Comcast offers cheap internet for low income families.

[danid512]

Link to the yahoo article:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/comcast-launch-10-internet-low-income-families-213445170.html

I thought this was pretty cool. Well I still do. The only thing that actually annoys me about it is the criteria that "have at least one child who receives free lunch through the National School Lunch Program (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CCcQFjAA&url=h ttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.fns.usda.gov%2Fcnd%2Flunch%2F&ei=I j1ATtz7GI-GsALNxqEX&usg=AFQjCNEEzIc0SOD27x8BrJf9hbb2cy8H_w&s ig2=SEXLj-NMdKI1yaJKbxZGuw) (NSLP). Comcast is using the NSLP requirement to ensure that only low-income families are able to take advantage of the Internet Essentials option."

While I understand validating someone's income for this service (as it should be, because I have no doubt that tons of people would love to pay $10 for internet, even at snails pace... I don't think it's very fair that only people with children should be allowed to qualify.

I mean... it's comcast's program and they can do what they want. But why shouldn't a single person or a married older couple on a limited income be able to take part in this as well, so long as they can prove they are low income? You don't have to have a brood of children to be low income.

</rant>

Thoughts?

[Tony]

re: "When Comcast acquired NBC a number of months ago, the FCC mandated that the company help low-income families (http://msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/08/7306191-comcast-offers-low-income-families-995-a-month-internet) get connected."

It does seem somewhat odd that someone is trying to define a "family" as people with kids. So my roommate and I aren't a family, but if I lived with my dad we would be? No, I suppose I'm reading way too much into it, and really it's only being done this way to save money.

[LazerFlash]

It would make a lot more sense to use the same requirements as SafeLink uses for its cell phone service... essentially anyone who currently qualifies for several assistance programs (including, but not limited to NSLP) qualifies for SafeLink.

[Kensey]

While I understand validating someone's income for this service (as it should be, because I have no doubt that tons of people would love to pay $10 for internet, even at snails pace... I don't think it's very fair that only people with children should be allowed to qualify.

I mean... it's comcast's program and they can do what they want. But why shouldn't a single person or a married older couple on a limited income be able to take part in this as well, so long as they can prove they are low income? You don't have to have a brood of children to be low income.

I would bet that this is a quirk of the political history of this sort of thing. Starting about 15 years ago there was a great deal of high dudgeon about the "digital divide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide#Origins_of_the_term)" between the well-off who could afford computers and fast Internet access in their homes, and the poor who could not. Most of this was expressed in forward-looking terms -- things like "if low-income children don't develop these skills it will be a handicap and further reinforce the cycle of poverty". So from the outset the focus was on kids and the families they were part of. (Sorry Tony, you don't qualify as a "low-income child"...) This is the kind of mindset that gave birth to projects like One Laptop Per Child (http://one.laptop.org/).

Now having grown up on the down side of the divide as it existed in the early '90s, I can say that it was a bit of a hindrance, in 1994, to suddenly get Internet access at college without having ever been exposed to BBS culture. It made for a little bit more difficult transition than otherwise would have been the case -- everything from important terminology I was unfamiliar with to jokes I didn't get at the time. But I don't get the sense these days that there is the same divide between "not having anything" and "having it all" as existed then when it took about $1500 of equipment plus a hefty monthly long-distance bill to really participate in things. These days a $200 netbook is all you need and you can leech the connectivity for free from a neighbor, a business, a public library or (in many places) your town itself -- although such options are increasingly looking to me like they will be the Internet equivalent of pay phones, soon unnecessary in a world where practically everybody has a mobile device with a data plan. In my opinion technology has outpaced politics on this one (as it so often does).