PubliCola says that public libraries are “the latest battlefield between cities and suburbs.”

According to the Washington Post,

Through a public program known as E-Rate, Washington gives institutions a bit of money each year to defray the costs of buying Internet service and equipment. That initiative got a big boost recently, with the Federal Communications Commission announcing plans to spend $1 billion a year for the next two years on better WiFi, amid a broader push to modernize the E-Rate program.

Now the FCC has to decide how to divide up that $2 billion — and libraries are smack in the center of a brewing fight about it. Library directors from five cities, including Seattle, Memphis and Hartford, Conn., have sent letters to FCC chairman Tom Wheeler this week saying that they stand to be shortchanged if the commission moves forward with a plan to tie the money to the square footage of their facilities. Under the proposal, the FCC would give libraries a budget for WiFi funding at a rate of $1 per square foot — which some say isn’t nearly enough. . . .

An FCC official, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, confirmed that the discussions are still ongoing and that the agency is evaluating the libraries’ proposals. But it’s committed to measuring funding by square footage because it’s one of the easiest ways to compare otherwise different libraries in different regions.

Subsidizing WiFi by square footage rather than usage seems very odd. As a letter from the Seattle Public Library (SPL) to the FCC notes,

Wi-Fi costs are not merely a function of the square footage of a room with wireless connectivity. Wi-Fi performance is a function of users, interference from adjacent networks in other buildings, and architectural impediments. A room of a certain size with many users will have poorer Wi-Fi service than the same room with the same network that has fewer users.

According to a letter from the Urban Libraries Council (ULC), the draft order would allocate these funds to schools on a per-student basis. The ULC argues that the FCC should adopt a similar allocation method for public libraries, and

It would be administratively quite easy for any library to report the number of people who come in and out every day. That user metric would be effectively the same as funding schools according to the number of students and teachers. We think that applying the same measurement to both sorts of critical institutions would be a superior methodology.

On the other hand, the American Library Association supports the square footage formula:

This is a metric that can easily be normalized across all library types and is a number that libraries report to the Institute of Museum and Library Services as part of their routine data collection and reporting requirements.

I don’t know which way would be easier administratively, but certainly a per-usage allocation standard would be more effective in delivering funding for fast internet service to areas with high capacity needs. Libraries — whether urban, suburban, or rural — should offer WiFi. In some rural areas, as outlined here, broadband is very expensive compared to urban areas. How should federal funding be distributed for this purpose? Should it go to rural areas with fewer patrons but higher expenses or to urban areas with more capacity needs but lower expenses? Whatever your preference, it’s not clear to me that the square footage rule would make rural libraries much better off than urban libraries. Rural libraries are small.

And, regarding that urban-suburban divide that PubliCola and the Post highlight, in the Seattle area, the King County Library System (the surburban system) agrees with SPL on this issue.

At the end of the Washington Post article, Reed Hundt (an urban library advocate, per the Post) is quoted:

“Suburban libraries are capacious and uncrowded, and people who use them have BMWs and use broadband at home,” said Hundt.

I take issue with that: It may be true that suburban libraries have plenty of room for the populations they serve relative to those in urban areas, but in no way does “suburban” uniformly equal “wealthy.”