President Barack Obama liked the idea laid out in a memo from his staff: an ambitious plan to expand high-speed Internet access in schools that would allow students to use digital notebooks and teachers to customize lessons like never before. Better yet, the president would not need Congress to approve it.
White House senior advisers have described the little-known proposal, announced earlier this summer under the name ConnectEd, as one of the biggest potential achievements of Obama's second term.
There's just one little catch — it costs billions of dollars, and Obama wants to pay for it by raising fees on mobile phone users. Doing that relies on approval by the Federal Communications Commission, an independent agency that has the power to reject or approve the plan.