Afgahnistan beats the US in TV

Afghanistan has converted successfuly to a new countrywide all digital television system, while the FCC dithers in the U.S. with a myriad of mostly irrelevant and/or conflicting regulations on the U.S. television industry.

I wrote recently that Ethiopia has a countrywide plan for broadband, unlike the United States. Not only do we NOT have enough elected and appointed leaders taking this seriously, we actually have politicians introducing laws forbidding states and communities from dealing sensibly with this new public infrastructure. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) has introduced a bill in Congress that would give the telcos the ability to shut down municipal projects nationwide. This would be exactly the same as introducing a bill in 1950 forbidding communities from investing in public water and sewer projects, with exactly the same devastating effect on economic development.

While the rest of the world, even places like Afghanistan and Ethiopia, "get" that technology investments are critical to their future, some of our leaders seem determined to cripple the future of communities.

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