benton's blog

Today, the average American school has about the same bandwidth as the average American home, even though there are 200 times as many people at school as there are at home. Only around 20 percent of our students have access to true high-speed Internet in their classroom and fewer than 20 percent of educators say their school’s Internet connection meets their teaching needs. By comparison, in South Korea 100 percent of students are connected to high-capacity broadband.

[Editor’s note: In this week’s round-up, new Headlines Writing Associate Rebecca Ellis looks at a significant media policy decision from Argentina that did not get much press here in the U.S. Looking at international coverage in English and Spanish, Ellis offers a take on the Supreme Court of Argentina’s ruling that upholds a new law that limits media ownership concentration.]

A funny thing happened while we all watched the tragic comedy known as the budget crisis – someone went and made some decisions about the future of the Internet. Or, well, not to put too fine a point on it, decided we need to make some major decisions on how to govern the Internet.

Broadband, especially of the high-capacity variety, once mostly the province of network engineers and large organizations, is now everyone’s concern. Whether at home, school, on the job, or walking down the street, speedy response in using the Internet is the new normal. For libraries, this need and expectation is even more pronounced. A single broadband connection to one library provides access for thousands of people over the course of a year. And with these Internet connections come the full range of resources and expertise that libraries and librarians offer.

Editor's note: The big news in Washington continues to be the government shutdown, an issue we looked at last week. So today we share some news from the Benton Foundation.