I hope I'm still alive for a "service" like this.

If only I had a billion dollar company that I could pile-drive into the ground persuing this outrageous venture.

Lets see if we can get her to pass a law letting us have free money too!

If she does understand this at all, she probably doesn't expect it to go through either. It's most like just so that, come election day, she can scream about her heroic efforts to bring free internet to the needy.

Yea, I have one word for you: Google! They're the only ones who has made the ad revenue mode work in a bit way and they have shown an interest in wireless.

I think this congresswoman has targeted this auction for Google. She migh as well come out and call it a Google sale.

Sorry, can't type this afternoon.

"revenue model work in a big way"

I dont know about the arguement

"ad-supported" system of weak wireless broadband might be more annoying than useful, even for people who can't afford an alternative"

if you cant afford it wouldnt getting it free with ad's be better than nothing with no ad's

However i do agree no company is gonna do this unless there getting a hugh tax write off from the feds

if they could get this off the ground i'd use it but i doubt this would ever happen

How would you enforce ads? Randomly jam an audio snippet into each video or media file you download?

@i4ni: And while you're dying, I'll be still alive!

There needs to be a system like this in place. Also there should be laws that make EVDO cheaper so that everyone can afford it, blah blah blah supply and demand. Everyone wants 30 dollar EVDO and I think that is the fair number. Free Wifi is also an answer. SOMEONE JUST GIVE US FAST INTERNET NATIONWIDE WIRELESS THAT HAS THE SAME COVERAGE OF CELL PHONES. That isn't 60 bucks, whoever comes up with the 30 dollar system is going to be huge.

So how would providing an ad-supported service for those who can't afford a paid for service work. Surely if you can't afford the paid for service you won't be able to afford to buy whatever is being advertised anyway.

FAIL

I also don't agree with the
"'A technology protection measure' that would keep kids from the porn"

What about 1st amendment rights.

@Jurisprudence:

You can always advertise loans or mortgage refinancing.

@JayD16: here in Israel according to new law every ISP has got to do free of charge service to filter porn starting about a month ago.
but most are still charging two bucks to do that.

it would suck to live in calif if this ever happend

(read third bulletin)

@Valicious:
optional service offcourse.

@Jurisprudence: JayD16's answer is close, but not quite right. When people are poor, targeted advertisements should include high-interest credit cards and "check-into-cash" services that charge huge fees. After all, that's how you KEEP them poor...

What's the point? Poor people can't afford computers anyway.

@Sleeper_Service: I dont know about that what is actually considered poor could be anything under like $ 25,000 and so a person whom makes $25,000 per year could afford a computer which is $ 300-500

unless your talking about poor as in homeless no money of any type

@utube2007:

I was kind of sort of joking.

Noobs-R-Us is right. Google will welcome this, and sense you can't charge for the service there won't be many bidders. I wonder if Google isn't the ones pulling the strings of this congresswoman's proposal.

Free wireless is a great idea, but it's being done wrong. A town should go to an ISP and say: Set up wireless internet for free across the entire town. It can be your slowest speed as long as it isn't under 300kbps. If you don't do this, you can't do business in this town anymore, but if you do, you can offer faster connections at whatever price you want.
I'm not sure if thats legal or possible, but since we pay through the nose for crap speeds already, I think that ISPs have the money to do it.

@JayD16: Stopping kids from seeing inappropriate content isn't illegal. A ten year old can't see an R rated movie.
It doesn't matter anyway because people always find their way around that stuff. You buy a ticket to a G movie and go into the other theater. And online you can just use a proxy, or a site that isn't blocked. Because until tit-recognizing filters are added, only known sites are blocked with a blacklist of bad sites.

of course this will go through so that some well-connected (no pun intended)company can get it for cheap and then use their bought and paid for politicians to get all the restrictions removed...

@JayD16: This "Think of the children" nanny-state provision would become a training course in bypassing content restrictions. I'd guess the average teen would get past it in a week, assuming he's busy downloading MP3s -- I mean, "doing homework" -- at the same time. Our poor victimized children could then take these new skills to China, and use them to sneak political news and discussion through the Great Firewall.

So in the end, it's a good thing.

Hasn't anyone heard of the library? You know, that place with all the books? Yea, most already have free internet.

That's entirely unnecessary.
You can go on the internet at StarBucks or the library, both of which most likely have better service. And the protection thing is rather stupid. They have no way of telling how old internet users are, and even if they did, it would be extremely easy to bypass it.

A better thing to do would be to encourage the installment of neighbourhood-wide free networks, as seen in some parts of New York.

Or then again, people could just steal wireless form their neighbours as usual.

@Leonard Nimrod

"Noobs-R-Us is right. Google will welcome this, and sense you can't charge for the service there won't be many bidders. I wonder if Google isn't the ones pulling the strings of this congresswoman's proposal.

and to that i must say...

"Let me be the first one to welcome our Google overloards"

ISP's should just launch a public WiFi that allows their customers to login to it, via a user name and password.

Each subscriber would recive a login, and from any access point (or city wide) would log in to use it. That way they still make money, while not charging extra.

Thats much more inbetween than charging crazy ammounts, or losing money (like they would here).

It wold work as a cooperative, where the users are also the owners. Cooperatives have worked in the past and still work now, and are common in California. They are mostly seen in agriculture though, but I see it as something that has proven it's self successful. (Sunkist, Calavo, Blue Diamond, Ocean Spray, and Sunmade are just a few) So why not a communications cooperative.

that sucks no porn,

so how bout the bandwith, will everyone be eating it up on 360s, i mean as if there wasnt enough lag with people on phone lines for crist sake

o and about no porn, somebody will come up with a way to make a video seem totaly innocent, run it through a program, and walla instant porn- the 1 hour conversion

"launch an "always-on" broadband with at least 200Kbps downloads"
Didn't the government just determine that 200Kbps could no longer be called broadband? Hehe

This sounds like it was custom built for Google in order to scare any other bidders away. They also happen to be in California where it was written, hmm.

Who else but Google even mentioned this kind of plan? Also the fact you can't charge but you can serve up ads seems to be exactly what only they have talked about doing. I think they mentioned using a network like this for cell phone service as well, which wouldn't be much of a stretch since Wifi phones are already out.
If they get this spectrum, they could use ads to finance it, which they already do on a massive scale, and if they made an open source cell phone that works on it...bad news for some companies.

Thats the dumbest thing i've heard come out of washington yet. For that they could just update the software of the EDGE network in the US.
I only see a company that's ad-based like google or yahoo or maybe even mozilla that way they'll make a ton of money advertising on their network while getting even more popular and become a household name MAYBE because of their free wireless service.
Thats stupid though and i agree with what you said that they could just run a compressed version of dail-up via copper wire. Or they could take it a step further and not live in the past and make it a fiber optic network and make it the required 300kbps. 300kbps is slow though that'd be like a 1kbps download speed in actual time. Well thats what you'll probably be seeing.

I'd rather have decent opt-in national health care before national Wifi. I can't surf if I'm dead.

You guys are totally not being creative...there's a ton of money to be made here.

200kbps is a joke in terms of speed, so why not offer it free, then charge for upgrades to higher speeds? You'd be offering free and slow access to everyone, but when they finally get tired of waiting they can shell out $30 a month for 10mbps or something. Voila, cashola.

Or heck, that porn thing, just block all the adult sites until people upgrade ahahahhaa.

Long time reader, first (and probably last time) poster, pro-corporate stooge.

This is just a blog, I know, but having been a regular reader of Gizmodo for years, I'm finding the ongoing liberal nonsensical whinings and obvious hypocrisy as just hysterical.

"I'm not pro-corporation, so much as I am pro-reality."

I agree, it's a dumb idea, but this statement made me literally laugh out loud at your incredible hypocrisy. I mean, seriously... this blog is just a corporate love-fest for the most part--drooling over the latest Apple product for example, and pantsing the coolest new gadget from Major Corporation X.

I enjoy your blog, but Gizmodo = hypocrite.

We have "free" tv...
Perhaps they will have it like the return of Netzero, connect and get a huge friggin banner

you know i dont know why people are complaining so much about 300kbps...unless utorrent is lying to me, 300kbps is one of the highest speeds i ever get (and i have a 16 mbps broadband) and the downloads come through pretty quickly. sure you wont be FLYING through the internet or anything...you'll certainly have to wait a minute or two for websites and especially videos to show up...but it'll work.

also, i'm with what someone said above...this congresswoman only did this so that she could say she fought for it come election time. While you dont need any credentials to get into politics...you do need to have brains. She knows as well as anyone else that for this to actually work it needs to be ad supported. she doesnt want it to take up alot of her time or anything though so she sets it up so that it comes down the minute after its proposed.

at this point in the game there seems to be a damn near infinite number of possibilities for ways to get wireless everywhere. what with the different types of wirelesss technology providers (routers everywhere, ballons, everyone providing the wireless off their own connections, etc) the geographical/social aspect(by city by town by state and the sort of plan that you use...the whole thing could be approached in different ways) and the economic aspect (make it ad supported, make it free but only for a small part of the day, make it so that you get a decent speed for alot of extra money etc etc) all the different parts lead to a whole multitude of possibilities! i think there needs to be a sitdown somewhere, and there needs to be a list made of every single possibility , and with an almost philosophical idea of what would work best for the everyone, narrow down the possibilities to at least a small handful of very good solutions.

@Blinklink11:
t-mobile has already kind of done that with hotspots...only its not very good

@jrghoull: thats 200 kiloBITS, not kiloBYTES. 8 bits in a byte means 25KBps, which is fine for browsing and most other online tasks but not really suitable for downloading large files (unless you have a few days to spare).

Don't hate on Eshoo, Gizmodo.

Unrealistic as it is, it was nice of them to try and make a point- we are paying too much, and there are people left behind

@ZeroCorpse

If we make a robot out of your corpse and sit it at a terminal then we can make you surf after life...

We can rebuild him...
We have the technology...

it's only 30mhz of spectrum... bored now...

ya quit hating!
just cause they come out with basic free internet doesn't mean their wont be somebody willing to take your cash for a faster service.

hey, free dial up, sweet....

So there's no buisness plan in an ad-supported free wireless service? Like, you know, the same model that has supported broadcast television in the US for half a century? Yes, a small fraction of the US population uses a DVR, and many more just mute the TV to get around the ads, but it works. And of course, there's always cable (or equivalents) for those who want to pay for something faster. Although we do have ads even there too. The alternative, to continue the metaphor, would be to copy the BBC, and have the government provide the infrastructure, tax supported, and commercial free (because the money does have to come from somewhere.)

Either way, I'd be in support of something that could push higher access speeds to everyone in the country. I'm sure Verizon thinks it would jam up the internet though, and not let all their important high-paying traffic through.

@mferrari: MPAA movie ratings are not government mandated. That is the HUGE difference here. The MPAA setting up guidelines for movie theaters to follow is a lot different than the government enacting a law that says a company must block questionable content if they operate a network on this new spectrum.