers. As a board member, I was invited by
this librarian to speak with this group about the value of the
Internet to their children and to offer to get them free Internet mail
addresses.

We described the vast array of topic-based Internet mailing lists to
which their children could subscribe to. These lists could become a
jumping-off point to a young student, enabling him or her to not only
follow the current debate of a particular research topic but to
actually find out about and acquaint themselves with members of
particular research communities. We described how messages distributed
through mailing lists could provide the electronic and postal
addresses and even telephone numbers of a wide range of individuals,
some of whom their children might like to become better acquainted
with.

The librarian described books which catalog Internet mailing lists.
Such books serve as references she could use to help students identify
interesting lists. We made the point that free, public access to
Internet mailing lists was a valuable opportunity for their children
to broaden their networks of personal acquaintances to include those
far outside their schools and neighborhoods which could broaden their
educational and career opportunities. Free public access to Internet
mail provides a means for a person to easily broaden and maintain a
network of personal acquaintances beyond the parochial boundaries of
school, community and close friends. This has important implications
for creating opportunities for low-income and inner-city students.

The range and quality of personal acquaintance networks has been shown
to affect individual success in the job market. Granovetter's work in
the early 1970s on the Strength of Weak Ties proposed that "our
acquaintances ('weak ties') are less likely to be socially involved
with one another than are our close friends ('strong ties')." Networks
of personal acquaintances serve as "bridges" between islands of other
close groups of friends, workers, business associates or research
communities. Bridging these islands of personal relationships through
acquaintances broadens one's knowledge of the world, expands horizons
of opportunities, and helps in career advancement or changing jobs in
a weak economy.

Strength of Weak Ties theory argues that: "Individuals with few weak
ties are confined to the provincial news and views of their close
friends. This will not only insulate them from the latest ideas and
fashions, but also may put them in a disadvantaged position in the
labor market, where advancement may depend on knowing about job
openings at just the right time." Through an acquaintance I had made
on the net some time ago, which I easily maintain through occasional
notes, I learned of a job description right down my ally several days
before the deadline. I went ahead and applied.

The chain of acquaintance, or weak ties that make the difference, are
those that actually provide a bridge to an entirely new community, set
of ideas or individuals. Simply going through a "friend-of-a-friend"
is often not sufficient, especially if it only leads to new
acquaintances within a community boundary--such as a low-income
neighborhood. The weak tie acquaintance must be novel: someone that no
one you know, knows. Email significantly reduces the costs of
acquiring and maintaining such novel, weak ties.

This early work in weak tie theory has led to recent inquiries in the
use of electronic mail in the maintenance of personal acquaintance
networks. Internet mail has been found to be a highly efficient means
of establishing and maintaining personal acquaintance networks.
Indeed, "distributed lists in email systems greatly reduces the costs
to the individual of discovering others with common interests." This
observation underscore Granovetter's core theory, that weak ties serve
as links between strong tie networks, thus expanding the channels of
information sources for the individual. Not only information--there is
the potential for transforming weak ties of acquaintance formed over
the network by way of mailing lists into strong ties which can result
in instrumental actions and productive gains: "The maintenance of weak
ties can play a crucial role for an individual when he or she is
forced to change jobs. Such a situation is a classic case when current
job ties are likely to be useless, but ties to individuals in other
employment settings might be very valuable indeed." Weak ties can be
passively maintained by continued subscription and occasional postings
to newsgroups and mailing lists. This helps retain options of more
serious communications leading to new strong ties in other social or
work domains. To tie my example and this academic digression up to a
point: "Exchange of employment information facilitates a free labor
market." This is a public good with implications concerning the types
of basic services that should be bundled into any new consideration of
Universal Service policies.


Information Infrastructure and Benefits to the Poor

Possibly the greatest contribution of the national information
infrastructure will be to those who are poor. Twenty-four strands of
dark fiber were recently laid through Harlem, were basic telephone
service is barely at 70% penetration, where 40% of the residents live
below the poverty line and nearly 50% percent are not in the labor
force. The fiber was laid from terms dictated in a recent cable
franchise negotiation, as part of an I-Net.

"The New York City Department of Telecommunications and Energy is
exploring potential applications for interactive video conferencing
between community rooms in City housing projects and City government
offices, schools, colleges, cultural institutions and business
centers. City college professors in early childhood education could
teach parenting to teenage mothers via interactive video
teleconferencing. Housing project residents could attend GED classes
already taught at many high schools, via teleconferencing.
Corporations with video teleconferencing facilities could be recruited
to develop tutoring and mentoring programs between their employees and
youth at the housing projects. These young people could be trained to
operate the video equipment, giving residents a bigger stake in the
project and offer inner city youth a chance to gain marketable
skills."

In time, fiber could extend beyond the community room to the
individual apartment. Consider a family with a single mother in a
housing project in Chicago. Her name could be Gonzales, Nguyen, Hakim,
or Jones. Working part-time she lives with her pregnant 16 year old
daughter, a two year old grandchild and a 17 year old son on
probation. They have a telephone and a television--connected to the
net.

The mother switches to interactive health-care programs to learn about
her grand-daughters's asthma. The progam gives guidance on medication
and home-care based on the little girl's symptoms. Another health care
program helps the mother assess a newly discovered mole on her face.
Many pictures are shown of good and bad moles. She learns that hers is
not a bad mole. Two trips to the health clinic have just been
saved--the taxpayers save money while the mother becomes empowered.
Much interaction with welfare agencies is done over the television
set, using a joy-stick to select the appropriate department. If she
cannot understand the words for various agencies or benefit forms on
the screen that she needs to fill out, the set reads them out to her,
patiently, line by line with an image of woman speaking in her native
tongue. She can connect to her daughter's school and watch teachers
explaining homework assignments for the week. Using a voice mail
utility, she can leave messages for her daughter's teacher and check
her message box for news about school events and parent's meetings.
She has begun to collaborate with a new team of other low-income
parents to urge the school to buy a vacant lot adjacent to the campus.
This is the first time she has participated in any kind of civic
activity. The mother's daughter uses the television to participate in
a support group of teenage mothers that meet over the network. Her son
uses the network to get temporary job assignments in grocery stores
around town. He is using the television to improve his English, in
lessons adjusted to his skill level, and is studying math to improve
his skills to apply for a cash register position. Both literacy and
math programs are available at a downtown learning center, but the
distance and his irregular work schedule make home study much
easier--and much less embarrassing.

In this scenario, a computer, television and telephone are merged into
one modestly priced consumer electronics device. Does this require
some kind of gee-whiz megapipe broadband firehose? We'll get there,
but consider what we could be doing very soon. Families were buying
interactive CD players last Christmas. 25,000 units a month. Give your
kid a joy stick and an interactive encyclopedia, plugged into the TV.
Are we really that far away from using the cable networks, or ISDN to
switch to resources on the net? Some studies assess the value of the
activities in the United States which could be affected by interactive
imaged information to the home, for purposes of health, governance and
citizenship, informal education, job training, literacy, numeracy, and
English as a second language to be in the range of several hundreds of
billions of dollars annually.


NII, Cost Containment and the Deficit

With a good information infrastructure, Americans might save, say, a
half day a year in dealing with government. That might come to roughly
1/500 of GNP, or about $10 billion a year. Job training: The imaging
power of technology can provide a simulated task environment a worker
needs to practice needed skills. How valuable could universal job
training be if such services were available in the home? IBM and Xerox
spend 4% or more of payroll on training. Estimates of how much is
spent in the country as a whole on formal job training vary between
$30 and $44 billion, or perhaps 2% of annual payroll. If the economy
could gain from training as much as IBM or Xerox think its worth the
increase in value could be on the order of $100 billion annually.
Better informed decisions about surgical procedures could save
Medicare billions of dollars a year in unnecessary procedures.
Yesterday, someone remarked that we needed to understand the costs of
NOT having public access. Public access to Internet mail could reduce
downtime between jobs through better maintenance of personal
acquaintance networks which could be used for employment searches.
Viewed in these terms, a telecommunications infrastructure represents
cost-containment. This is a completely different way of valueing the
information infrastructure and is quite distinguishable from
traditional business models promoting, for example, interactive
entertainment and pay-per-view television. Yet --again --the economic
research in this area is poor, and only at the earliest stage of
inquiry.


Current Population Survey and the Internet

Demographic surveys of non-institutional, individual use of the
Internet are lacking. There are good statistics concerning connected
internetworks, connected institutions and connected machines or
resources. We speculate that somewhere between 5 and 40 million people
around the world use the Internet. That's like saying that somewhere
between 5 and 40 million people live in California. We just don't know
yet how many people inhabit Cyberspace now, what their attributes are
or how those attributes are evolving and we need better data.

In 1988, an Educational Testing Service survey indicated that home and
school access to microcomputers provides a significant educational
advantage to children. They also indicate that these advantages are
unequally distributed across economic, ethnic and gender categories.
The ETS study found that: 37% of children in families with incomes of
more than $50,000 have computers in their homes. Only 3.4% of children
in households with income less than $10,000 have computers at home.
17% of all white children, 6% of blacks and less than 5% of Hispanics
use a computer at home. Yet, the survey also found that black children
tend to use computers at home much more than their white counterparts.
White children used home computers on average 2.8 days/week, black
children averaged 3.8 days/week.

The Census Bureau found in 1989 that 15 percent of American households
had computers. However, only 7 percent of households with income under
$25,000 had computers in their homes, versus about 40 percent for
households with income over $50,000. Less than 5 percent of those age
65 and over had home computers. Only about 8 percent of black
households and 8 percent of Hispanic households had home computers
(versus 18 percent overall for whites and non-Hispanics.) Those with a
high school education were about half as likely to have home computers
as those who are college graduates. Those with less than a high school
education were half as likely to have home computers as those with a
high school diploma. Home computer use on its own, however, does not
imply network literacy, and this is the area we need to learn about.

October 1989 was a long time ago. Remember the Berlin Wall? It fell
that month. Things have changed. Since October 1989, of course, the
personal computer and on-line information services markets have
exploded. Federal purchases of personal computers doubled, Internet
connectivity has increased exponentially with over 50% usage in the
private sector, private BBS systems have grown dramatically. Personal
computers have followed a now predictable pattern of falling prices
combined with ever increasing power and capacity. Modems which cost
$200 in 1989 could transfer perhaps 7-10 pages a minute. Modems for
less than $200 bought today can transfer over 50 pages a minute
rivaling ISDN. We could perhaps expect the 1989 figures to follow a
similar path.

What does the Census survey tell us about network literacy? We have to
infer. For example, in 1989 23% of all households with computers had
modems. For young people in their late teens, use of bulletin boards
was the same or in some cases higher than the use of spreadsheets.
Electronic mail use was reported at about a half percent of the total
sample, although curiously, electronic mail was used more heavily by
part-time rather than by full-time workers. More curiously, electronic
mail use by households with family income less than $10,000 was twice
as great than households earning more than $75,000 a year. Bulletin
board use among low-income households follows the same pattern, with
use twice as heavy than moderate income households, whose use of
bulletin boards is heavier than high income households. The data is
only suggestive and is by no means significant. Yet, it appears that
home use of bulletin boards and electronic mail is more valuable to
the low and moderate income user than the high income user. Better and
more recent data could illuminate this observation.

The Census Bureau will conduct a third survey of computer use by
Americans next October, 1993, and we can expect to see some long term
longitudinal patterns emerge against the two previous surveys. The
questions will be updated slightly to, for example, inquire about
CD-ROM and as to how many computers are in the home. However, simply
surveying whether electronic mail or BBS applications are used is
inadequate because it gives us no attribute information. For example,
we would want to know if a household member has Internet access and if
so by what means? We would want to know whether e-mail is being used
to create and maintain new relationships, if e-mail was used for job
searching, whether BBS use was purely recreational or whether it was
being used for non-formal educational purposes similar to how a public
library would be used.

These types of questions are too detailed for a Current Population
Survey to administer, and the survey questions for October have been
determined already and OMB approval has been secured. However, if
funded through a public and private partnership, Census would be able
to administer a follow-up mail-in questionnaire in Februrary 1994,
when the October data frame was completed, to those households in
which computers were being used. Census estimates that about 26% of
households would now own and use computers, up from 15% in 1989. That
would be 26% of 60,000 households surveyed in the October CPS, or
15,600 households that could be surveyed for detailed applications use
including networking. A 50% response rate could be expected, about
7,000 households. This would cost perhaps a half million dollars. This
funding could be assembled through a public and private partnership
comprised of executive agencies needing better demographic data for
promoting the national information infrastructure to private
foundations seeking better data to guide funding priorities for
researching and promoting information equity issues.

Such a mail-in questionnaire ought to explore the penetration of the
Internet into the general population, service usage, and the manner
connected. These results could then be cross-tabulated with income,
occupation, education, location, ethnicity and other such variables.
Until then, it will be difficult to identify and track how various
population groups are affected by an emerging national information
infrastructure.


New Options for Federal Policy

Community Applications

In Ohio, the Youngstown Freenet, a public computer network which
provides free access to Internet mail, a social services directory is
available. If you are poor, you can go into a public library and sit a
terminal. Using the arrow and enter keys are about all you need to do.
People figure it out. You can navigate through a directory,
alphabetically organized, of all manner of agencies, churches,
services--and make your own descisions based on what you can learn at
that terminal. And people do. This kind of social service "gateway"
helps poor people gather intelligence. In the not too distant future,
these gateways can be provided by internetworking through the
television set with a Nintendo joystick. In Santa Monica, there is the
important case of homeless people using a public access network called
"PEN" to organize with citizen groups. Such activity has also taken
place over the Community Memory Project in Berkeley.

What about job banks? A $14 million dollar Labor/Worker Profiling
program in 1993 and 1994 is proposed "to assist the States in
developing automated systems to identify laid-off workers who may have
had difficulties in finding new jobs, and to assist them in finding
employment." Such automated systems, developed by states, could be
readily integrated into job banks offered through non-profit public
access computer systems under development in many cities around the
country. What if local civic networks, like the Youngstown Freenet,
maintained an online job bank that was interconnected with this
envisioned federal system? And what if you could navigate this
job-bank at home, using your existing television set or a very
inexpensive PC with a joy stick?

The Administration had proposed $64 million in stimulus funding for
Information Highway demonstration project grants for schools, cities,
and non-profit organizations through the National Telecommunications
and Information Administration. While such funding failed passage in
the stimulus bill, this appropriation could rise to $150 million a
year by 1995. Civic networking initiatives--that is, regional and
local public information systems and services--fit this investment
framework well. NTIA grants for local, non-profit demonstration
projects could help leverage other federal efforts, such as the
Labor/Worker profiling program as well as state and local funding.

Proposed Community Development Banks would receive $350 million over
four years to finance small businesses and service programs in
depressed inner-city locations, while a rural development initiative
would pump hundreds of millions targeted to small, emerging
"micro-enterprises." These investments would provide "increased
employment opportunities for rural individuals, and upgrade community
infrastructure to improve the quality of life for all rural
residents." Such infrastructure, particularly to support very small
businesses, could also support locally operated information services
which could bring additional incomes to rural communities. Within this
mix again, are set-aside opportunities for civic networking at the
regional and local level, where such activities show promise in
quality of life improvements or community development.

In fact, set asides for local public access telecommunications which
can enhance the service mission of federal programs or increases their
efficiency needs to be established for every line item in the domestic
budget where applicable. This should be a key recommendation of the
National Performance Review.

The Federal government could leverage the internetworking of rural
America for less than the cost of a B1 bomber. The Really Big Number
would be about $747 million dollars over five years. Here's the
picture. There are 3,100 county extension offices around the United
States, each with about five professional and two support staff. Why
not make county extension offices Internet nodes that will extend
tangible benefits to rural communities?

Five year capital procurement cycles are coming due, so let's say all
these offices get new Macs, a laser printer, a terminal server, an
Appletalk Internet router, and a few high-speed modems, perhaps
$35,000. Toss in a $300 a month leased-line back to the Land Grant
college. Hire a support and leadership staff person to get the
schools, libraries and small businesses on-line at about $35,000 a
year. We just spent $73,000 for the first year to upgrade an average
county office.

Next, for years two through five, assume a 10% maintenance contract of
$3,500 a year, $35,000 for the support and leadership position and
$3,600 for the leased-line: $42,000 a year not counting annual
adjustments such as cost-of-living. A county office onramp to the
information highway might cost $284,100 over five years. If you carry
that figure across 3,100 extension offices, the price tag is $227
million for the first year, and $130 million a year after that.

Consider how this might really play out. First, as time goes by,
computers cost less and get more powerful. Each state will procure new
technology when its ready--next year, or the following year, so
procurement costs decline over time. Second, someone must serve in a
support and leadership role--to get the community connected. President
Clinton wants a new National Service Program to help graduates pay off
student loans through two years of community service. In this case,
the new staff position becomes an "off-budget" item--leveraged through
a separate program, a savings of over $200 million. Third, the monthly
leased-line cost to the Land Grant college should be split among the
groups which access the net through the county extension office--$300
a month drops to $100 a month, saving over $30 million. Finally, the
Really Big Number is going to be spread around evenly between federal,
state and local budget authorities.


Conclusion

Information infrastructure funded by government should target
important non-market applications. Such non-market applications should
promote preventive health-care, job training, informal education,
enhance civic participation in governance, and reduced costs of
delivering services. Pilot projects should be funded within strict
criteria which could demonstrate and evaluate the use of available,
open platform technologies which use internetworking tools, in
coordinating and integrating local public activities conducted across
all media--radio, television, cable and computer. The October 1993 CPS
will collect data on home computer use. A mail-in followup
questionnaire should be administered in February 1994 to gather
detailed information on individual network use from households with
computers. Finally, any long-term strategy for a National Information
Infrastructure which uses public money (that is to say, where the NREN
is heading)--particularly if used to leverage private
investments--must also demonstrate positive effects on low and
moderate income families, and potential for lifting Americans out of
poverty rather than creating a two-tier society of information haves
and have-nots.

An infrastructure is not only a set of facilities, but the people and
skills needed to use them. Facilities, people and skills must be
commonly available to further activities of both public and private
parties. Ultimately, when people have access to, and the skills to use
the infrastructure, they more fully share in its benefits, and the
nation will as a whole, will benefit as well.