The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is gearing up to release its plan for national broadband access on March 17. The FCC is required under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to develop and present to Congress a plan to connect an estimated 93 million Americans to broadband service. Early releases of the plan indicate a broad vision, but problems concerning funding and net neutrality threaten its success.

On Feb. 18, the FCC gave the public an idea of what will be in the plan by releasing its national purposes update, which outlines what the commission will present to Congress. The plan embraces a broad vision of public connectivity that some public interest groups consider long overdue. The vision includes increased public education programs to bridge the digital divide, efforts to utilize broadband to improve energy and health care efficiency, and plans to provide first responders with radio interoperability.

Open government advocates have hailed the plan's prerogative to increase civic participation in government policymaking. John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation wrote that the FCC seems "committed to the sort of government policies that can help turn Internet access into a transformative tool for citizenship." If, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, a democracy requires an informed citizenry, then broadband enables the masses to reach government information faster with fewer barriers to access. Further, national broadband access increases the capacity for tools that enable citizens to better interact with government information.

A major part of the plan seeks to use broadband to improve government efficiency, to enable citizen-centric online services, and to utilize existing government assets to improve broadband deployment. According to the Feb. 18 document, existing social media and cloud computing can be used to reduce costs, and services such as enabling citizens to access personal data held by government agencies can be better centralized. The blog on FCC's Broadband.gov approaches the question of citizen engagement in five primary areas:

• Transparent government information
• Increased access to media and journalism
• The use of social media to communicate with the public
• Developing innovation in communal digital space that advances government
• Digitizing democracy by enabling such things as online voter registration and enabling overseas members of the military to vote online

Further, there have also been reports that the federal government may also look into creating an online archive of agencies' web content and recommend that Congress change the Copyright Act to allow media companies to contribute their archival content to this national archive.

Presently, federal broadband policies that encourage citizen interaction with their government are almost nonexistent or poorly implemented. The executive branch has made some recent inroads to civic engagement by launching online forums to solicit public input in policymaking, but these efforts have been limited. The federal government's efforts to get public input on the Open Government Directive is a prime example, and its subsequent efforts to encourage such engagement on individual agency openness plans was a further step in that direction. However, the E-Government Act of 2002 has never been fully implemented in such basic areas as agency website standards; thus, it is unknown whether such an ambitious plan can be fully realized.

Funding for the FCC's plan is a potential roadblock for the effort. Currently, the FCC subsidizes telephone services to poor and rural areas through its Universal Service Fund and plans to establish its broadband-focused Connect America Fund within the existing program. The $8 billion Universal Service Fund is paid for out of surcharges affixed to consumer and business long-distance bills. To pay for extended broadband services, the FCC plans to propose several options to Congress, including a gradual phase-out of the Universal Service Fund telephone service to a focus entirely on broadband. However, the FCC is expected to request another $9 billion from Congress in addition to the $7.2 billion that legislators already provided for broadband lines in the economic stimulus package.

Another potential problem is that cost cuts may give an advantage to big business that could then undermine competition. Blogs on both Verizon's and AT&T's websites praised the agency's efforts. Verizon's vice president for regulatory affairs even called the FCC's plan "bold and practical." However, corporate support may stem from FCC not requiring companies to share broadband lines with rivals, thus favoring big companies and violating the principles of net neutrality. Both companies have ardently opposed any regulation related to net neutrality.

The pricey and expansive vision is what critics contend will be the plan's failure. Most reports indicate that without being broken up, the plan is too large to make it into an omnibus bill. Currently, there are fears that the plan is so big that Congress is unlikely to do anything with it at all.