• The New York Times, Monday, December 5, 2011 11:52 AM

There is a new digital divide in this country, and it’s got everything to do with the speed of Web connections. So argues Susan Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and a former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation policy. “Increasingly, we are a country in which only the urban and suburban well-off have truly high-speed Internet access, while the rest -- the poor and the working class -- either cannot afford access or use restricted wireless access as their only connection to the Internet,” she writes in the NYT.

“As our jobs, entertainment, politics and even health care move online, millions are at risk of being left behind.” Presently, just over 200 million Americans have high-speed, wired Internet access at home, according to Crawford. Meanwhile, according to numbers released last month by the Department of Commerce, a mere 4 out of every 10 households with annual household incomes below $25,000 in 2010 reported having wired Internet access at home, compared with the vast majority -- 93% -- of households with incomes exceeding $100,000.

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