Hillary Stumps for Rural Broadband… or Votes

As part of her plan to “Restore the Promise of Rural America,” Sen. Hillary Clinton is proposing a new fund and strategy for rural broadband deployment. While we admire the Senator from New York’s savvy for noticing how improved Internet infrastructures can help economies, we can’t help but wonder if last week’s announcement is designed more to grab Iowa voter attention than to realistically spur federally supported carriage of bits.

On the surface, Clinton’s Rural Broadband Initiatives Act is not a bad idea — given that the big service providers are doing all they can to escape build-out clauses for their future networks, rural America needs all the broadband help it can get.

But the political reality is that such broadband subsidies are more likely to be part of a planned reform of the Universal Service Fund, a huge bear of a political tangle whose knots are just now starting to get pulled apart.

Such legislation is likely to first emerge in the Commerce committees of both the House and the Senate, but D.C. insiders see little chance for serious action on telelcom matters anytime soon, due in part to the unsure power balance and more-pressing legislative issues like the war in Iraq.

So — good for Hillary to make broadband a part of the stump speech. But her plan will probably do a better job of cheering Iowa voters than putting any fiber in the ground.

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