Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
The New
York Times
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May 6, 1999, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section C; Page 4; Column
3; Business/Financial Desk
LENGTH: 431 words
HEADLINE: F.C.C. Chairman Urges More Spending for
School Internet Program
BYLINE: By IRVIN
MOLOTSKY
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 5
BODY:
The chairman of the Federal
Communications Commission, William E. Kennard, said today that he would urge the
commission to increase spending for a program that collects a fee on telephone
bills and devotes the money to help schools and libraries in low-income areas
connect to the Internet.
Under Mr. Kennard's plan, the program would
spend $2.25 billion a year. It now spends about $1.35 billion a year after Mr.
Kennard agreed to reduce the level last year to win approval.
Because
Mr. Kennard is a Democrat and is likely to have the backing of the two other
Democrats on the five-member commission -- Susan Ness and Gloria Tristani -- he
is expected to win the increased spending for the program.
Republicans
in Congress have said that they want the program, which is called E-rate
discounts, to spend less, not more, money.
Ken Johnson, the spokesman
for Representative W. J. (Billy) Tauzin, the chairman of the House subcommittee
concerned with telecommunications, said Republicans would introduce a bill to
eliminate the fee and reduce the spending on the Internet connection program to
$1.7 billion a year, paid for by the existing Federal telephone
tax.
"It's in effect a tax on talking, and that's why
conservatives are against it," Mr. Johnson said.
The E-rate program
subsidizes the cost of connecting to Internet providers and of internal
connections inside schools and libraries.
Mr. Johnson said the public
was getting "hoodwinked" because some recipients used the money for related
projects such as ripping out and replacing walls and removing asbestos.
Mr. Kennard, though, said the program was working.
E-rate
discounts went to more than 80,000 schools and libraries last year, Mr. Kennard
said at a meeting called to promote higher spending on the program.
"Over 38 million kids -- from the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest to
the inner-city neighborhoods of Chicago, from a parochial school in Montana to a
yeshiva in Queens -- are now connected to the Internet," he said.
The
dispute goes back to a time before phone deregulation when the Federal
Government required the telephone companies to charge more to higher-income
customers so that there was enough money to subsidize the service to the poor.
In this way, for example, urban customers subsidized the rural, and
long-distance callers subsidized local ones.
The F.C.C. said that
telephone bills should not go up despite increased spending for the E-rate
program because long-distance carriers will be getting a reduction in the
connection fees they pay to local telephone companies.
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LOAD-DATE: May 6, 1999 
