If It Does Not Come Consider Yourself Lucky

MercerNet - A Case Study

Introduction:

We offer here a detailed case study of the MercerNet award and a subsequent nine months of efforts on our part to shed light on the processes underlying but one of several dozen grants made by NTIA. These grants ostensibly further the public interest in helping communities gain access to what the Clinton administration loftily touts as National Information Infrastructure. It is our contention that the process is so badly broken that the grants may harm the long term interests of the communities to which they are given. We believe that NTIA needs to implement criteria immediately for future grants that will first emphasize the development of human resources necessary to use technology and second include criteria that will ensure broad community control and ownership of projects funded. We shall show here why the process that underlies the reality of MercerNet has robbed the people of Mercer County of likelihood of any substantial benefit from this federal largesse. Indeed we shall demonstrate why we believe that MercerNet will be harmful to the interests of most citizens of Mercer County.

A Personal Evaluation of MercerNet

This will be a continuation of a story that we first wrote about last October when we blasted the Commerce Department and the decision of Laura Breeden at NTIA to approve a grant application for Mercernet. At that time, in the Trenton Times an article reported that Mercer County Community College, Princeton Regional Schools, and Lawrenceville Schools in partnership with Comcast had been awarded $750,000 by NTIA for an interactive realtime video network for distance education in a county of 400,000 population that is about 15 by 20 miles in size. We went rather ballistic and published a rather hot flame to two mail lists. Within a day or two Laura Breeden, the NTIA Director, was flaming back at us. By the time the dust settled, no one involved with the project would return our calls. We found out, in the meantime, that the project we had been following between March and June of 1995 had been seriously revised by a Comcast grant writer when the Princeton and Lawrenceville school systems picked Comcast rather than Bell Atlantic as their technology partner in June of 1995.

By September 20 1995 (the date of its final revision) the project had been dressed in very liberal NII "do good" clothing. No longer an effort to help the wealthy bedroom school districts give the requisite number of advanced placement courses to their students, it now involved bringing the Internet to the county's high schools and libraries. And even more importantly, it focused on the idea of the wealthy districts helping the poorer districts by sharing resources. However, there was nothing in the proposal that would lead anyone to believe that there would be anything but a "trust me to do it sooner or later" approach by the grant applicants to deliver what they promised to do in return for the federal dollars. We also find it interesting that it was funded with about three weeks of its final "revision" - a really rapid turn around by a federal agency.

About a week after the beginning of the flame fest, when we realized that the chances of speaking to the principal Investigators were zero, we finally called Comcast. Dave Briedinger, who headed Comcast's participation in the project, did talk with us and gave us a copy of the proposal. Since then he has been almost our only official source of entry into the project. Why? Because Peter Thompson from Princeton (whom we have known personally for over two years) Rebecca Gold from Lawrenceville and Tony Bruzaitis from Mercer County Community College have remained steadfast in their refusal to talk with us. Hence, except for one meeting lasting a little over an hour with them in front of a dozen other people, we have been unable to get their side of the story.

What is the "bottom line"? Why are we disgusted with the NTIA award to MercerNet some nine months after it was initially announced? Why do we still feel that if NTIA can't do better than this, it and the Commerce Department in which it resides might as well be abolished?

NTIA Grants -- Whose Interests Are Served?

The bottom line is that it is our opinion that the Clinton - Gore Administration does not have any interest in using federal funding of NII projects to empower the American people in the communities in which they live. Quite the opposite. The federal programs far too often tend to go to self-appointed technology elites who quietly ally with large corporate interests to deliver control of the technological future of their local communities into the hands of the corporation. Furthermore, there is normally no direct linkage between the financial interests of the local community and the financial interests of the large corporations and their shareholders who, by and large, live outside the the affected local communities, or even in other parts of the world.

Far too often the community technology elites get grant money and then go on to do their own thing with their partnering corporation. The community then finds that the corporation has silently embedded itself in the process as the technology advisor to the interests represented by the technology elite. The project is implemented quietly in a secluded corner with the elites and their corporate partners steadfastly refusing to involve and inform the public or the community about what is really happening.

Since October 1995 we have been watching these events unfold in our own back yard in Mercer County, New Jersey. We are angry and disgusted. We are writing about it with the hope that, if the NTIA administrators are unwilling or unable to take notice of the short comings in their criteria for awards as demonstrated in Mercer County, at least the reviewers of the new crop of proposals might have a better idea of the questions that need to be raised before they award a new round of grants. We would hope to see grants that do not sell out local control of technology to large corporate interests that use the federal largesse to funnel economic resources away from local communities rather than set this technology up as locally owned and controlled engines of economic development within the community. Moreover, it is not just a matter of where the dollars go but whose dollars we are talking about.

Remember that grass roots innovators like Dave Hughes have shown again and again that the information age can be brought into communities for a small fraction of the high-tech high-cost programs of the IXCs, RBOCs and cable TV companies. In a nutshell, the key issues underlying NTIA grants are ownership and control of future technologies, and this in turn is determined in each community by which technology is ultimately deployed.

MercerNet Problems

What then are some of the problems with Mercernet?

1. The appearance of acceptance by a county's school system. School districts were offered the opportunity to sign on to the grant application with the contribution of five thousand dollars per district in matching funds. This money would be used to pay part of the salary of the MercerNet coordinator who would be hired if the project were successful. This money is pocket change for Mercer County districts which spend on the average $10,000 a year to educate each pupil. Even so, we were told that Hamilton township refused to sign on, but was given a free ride so that the grant application could include all the county's high schools.

The superficiality of the endorsements should have been obvious to any reviewer who looked carefully at the letters of recommendation. There are nine letters of endorsement. Six of the nine were almost verbatim duplicates. One was a paraphrase. Two were original. One is left with the impression that the school superintendents were given a form letter by the organizers. That they did a perfunctory job of filling it out. Perhaps they were applying for some federal money as though for a lottery. A few minutes effort and maybe they would win a prize?

2. A paper only participant. The Invention Factory Science Center (IFSC) is listed as a participant for both the video hook up and the Internet. The IFSC is to be located in an abandoned factory building in a decayed part of Trenton that is undergoing rehabilitation. Unfortunately the IFSC existed only on paper a year ago when the grant was written. An article in the Trenton Times in June 1996 stated that the IFSC was expected to open its doors sometime in 1997. The two year term of the MercerNet grant will expire on September 30 1997. Nevermind, the grant application still lists 10,000 visitors per year to the non-existent Science Center as beneficiaries of the grant.

3. Non-uniform class periods. If a video system is to be used for classes across school systems, one had better have class periods that begin and end at the same time. The schools involved in MercerNet do not have synchronized class periods. Most have periods of less than one hour and bells that do not ring at the same time. We have been told that students could not be excused a few minutes early to go to a video class. State education regulations would prohibit it. We are also told that some schools are changing the times of their class periods and moving to longer periods in September 1996, the second year of the grant.

4. No video course list. The school districts were expected to release a list of projected video courses last March. We understand that this list is now not expected before the fall.

5. Free first year use. Comcast magnanimously has offered to give all sites free video and Internet access for the first year. Unfortunately, this turns out to be worth very little. As the first year of free access is about to begin, the organizers are only now beginning to talk about training teachers this summer. Our own research has shown that most teachers at most schools not only have no experience with video links but also have no Internet experience. Training was promised either via Ferdi Serim's OIT program or through "an appropriate program for selected high school teachers and librarians who will then act as trainers for the others, including parents and volunteers." And "including non profit agencies," we read in the next sentence.

We understand that some training is beginning now that school is out. However, after having spent the last year talking to various people in our school district, we clearly realized that teachers who are trained will train others only if they are paid extra by their school districts to do so. Furthermore, during the regular school year such teacher trainers would generally not have the time available from their schedules to do so. Indeed one of the problems with MercerNet is that, as part of the building of its technology administrator's empires, it has taken a top down administrative approach. The administrators install the equipment and appoint some teachers to use it. This direction will not bring success.

In every successful K-12 internet implementation that we have observed, the direction is bottom up. A front line teacher discovers the Internet and this discovery changes the life of that teacher. If the teacher is fortunate, he or she can find an administrator who will empower the teacher to lead development from the classroom level outward. Ferdi Serim is an example of someone using precisely this dynamic. It is ironic that he teaches in the Princeton Regional School System that has been, along with Lawrenceville, the primary implementor of MercerNet. However, from what we have been able to ascertain, MercerNet has been an activity carried out quite independently of Ferdi. We also want to make it very clearly that nothing in this article is meant to be critical of him in any way.

6. The project coordinator. The project promised to hire a coordinator which it called "critical to the success of MercerNet" but said nothing about when. Susan Sullivan was not hired as project coordinator until four months after the project began.

7. So-called public access. On page one of the proposal we read: "MercerNet will make access to the Internet available in every county high school and library. It will provide access not only for educational purposes, but also make it available to the public - in particular to volunteer groups and non profit agencies that provide public training education or assistance. By including public sites MercerNet will make access to the internet by **anyone** in Mercer County both much more available and much more equitable."

But on page seven the application gives a very different picture: "All Mercer County students teachers and parents will have access to the internet at the county libraries." There is not one word about the general public which pays the property taxes to keep the schools and libraries open. We have since been told that libraries will give the first class of people (students teachers and parents) Internet access that includes email while the rest of us second class citizens will have access to netscape web serfing. Period.

Since the school and library infrastructure of Mercer County is paid for by property owners, regardless of what social or economic class they fall into, it would seem to us that the county library in particular would be in a legally risky position if it tired to discriminate between parents and non parents of Mercer County students.

8. Internet access as an afterthought. To us the Internet access is the most important part of the project. We believe that it was added in June 1995 when Comcast brought in the grant writer. We had been talking to people who were aware of the project's plans from March of 95 through early June. They were unaware of Internet access as an integral part of the project concept. Indeed, since its inception five years ago, the project principals have been trying annually to sell real time video to the county's schools. Fortunately, until Uncle Sam stepped into play the sugar daddy, the school boards had always rejected the project planners' suggestions that they spend $50,000 for a video classroom alone. Yet the grant application somewhat disengenuosly suggests that June 1994 was the inception of the successful MercerNet planning cycle.

On the other hand, during their one public meeting with us, project participants steadfastly insisted that internet access had ALWAYS been a part of the plan. If this is true, one must conclude that they had gone for several years right up through and concluding the successful grant application without addressing the most fundamental policy decision of who would have access to the Internet in Mercer County. (See point seven above.)

9. Uncertain mechanism for resource sharing. The project calls for sharing between "have and have not districts" and yet the principals are saying that to get video courses you have to give your own as a contribution back to the system. They are talking about a banking system wherein you contribute before you can take something out. What we have never seen answered is the question about what Trenton can contribute that will be of any interest to Princeton or the other wealthy Mercer school districts which will be using the video system to make sure their Ivy League bound graduates have the requisite number of AP courses to save their parents as much as possible on college tuition money.

In view of the refusal of the implementors to extend internet use to new districts during the project's first year, while Internet use spreads in the wealthy bedroom communities within MercerNet during that same time, the argument can easily be made that MercerNet will increase educational disparity within Mercer County. For school districts like our own the year's free use that comes in year two of the project is likely to mean experimentation by a handful of teachers and not any wide spread adoption. We complained privately to Comcast and the PIs about this at the end of February. As we shall relate below one of the MercerNet technologists took our private complaint and used it to publicly discredit us in front of our local school technology committee.

10. The PIs have no time to use the Internet. This is most inexcusable. It is caused by the fact that the project PI's all have full time jobs with other responsibilities. (One wonder's why they have taken on a new project to which they can not give adequate attention?) They have told us they have no time to use the Internet on a broad level to implement the project, even though they all have access to the internet in their current positions. This excuse regarding time has been their proffered reason for not opening a mail list to discuss the project's implementation with Mercer County residents who have to pay for the infrastructure that keeps the technocrats employed.

Of course such access and open discussions would also subject the implementation to challenges to Comcast's technical expertise and guidance, a subject to which we shall return.

Meanwhile this situation has the ironic effect of preventing the project coordinator Susan Sullivan (with whom we have (at her initiative) spent several hours and whom we like and respect) from being able to use electronic mail or conferencing with the 5 different levels of administration with which she must deal in each of ten different school districts. She is left to use phone, fax and face to face meetings with these people. Why? Because the project has tight deadlines to be met, and, as a result, there is no time to train someone in each district to use dial up internet accounts that are available to all the districts. There is a general refusal among the project leadership to make any extra effort necessary to help Susan out.

In short the techno-elite consisting of the three PIs of MercerNet is not using the Internet democratically to seek acceptance of the citizens of the county who will in turn be stuck with the bills that it generates.

Ê In other words, Clinton, Gore, and the bureaucrats of NTIA have created a situation where due to the self serving nature of the tightly knit school community and its contractor relationship with Comcast, the school districts of Mercer County and, in all likelihood the Mercer County Library system, will now have Comcast installed as the primary source of information superhighway technical expertise. In the absence of openness to other opinions, such events are likely to greatly benefit Comcast and harm the taxpayers of the county. (We shall explain why below.)

Thanks to NTIA and the MercerNet PIs it looks like we shall have Comcast's technology view of the world, period. Comcast's economic interests are thus self-serving and as such are inherently opposed to those of the citizens of Mercer County. Comcast uses this project deceptively to portray itself as the friend of Mercer County residents while at the same time Comcast is in protracted licensure renewal disputes with two of the eight townships represented by the MercerNet proposal.

Part Two: Efforts to Ascertain the MercerNet Side of the Story

Beginning in November of last year we continued to try to find out what MecerNet plans and objectives were. We wrote to Dr Tom Sepe, President of Mercer County Community College, the entity to which the grant was made. We asked for a meeting with Sepe who never even had the basic courtesy to ask his secretary to call us back. We talked with Doug Brower, the project coordinator for the Hopewell School District, and sought his help in convincing Peter Thompson to agree to an interview. We approached numerous people in Princeton seeking the same interview. In December we sent email to a mutual friend asking his intercession with Thompson. We had published an interview with Thompson on another subject in the spring of 1994, so Thompson himself had had direct and satisfactory experience with our policy of allowing him in advance of publication to review and correct in advance of publication any misinterpretations of the interview. We also offered Thompson a 90 day embargo on the publication of an interview with him. In short, we bent over backwards to be scrupulously fair. Nevertheless Thompson still refused to talk with us.

In January we went back to Comcast's Dave Briedinger who told us he had been trying to get Thompson to agree to talk. By early February Dave held out the possibility of a meeting with the MercerNet staff within the next 30 days. The meeting proved to be exceedingly difficult to get and did not occur until April 19, 1996. We were ushered into what appears to be the monthly planning meeting at Lawrenceville High School where we were introduced to the project principals and their Comcast advisors which included about a half dozen Comcast network engineers who were very perplexed that we wanted people to be using a system that they hadn't installed yet. (They simply didn't grasp the concept that modem dial up to the Internet might be something not under their control.)

A large chunk of the hour was used up by assertions that Internet access was really always a part of their plans. The rest of the time was occupied with our efforts to understand where operative control of MercerNet would be vested and how and under what conditions they would ever allow the taxpayers of Mercer County access to their system. The next day we wrote the following summary of the meeting which we sent to Dave Breidinger, the three Pis and Susan Sullivan. We received no rebuttals to what follows.

[In the following section of this article, the use of the editorial "we" will be discontinued and replaced with a first person perspective. This change is appropriate due to the author's involvement as described herein.]

MercerNet: Two Systems - Separate and Unequal

APRIL 20:

But those who are not members of this elite might as well be citizens of another universe. This, despite the fact that we pay the salaries for school system employees as well as the operating expenses of the school system - which payment continues through inertia for as long as we need a home to live in.

Look at the low passage of school budgets in Mercer county. That should tell you some part of the story. Its us against you. And voting down the budget is the only protest we can make. You those other folk in that other universe called the school system, by your own admission own Mercernet. [The PIs had pointed out in the meeting that ownership and control of MercerNet was vested in the school superintendents of the participating school systems.] And YOU will decide the terms on which the rest of us can approach it. You could have used it to reach out to the rest of us, but you have chosen not to. Meanwhile it will add a fresh layer of expense to that other universe -- the school system for which we shall have to pay as long as we live. Taxation without representation. School net - not Mercer Net.

Within that other system, the school system, you, the technologists have justified your operations by working very hard to bring in a new project -- a new layer of technology. If school budgets are pressured and need to be trimmed, you can then go to the administrators and say: no don't trim here... We are a profit center for the school system. We have gotten in more outside grant money than it costs you to pay our salaries. Meanwhile I am sure that you technologist's believe in your heart of hearts you are doing nothing but good for the children and for your communities.

Maybe eventually you will indeed do some good. Will it be the kind of good that could have been done had you involved the community outside the school system from the start? I doubt it. In addition to those who must pay the bills you generate, there are some citizens of that other universe who do know something about the technology you are bringing in. Why not reach out allow control to be shared?

Sadly the dynamic is totally the reverse. The implementors tell me they are busy. They have full time jobs. They added Mercernet to a schedule that was already FULL. They would not use an internet mail list to discuss the implementation of MercerNet. Period. Why? Because it is a known fact that internet mail lists can generate large amounts of traffic. They work such long weeks already that they simply do not have time to read such traffic. Yet they are bringing the internet to Mercer County. Sorry but I think there is an inherent contradiction in these previous two sentences.

I find one phrase of the Mercernet proposal especially troublesome. The system will be available at all the public libraries (for the support of which every payer of property tax contributes $100 to 250 a year in addition to $2,000 to 5,000 per year in school taxes). Yet the users will be students teachers and parents - constituents of the school system. Did you merely inadvertently disenfranchise the rest of us?

Yes, you have a complex task to put the infrastructure in place. One that fairly cries out for the use of email and mail lists. And the inner circle that is doing it and met with me is using email and perhaps even a list. But no one else. Why? Because your proposal was funded with a tight time line and that requires you to get a lot of technical things implemented in a short time and now there is simply has been no time to teach administrators or superintendents, principals, board members, teachers or anyone else how to use the internet. Why? Because your schedule is complex and tight, you don't have time to bring to bear the very tools that would help you build a constituency and work to implement more effectively what you are doing? Vicious circle. But one that Peter Thompson certainly has enough internet experience to have foreseen when you rewrote the grant last year. Sadly Peter apparently choose not to do so. Why, since for seven months he was unwilling to set up a leisurely meeting with me, I still have no clue.

Yesterday's meeting was informative. It was definitely better than nothing. But to put me in front of approximately a dozen people (three of whom I had meet before) for roughly 75 minutes and to hope bridge satisfactorily the gap in world views involved was absurd. Given three hours with Susan, Peter, Tony and Rebecca perhaps. But I suppose this is not likely. Why not? Because, if it were, the meeting that you gave me after seven months would have been different than the normal monthly meeting of your working group. Ownership and control.

You implied that you would open things up as soon as you had infrastructure installed. You mentioned reaching out to the technically knowledgeable within the communities. And when I asked for specifics, someone said well Gordon you are doing it already through your local school technology committee!!! Sorry that deck is stacked with parents who know very little about technology and are essentially candy store shopping. I and one other are on the roster as "citizen." Score: the school system 23 people, the rest of us two. And Rebecca **misused** private email from me to Peter in such a way that my earlier communication to you (Peter and Dave) was effectively misrepresented in front of that entire group. This was done in such a way that I had no opportunity to respond to the group. My ability to be perceived by those people as anything but a hostile outsider was effectively destroyed. I made an offer to those people to show them the educational resources of the internet at my home for an hour or more. Each and everyone of them individually. In the month since that meeting not one person there has taken me up on my offer.

MercerNet - another jewel in the crown of our county school superintendents - but something that has no ownership, buy in or support from the rest of us on whose backs the support of this essentially alien system rests. A sad, sad day for Mercer county.

Part Three:

Technology Planning in Ewing Schools & Its Relationship To MercerNet

Ewing Township, where I have been a homeowner for 20 years, has over the past 3 years spent well over a million dollars on the lease purchase of MAC Computers for its 3,000 student school system. The money was spent on the basis of a pathetically weak December 20 1993 report from the township school technology committee. Readers can grasp the level of knowledge displayed from the assertion in the report that the township needed fiber optic backbones in all its school buildings to properly educate its children! One small problem with this assumption is that even Princeton Regional Schools, which offers hard wired internet access to every computer in its system, does so with a coax institutional CATV network!

The report called for the hiring of a Technology Coordinator to implement effective use of the new system. The school board claims than it had a person selected who turned down the job at the last moment. Instead finding a full time replacement, the young school superintendent went out and hired (at $85 an hour) the full time K-8 technology coordinator from West Windsor Plainsboro to coach Ewing teachers whom the administration had selected to be computer teachers. He spent over 40 thousand dollars on this consultant the first year and then, rather than hire a permanent staff member for the district, spent another 27 thousand on the same consultant for the second year just past. The Superintendent's idea seems to have been: buy the equipment and let the teachers figure out what to do with it.

In the summer of 1995 I tried to find out whether anyone in the township schools was interested in applying use of the computers to the Internet. The answer was no. By the end of the summer I had the Net Access pop in my basement up and running and had especially good web access. In early September I the Ewing School Superintendent came to my house twice for two two hour sessions on internet use. I showed him K-12 web resources and got his laptop connected to an internet dial up account. I had him again for a third two hour session in March of this year. Pro bono - not at $85 an hour.

The Blind Go on a Trip to the Technology Candy Store

Meanwhile he suggested that I try to contribute to the township's technology policy by participating in the revived technology planning committee. I agreed and attended two hours sessions in December 96, and in February and March of 96. The experience was an eye-opener. There were about 25 people. The eight computer teachers and about 15 parents and two attendees marked on the roster as "citizen" --myself and one other person. The meetings were chaired by Linda Walker a Ewing Administrator with the title of "curriculum coordinator." The computer teachers, interestingly enough, had not been invited by the administration and attended only because they had asked to do so.

The sessions turned out to be questions and answers about the district's prior computer purchases and then blue sky brainstorming sessions about what the teachers and parents would like to have for future purchases. One moment at the March meeting was especially poignant when a teacher finally said to Linda Walker: this costs MONEY. Can you tell us what we really can afford? Linda's answer was "no not really, but not to worry, that was not the role of the committee. There hadn't been money available in December of 1993 either but the School Board had found away to make the purchases anyway. It was likely that they would do so again!"

Between December and March groups of parents and faculty went on tours of other generally very wealthy school districts to find out what these schools had bought in order to better understand what they might want to ask Ewing taxpayers to support. The taxpayers, we might add, would not be asked. We'd be told to buy and buy on time with the next lease purchase that could be slid into the next budget or budgets. On interesting moment came as the media teacher from the high school showed slides from wealthy Hundterton County Central High School which had just spent $250,000 on installing a fiber optic backbone into the building.

To what purpose I asked? Well that what you need to do to bring the information super highway to the kids was the answer. Wrong I remarked and then gave a short lecture on how twisted pair or coax would do just fine. Later Linda went over statements of goals and objectives from the group's 1993 shopping expedition. The planning process consisted of asking those in the room whether they wanted to change the wording of the 1993 "plan" in anyway. The goal of fiber optic back bones in all Ewing schools was read out and adopted. I objected and, after some discussion, I believe the group agreed to change the goal to "whatever media is sufficient to bring multi-media applications to the studentÕs desktop." Why was this important? With Comcast in the drivers' seat thanks to MercerNet and the proposals talking about extending the technologies to all schools, I can imagine that it would not be long before Comcast would be trying to get the local school board to pay for fiber runs from its backbone to the middle and elementary schools. Never mind that wireless technology is looking pretty good, and that Internet technology changes faster than virtually any other technology, NTIA in its foolish use of federal funds for MercerNet has delivered us all into the hands of a CATV infrastructure.

My reason for committee participation was to try to get the people involved to focus on the internet as the only reasonably cost effective educational payback for the computers our district had purchased. At the February meeting I had hoped to find out that the computer teachers of Ewing would be eager to get involved with Internet training so that they could take full advantage of the year's free use offered by Comcast. Much to my dismay, I saw that of our eight teachers in the three thousand student district responsible for the computer use, only one was enthusiastic about the internet and one other mildly interested. Most still had no concept than it was anything other than a wide-open public circus haunted by pedophiles and pornography vendors.

Neutralized by a MercerNet Principal Investigator

I arrived home really disillusioned that MercerNet in its first two years would be able to do anything meaningful or beneficial for my school district and I wrote an impassioned private note to Comcast's Briedinger and to Peter Thompson. No response. But unbeknown to me one of the three Mercernet PIs took action designed to end any chance of my having an impact in my local school technology committee. My private email was faxed to Linda Walker who, a month later stood up in front of the entire committee and chastised a committee member who allegedly took the private business of the committee and published it before the entire Internet besmirching the reputation of several teachers along the way.

It was quite obvious to every one in the room who Linda was complaining about. When I then passed out a note with my name and address and suggested that they needed to see the internet first hand and that they would never again think about the application of computers to K-12 education in the same way once they had, the silence was palpable. I made an offer to show everyone the k-12 resources of the internet privately and individually from my own home. Just call and make an appointment. Not surprisingly during the 12 weeks that have passed since this incident no one called. It has been made quite clear that I have nothing more to contribute to the school district's shopping expedition.

The technologists behind MercerNet succeeded quite well in killing off the alien influence that tried to invade their technology turf. Of course with this article I am going public to my subscribers and later to the Internet as a whole. But this is local politics at a quite nasty level. And since it involves the expenditure of public funds the bureaucrats of the local school kingdom have no right to expect to continue to be allowed to operate anonymously.

Comcast's Role

In most ways Comcast has acted far more professionally with me than the MercerNet Principal Investigators. I want to thank Dave Briedinger for generally putting up well with the hard times I have given him. However, having said this, I want to add a few more remarks about what I have ascertained about Comcast's internet expertise. As of June 28, 1996 Comcast's corporate internet account is a $50 a month dial up store and forward email account run by PSI out of its Troy, New York, NOC! For proof, at a shell account internet prompt type: whois comcast.com. For the third largest cable TV company in the country and the company that the Commerce Department has positioned in the technology driver's seat for the public tax supported sector of Mercer County this is not a good omen.

Now Breidinger has assured me that the technology approach from Internet for Mercernet is under his control. He says he is feeding T-1s from UUNET into Comcast's fiber network that extends all the way from the New York suburbs to Philadelphia. This seems to be a reasonable approach. There are, however, many many questions about administration and technical expertise behind the internet links that I have heard no answers to. More troubling yet is the absence of any source of independent technical expertise that the school superintendents can weigh in contrast with Comcast's future advice. In my opinion the process has been effectively rigged. And it is most definitely not rigged in the interest of the citizens of Mercer County.

A Few National Lessons

It is time that members of the Internet community and the press took a serious look at what Clinton Administration policy makers are doing in the name of the public interest. Human resources -- not technology resources -- are what the public interest in the US demands. This can be a locally empowering technology, only, if the corporations and politicians permit sound policies to be pursued. The unholy alliance between local technocrats, the funding power of federal government and the power of both of these to sell out the interests of local citizens to far distant corporations needs to be broken. The MercerNet story is important to follow in detail because it is a case study of the process being employed to reach national goals. As we have seen, the process is badly mangled and will likely remain so, until and unless, someone demands that NTIA incorporate accountability criteria for its reviewers. Criteria, that ensure local citizen control over grant implementations, must be established and followed through on before the receipt of an NTIA grant is likely to become anything else than really bad news for a local community.

The Administration's national policies for the creation of an information highway have promised equity and greater economic opportunity for American communities. Unfortunately, in reality these policies are going to be implemented at the local level where the influence of politics and powerful corporations can readily be felt. Does this case study of Mercer County and MercerNet tell us something about where this information highway is really headed and who is going to have access to it?

Meanwhile, in my own backyard, I agreed today to send full text of this article to Susan Sullivan for comment. On April 19 the MercerNet Principal Invetsigators had assured me that they would have a web site open for informatin and comment about MercerNet before the end of May. Today (June 28) Susan told me that time to do this simply hadn't been found. But the website was coming real soon now. When pressed she said within the next 30 days!