* Haves / have-nots is a false binary that can lead to paternalistic assumptions and oversimplified solutions.

One of the biggest problems with the universal service position is that it assumes too much about what is best for others. While Compaine makes this point in passing in his commentary to the sections and in his own essay contributions, this argument receives its fullest treatment in Milton L. Mueller and Jorge Reina Schement's "Universal Service from the Bottom Up: A Study of Telephone Penetration in Camden, New Jersey." This piece is perhaps the most thought-provoking of the volume. The authors make a convincing case that telecommunications use is best understood as a continuum of choices, not as a binary between those who do and those who do not have access to services. If we think of these choices as a continuum, then the question we should be asking ourselves is this: what are the economic and social pressures affecting those choices?

           Mueller and Schement point out that inner-city households are more likely to have a cable television than a telephone. Why is television more valuable to these residents than telephone? Others (like Bill Clinton and Al Gore) have mentioned that cable television helps keep inner-city children off the streets. But Mueller and Schement provide us a more complex picture of how social and economic factors—and by implication, culture—shape telecommunications use. Their field work in one low-income neighborhood in Camden, New Jersey, suggests that television may reduce isolation more than a telephone, especially in a close-knit community where family and friends drop by often, a practice that diminishes the need for a telephone. To make do without a telephone, nonusers find workaround solutions, with adaptive behavior to maximize use of telephones in other locations at certain time periods, such as work phones, public phones, or even neighbors' phones. Further, having a telephone requires ongoing monthly payments that are hard to control, especially long-distance calls made by family members calling from home or calling collect to home.

          According to Mueller and Schement, these reasons help explain why African Americans and Latinos spend more on communications services-the latest finding from Forrester Research-including cable television and long-distance, than non-minority households. In fact, low-income homes are

Overview Pro-Public Policy Position Insights from Free Market Position    * The definition is a moving target    * Utopian claims need to be tempered    * Emergent technologies diffuse unevenly    * Is the divide closing? Table of Contents

phoneless most often because of usage-related costs rather than access-related costs. If studies in phonelessness are predictive of Internet adoption, the authors conclude, then simply providing home access to the Internet will not insure that low income households will use or will be able to afford these services on an ongoing basis. The Internet simply cannot compete with all the other telecommunications options available to low-income households in central cities and rural areas.