Over on MyLeftNutmg, MattW points out Rep. Tom Drew’s proposed bill, Proposed Bill No. 6502, AN ACT CONCERNING WIRELESS INTERNET ACCESS.

That the general statutes be amended to establish a working group to make recommendations for creating incentives to expand or maximize wireless Internet access in the state.

On initial reading, this sounds like a great idea. Statewide WiFi. As I commented on MyLeftNutmeg:

As a starting point, every public building ought to have WiFi. Schools, libraries, town halls, court houses, police stations, etc. Some already do, and many others can without much work.

Getting WiFi at parks and Community Technology Centers probably brings even more bang for the buck, but is harder get through.

Yet the devil is always in the details. Who will be in the working group? What will happen to the recommendations? What sort of incentives are being considered? Will the group be made up of industry executives pushing for proposals for large corporate giveaways to get the corporations to make $30/month WiFi access more ubiquitous? Will the group be made up of technogeeks pushing for some wonderful but arcane and unusable solution? Will the recommendations end up being one more set of recommendations that get added to a library somewhere and not acted upon? We shall see.

How will this “maximize economic and other development” in our State? Will it be done in such a way that helps alleviate the digital divide, or will it compound the digital divide with policies that make it useful only to people that already have WiFi enabled laptops and the knowledge of how to use them.

I hope that we get a lot of people working together to make sure that this bill does bring about greater Internet access for a wide spectrum of citizens.