I see that Bush waited until he got to your town to talk about the internet.
Bush Sets Internet Access Goal
By Mike Allen
ALBUQUERQUE, March 26 -- President Bush, who is gradually retooling his economic message to compensate for a stagnant job market, set a national goal Friday of making high-speed Internet access available to every home within three years.
Bush has not publicly addressed the question of broadband Internet access since August 2002.
His statement was grafted onto a speech about homeownership hours after his opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), released an economic plan that called for "spurring the growth of new industries like the broadband technology that will dominate the future."
Presidential advisers said that Bush will put an increasing emphasis in coming days on the changing economy and that the target date for broadband access was an early part of that effort. Republican lawmakers have been pressuring his campaign to come up with a stronger economic message to counter Kerry's focus on the more than 2 million jobs that have been lost during Bush's presidency.
The presidential endorsement of "universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007" answers a longtime goal of the technology and telecommunications industries, which have lobbied for a specific deadline to give them more leverage as they seek tax and regulatory breaks from Congress and the Federal Communications Commission.
"Broadband" refers to Internet access that is faster than dial-up, and it is typically provided through telephone or cable lines. The additional access would mainly benefit rural areas, because most of the country already has the service available.
Bush spoke only of the availability of the service and did not say how many households could actually tap into it. He also did not propose tax credits or other ways to make the service available to poor households, a move that has been pushed by activists who complain about an "economic digital divide" between people who have access to the latest technology and those who do not.
"This country needs a national goal for broadband technology, for the spread of broadband technology," Bush said, speaking in the courtyard of a Pueblo-style 4-H complex at the New Mexico State Fairgrounds. "Then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter, consumers have got plenty of choices when it comes to purchasing the broadband carrier. See, the more choices there are, the more the price will go down."
Bush added that Congress "must not tax access to broadband technology if we want to spread it around." A moratorium on taxing access to the Internet expired late last year, and congressional negotiations over a renewal are hung up by a battle over how much of the telecommunications infrastructure for Internet service should be tax-exempt.
A six-point plan for job creation that Bush talks about in nearly every speech focuses on tax cuts, lawsuit reform and deregulation. He previously has said little about making technology more widely available. The last time he spoke publicly about broadband access was at an economic forum he held in Waco, Tex., two summers ago.
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washingtonpost.com
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