New Orleans has a great plan: To offer city wide high speed wifi Internet access for free to help stimulate local regrowth. This would help scattered people contact one another, to look up job information, to find housing information, and more.
Bellsouth Corp. doesn’t like this however. They want people to pay for their Internet service and they now seem to be holding a building as randsom or possibly even reneging on the offer. You can read the story at the washingtonpost.com.
My personal thoughts follow.
This building was to be a police department for the city since all of their law enforcement has been spread out in hotels and basically anywhere that they could get residence. This building could have allowed for some much needed organization that would ultimately lead to helping people who need it. Though progress has been made, the people in the area that was hit by Katrina still strongly need any help that they can get.
Bellsouth is (in my opinion) using this need as leverge to push their ’services’ onto the people of that city. Not that they could pay for it to begin with! Let’s not forget, as Bellsouth has obviously done, that all of their homes and businesses were destroyed.
On one hand I’m appalled by Bellsouth’s behavior yet on the other hand I’m macabrely fascinated by their own self destruction. The city’s cheif technology officer said it best when he described the situation as “a once-in-a-century opportunity to truly show the entire world what can be, instead of just what is, and help write future history in the process [...]“. These corporations are so bent on keeping their control and sucking every last dollar out of people even in such desolate situations that they can’t see what a turning point this is. Both in the mindset of people (especially in those areas) and in the way that people - and cities, for sure - will do things.
It’s saddening that any company in the U.S., or any other disaster ridden area, would put their own wallets before the people and the destruction that they experienced, but with any luck, and we can hope, this is part of the death throes of a beast that has long out lived its time.
Then again, I do tend to lean toward being an idealist.
~Mysk
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