In Stephen O’Grady’s post titled “It?s the Network, Not the Application: Online Desktops” he describes an environment where the computer is always connected to internet.

Some day this may be true but it’s not true today – unless you use the internet in a sufficiently limited way that satellite connectivity is productive. For many in the world – and it’s still very true here in the United States – internet connectivity is only achieved over dial-up. This is neither fast enough of cost effective enough to be “always on”. I know many people who are less than 5 miles from high speed internet connectivity but because there is no economy of scale, are not served – some are less than 1 mile away. For them, it is frustrating knowing it is so close and yet it would be literally thousands of dollars to “get connected”.

Obviously, this will change over the next several years but it is slow to change because the internet service provider is a capitalist. I’m not implying this is a bad thing. Rather, I am making a point that “those who have” seem to forget about “those who have not” – even when the members of the first group were very recently members of the second group. … how quickly we forget … <sigh>

The US government has had an initiative to promote rural development by funding development and deployment of high speed internet to the unserved and under served sections of the country. One of the driving goals is to provide the “global economy” to rural families and thereby allowing them to extend their economic opportunities. A large number of rural Americans either live near or below the poverty line. They would rather not give up on their way of life. They have creativity, business sense, time and labor on there side. The rural internet initiative would allow them to supplement the family income or even create whole new incomes if they had a market for their products and skills – the local community and county fairs do not provide enough customers but the internet does.

Unfortunately, the rural internet initiative has been given a failing grade for many years. I don’t have access to the government records but I would guess the failing grades go back beyond the current administration so I would not characterize it as a republican or democrat failure – it’s an American failure.

This is one of those cases where the private sector won’t solve the problem. It’s not in their short term economic interest. It has no pay off within a few fiscal quarters <rassa fraggin’ short sighted fiscal bean counters>. I liken it to the US Highway system. Today it is a great asset to American business but when it was first built, it had to be a government project because it did not have short term economic incentive.

I hope this will change at some point but I am not holding my breath. In the mean time I support our legislators and senators who see the value in getting the internet more distributed. Where possible, I provide my time and knowledge to the efforts. I have no grand illusions. I don’t expect we will have a truly “world wide web” anytime soon. I don’t even expect we will cover major countries anytime soon.

What I believe is there is more to a capitalist society that quarterly earnings reports. There is value in a long term view. There is a balance between profits and profitability. There is creativity, chupzta, knowledge, and sweat equity in a scale most companies only dream of … and it’s out there, just waiting!