Jon Taplin's Blog

California Broadband Taskforce Report

For the last year I have been working on the California Broadband Taskforce. We finally released our report this morning. The task given us by the Governor was to create a path to Universal Broadband for California within the next five years. One of the outstanding pieces of the report is the first attempt to comprehensively map the state for Broadband Access. While I’m pretty proud of the report, I must enter a couple of Caveats. We were not allowed to raise the issue of Network Neutrality, the third rail of Media Policy. Secondly, I thought we could have done more to push low cost Universal Access (using the Universal Service Fee administered by the FCC) to low income households. Still and all, its a good start and the fact that The Governor was able to get business, academia and NGO’s in one room to discuss the problem with a great deal of civility bodes well for the future.