OPEC Votes to Trim Output Oil Producers Will Cut 2 . 5 Million Barrels Daily

I f Al Gore invented the information superhighway, then President Bush ought to be able to raise the speed limit. Or so Bush seemed to be saying on Friday when he called for extending high-speed Internet to every U.S. home within three years. “This country needs a national goal for broadband technology, for the spread of broadband technology,” Bush said while campaigning in Albuquerque. “We ought to have a universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007, and then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter, consumers have got plenty of choices when it comes to purchasing the broadband carrier.” Bush offered no details of how to achieve his goal beyond saying Congress should refrain from taxing broadband access and, in another speech on Tuesday, adding that we need “the right regulatory environment.” For starters, Bush could come up with a fresh definition of “broadband,” one of those awful buzzwords whose meaning grows fuzzier with each new technology it’s used to describe. Broadband is slang for any form of Internet access faster than dial-up. How much faster depends on who’s selling it, and there are lots of competing flavors. In reality, though, most flavors available to consumers in the United Sates today are still middleband—the equivalent of barreling down a highway in a car, while real high-speed Internet access is more like air travel. Increasingly, real broadband is available in South Korea, Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, where governments have helped defray the considerable cost of laying fiber-optic lines to many homes. But it remains tantalizingly elusive in the United States, where the market TECH THURSDAY