House Panel Takes A Look At Broadband
May 17th, 2010 | By Dawn Rivers Baker | Category: Politics & PolicyIt seems as if it was broadband week on Capitol Hill, as both the House and Senate Small Business Committees played host to meetings to discuss high speed Internet access and its impact on small businesses. Over in the House, Committee Chairwoman Nydia Velázquez convened a hearing last Wednesday that was immediately striking because it did not feature any Administration witnesses. Evidently, lawmakers wanted to know how the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan was playing with small businesses and so they chose to dispense with the usual sales pitches from Administration officials.
What the small business owners present had to say was extremely enlightening. Most of them testified that, thanks to Internet technology, they operated firms that would not have been possible ten or twenty years ago. There was talk about lean, efficient operations, a technology-enabled distributed workforce that spans the nation or the world, and about foregoing borrowing in favor of using free or low-cost online tools to make the most of what you’ve got. In fact, it all sounded quite a lot like what is normal for microbusinesses and has been for a long time. Everybody at the witness table agreed that universal access to broadband was important, not only to give them access to markets and to their own clients but also to give them access to their workforce. At the same time, witnesses cautioned policy makers against creating tomorrow’s problems with today’s solutions, suggesting that they avoid legislation that could hamstring technologies that had not been conceived of yet.
