If you think the USA has the right decision make savvy to make progress on it’s alternative energy goals, think again …

MS. GREENBERG: Okay. Our next question comes from Jim Finkle:

Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox? I just – (applause) – I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn’t use this browser. It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don’t understand why State can’t use it. It’s a much safer program. Thank you. (Applause.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, apparently, there’s a lot of support for this suggestion. (Laughter.) I don’t know the answer. Pat, do you know the answer? (Laughter.)

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: The answer is at the moment, it’s an expense question. We can —

AUDIANCE MEMBER: It’s free. (Laughter.)

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: Nothing is free. (Laughter.) It’s a question of the resources to manage multiple systems. It is something we’re looking at. And thanks to the Secretary, there is a significant increase in the 2010 budget request that’s pending for what is called the Capital Investment Fund, by which we fund our information technology operations. With the Secretary’s continuing pushing, we’re hoping to get that increase in the Capital Investment Fund. And with those additional resources, we will be able to add multiple programs to it.

Yes, you’re correct; it’s free, but it has to be administered, the patches have to be loaded. It may seem small, but when you’re running a worldwide operation and trying to push, as the Secretary rightly said, out FOBs and other devices, you’re caught in the terrible bind of triage of trying to get the most out that you can, but knowing you can’t do everything at once.

SECRETARY CLINTON: So we will try to move toward that.

source: July 10th US Dept of State town hall meeting

There’s even video evidence … time index at 26m:34s

Mr Antonio at the Washington Post recently wrote of the political debates “televised” on YouTube. The format for the debate was people posting video questions on YouTube and Anderson Cooper selecting a set of those questions, airing them and then getting candidates’ responses. He outlined five myths about the experiment. He makes good points with good examples an all of them. Interesting to my concern was #5 …

5.”Anyone can participate in this debate.”

That quote is from David Bohrman of CNN, which tirelessly promoted the event. Truth is, not everyone can. There’s a rarely discussed digital divide in America. In Charleston, 40 to 45 percent of the population subscribes to a high-speed Internet service, about the same as the national average. In a state where half of the primary voters are black, a study released last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that broadband use among blacks, though rising, continues to lag behind whites and English-speaking Latinos. In many parts of the country, particularly rural areas and poor inner cities, access to high-speed Internet is not the norm. In fact, less than half a mile from the Citadel, the site of last week’s debate, sits the Cooper River Courts public housing project, where owning a computer and subscribing to the Internet are considered luxuries.

Source Jose Antonio Vargas  (vargasj@washpost.com) The Washington Post

This Serves as another example where we must be careful that we not take the Internet for granted. As soon as we make the Internet a prerequisite for participation in society, we create a class strata. It comes back to “those who have forgetting about those who have not.”

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!