[Note: This comment comes from friend Bob Frankston. DLH]

From: “Bob Frankston”
Date: November 2, 2007 5:20:23 PM PDT
To:
Cc: “‘Dewayne Hendricks’” , “‘Mike Cheponis’”
Subject: RE: [IP] Is U.S. stuck in Internet’s slow lane?

As I emphasized in http://www.frankston.com/?name=InternetDynamic we keep worrying about the Minitel gap – in the 1980’s France gave everyone a computer terminal. Good thing we were so proactive and allowed the Internet to happen (despite the carriers).

How can a community lack Internet access? If it has copper wires everywhere it has multimegabit connectivity. Oh yeah, it doesn’t own it. It depends on the government coming in and connecting them to that Internet out there. The Europeans are not doing well as well as they’d like people to think because they are missing the point of the Internet and repeating the Minitel dynamic. This is not like electricity — we “generate” the Internet ourselves.

Is this inventory going to include the networks we do ourselves or just the dependency-assuring networks?