State Petitions FCC for Rural Internet Access.

• Position: Brief Article

The State of Alaska is asking the Federal Communications Commission to help bridge the digital divide in rural Alaska communities and allow villages, which currently have no local dial-up access to the Internet, to use telecommunication services at their schools and libraries for access under the federal E-rate program.

The program gives money to eligible schools and libraries to defray the cost of providing Internet to those facilities.

"Internet service in most remote Alaska communities is prohibitively expensive," said Lt. Gov. Fran Ulmer, a member of the FCC's local and state government advisory committee. The state's petition, originally developed by several rural school districts, asks the FCC to widen access to the Net to allow residents of rural villages to use the service already provided to the school or library. If approved, only communities...