Here’s their message:

Letter to House Committee on Agriculture Subcommittee on Specialty Crops, Rural Development, and Foreign Agriculture

Dear Member,

Tomorrow you will have a hearing on the nation��s current rural broadband programs. The Rural Utilities Service (RUS) is responsible for the Rural Broadband Loan Program, which subsidizes broadband service in rural areas. RUS has spent more than $871 million to provide this service since 2003. A report released this month by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation & Development entitled Broadband Statistics to December 2006 found that, while the U.S. has the most total broadband subscribers of the 30 countries it researched, our nation ranked 15th in broadband deployment penetration. On behalf of the more than 1.2 million members and supports of the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW), I ask that you abolish the Rural Broadband Loan Program.

Besides the more than $30 million in broadband loans that have gone into default, the program has lost its focus on serving rural America. A 2005 audit conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture Office of the Inspector General stated ��RUS has not exclusively served those rural communities most requiring Federal assistance to obtain access to broadband technologies. Because RUS�� definition of ��rural area�� is too broad to distinguish usefully between suburban and rural communities, the agency has issued over $103.4 million in grants and loans (nearly 12 percent of $895 million in total program funds) to communities near metropolitan areas�� Though the law does not explicitly forbid issuing loans to communities with preexisting service, we question whether the Rural Broadband Loan Program should be providing funds for competition in many of the communities served, while other communities go entirely without service.��

Instead of allowing the free market to flourish, RUS has been subsidizing private companies to provide broadband in neighborhoods that already have this service. The government should no longer be allowed to waste the taxpayers�� money in bringing broadband to rural areas. This goal should be left entirely to the private technology sector. CCAGW asks that you support the abolition of the Rural Broadband Loan Program.

I am completely opposed to their opinion. Completely.

First of all, they liken the broadband services as basically all being the same. They are not. Not even close. Just because a community has dial-up does not mean they have the resources to provide adequate bandwidth to lure industry. A typical DSL connection will not support an internet based company. In order to do this, you have to have huge chunks of bandwidth. The local cable company or DSL company doesn’t need that type of overhead to provide typical home-based internet browsing. As such, although most of the rural United States may have broadband penetration as CAGW states, they are at a disadvantage to attracting industries to most third world nations at this time. Given the financial and technological resources available in the United States, that is quite embarrassing to me.

On a national security level, clustering all our communications assets in very localized urban areas is the exact opposite of what we need to be doing. There is no need to all of our critical data to be in Washington, DC. Put some in rural Kentucky. Put some in rural Nebraska. Hell, put some in Kansas. Spreading those resources out makes things a lot more complicated for enemies.

Now, on a bigger picture that Tom Schatz is missing, some people feel that urban areas are the main problem in global warming. There’s a phenomena called urban warming named specifically for that effect. It’s not much of an issue in rural areas. I have pondered several times on my blogs that it seems to me that de-urbanizing the United States would do the US, and the world, good. We no longer need to cluster a million people in a small area thereby overwhelming the Earth’s ability to provide. We don’t need huge expanses of concrete and asphalt. We just need to spread out a little. We need to live amongst the trees so those trees can counter our CO2 emissions a little more efficiently. We just don’t need cities in this day and age and they are doing more harm than good. A big part of the reason we don’t need cities any more is because of remarkably improved communications. It is no longer expected of a person to meet face-to-face every single time you have an important message. We don’t have to hand deliver documents. We don’t have to assemble 100 people in the same room to coordinate a message. The internet has solved all those issues. So, to say broadband is not worth the government investing in it is ludicrous and extremely short-sighted.

CAGW does a lot of good things and tackles a lot of truly wasteful spending. However, in this case, they’re 100% wrong.

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