[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 17]
[House]
[Pages 24442-24443]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                              {time}  1745

                        AMERICA'S DIGITAL FUTURE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Simpson). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Tauzin) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I do not often do special orders, but 
something recently occurred that has caused me to come to the floor of 
the House today and to announce a very special project that will occur 
on Monday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at Louisiana State University.
  And many of the Members of the House have recently seen copies of 
this map published in the local newspaper, The Hill, and the local 
newspaper, the Congress Daily and others in this area, and it is a map 
that indicates the U.S. Internet POPs, the points of presence of 
broadband hubs in America.
  What is interesting about the map is that an awful lot of our country 
does not have the presence of an Internet, a broadband high-speed hub, 
located on their map. The map becomes more interesting when it is 
compared to a report that was recently published on the new economy 
index, an attempt by the Democratic Leadership Council to identify the 
States of our country where the high technology or digital economy has 
really arrived and is achieving great results for its citizens and the 
places around our country where the high technology economy, the 
digital economy, the Internet economy, however you want to call it, has 
yet to arrive and may be very slow in arriving.
  The State new economy index ranked the States of America in terms of 
the high-technology connects, the connectivity of our people, of homes, 
of businesses, to the Internet and the presence of broadband capable 
structures that are going to allow those States and those economies to 
do well in the new millennium.
  In that list of States are listed, of course, the real winners, the 
States where the high technology economy has really arrived and where 
high technology hook-ups, the connections to the Internet, the capacity 
of the systems are really very present. The top two States are 
Massachusetts and California. The lower States, the lower 25 States 
include Georgia, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Rhode Island, North Carolina, 
Tennessee, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Indiana, 
South Carolina, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Iowa, South Dakota, 
Alabama, North Dakota, Montana, my own State of Louisiana, West 
Virginia, Arkansas and Mississippi. We are

[[Page 24443]]

ranked 47th in Louisiana in high-technology connects.
  Now why did I find that so alarming, and why this event in Baton 
Rouge next Monday?
  I found it so alarming because, as chairman of the Subcommittee on 
Telecommunications, Trade, and Consumer Protection of the Committee on 
Commerce, I have seen the high-technology economy at work in other 
parts of the country and around the world. I have seen how connecting 
to the Internet makes a difference in the education of children. I have 
seen how connecting to the Internet makes a business prosper or fail. I 
have seen the promise of the broadband technologies, in effect high-
speed Internet connects, to an economy are going to make the difference 
between whether some economies succeed or fail.
  And I have lived in the State of Louisiana that I love dearly and yet 
I know suffers from a high illiteracy rate and a need for children to 
be uplifted, an economy that desperately needs a connect to this high-
technology economy; and yet I see these numbers that say we are 47th, 
and I see so many other States lingering near the bottom of this list.
  And so on next Monday we have convened what might be the last big 
high-technology summit conference of this millennium where on October 
11 in Baton Rouge we are going to feature such speakers as:
  Bill Kennard, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission,
  Robert Pitofsky, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission,
  Barry Diller, the chairman and CEO of USA Networks,
  Charlie Ergen, chairman of Echostar Satellite Communications,
  Bob Coonrod, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
  Greg Maffei, the Senior Vice President of Microsoft,
  Afshin Mohebbi, the President and CEO of Quest Communications,
  Mike McCurry, former White House spokesman, now a cochairman with our 
own Susan Molinari of the broadband Coalition, an organization formed 
to try to make sure every part of America, not just the few States that 
have high-technology connects, but every part of America is brought 
together; that we do not have a digital divide in the new economy of 
the future; along with folks like Hal Krisbergh, chairman and CEO of 
Worldgate Communications, a company that is manufacturing equipment 
that can put every child in this country on the Internet on television 
without the necessity of a computer for about $5 a month rental, 
technologies that mean the difference between children being left 
behind, and businesses being left behind and economies being left 
behind or being a part of the new fast economy that is being described 
as the new economy of the new millennium.
  This summit conference will be available to all of America on the 
Internet, and I want to tell you how you can log in, how you can tune 
in. If you are interested in knowing how critical it is for your homes 
and your businesses to be connected to the Internet and to be, more 
importantly, connected to the high-speed Internet of the future, the 
broadband services that are going to combine all the new economies on 
the Internet with the high-speed visual and audio and data services 
that are going to be available on those services. If you are 
interested, you can tune in. It will be broadcast live on the Internet 
all day long next Monday, and you can find it at www.mobiletel.com.
  That site is connected to other ISPs or Internet service providers.
  You can tune in, you can get a sense of how your State can do what 
Louisiana, I hope, will do, and that is start a major effort to connect 
every family, every business to this new economy and to the high speed 
Internet. Join us at www.mobiletel.com on Monday all day at LSU and 
learn what the future looks like for your State.

                          ____________________