I’m continually bewildered by conservatives who defend U.S. broadband policy with a laissez-faire, hands-off-the-market, ignore-the-facts claim it is working.
Conservative laissez-faire approach ignores the facts
Imagine what online services might already be available in the states (including educational ones) if our broadband connections were three to four times faster than they are today.
But if we listen to the likes of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, we may never get there in the next decade or more.
In lengthy comments filed Tuesday with the Federal Communications Commission, W. Kenneth Ferree, president of the foundation, typifies the argument. He claims U.S. broadband markets are adequately competitive and generally successful at encouraging deployment. What is he smoking?
Of course he offers no statistics to back up his claim.
And he ignores perhaps the best source of data available worldwide on broadband deployment. Here is what the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development said in May:
*The U.S. in 2008 slipped to 19th place in terms of the speeds commercial providers offer users. It was 13th in 2007;
*The average download speed in the U.S. is 9.6 Mbps, or a tenth of what is offered in Japan. Other countries ahead of the U.S.: France, Finland, Netherlands and Korea.
Many of the countries providing faster connections benefited from government intervention in their markets.
With this sort of data, how can we even listen to these guys at the Progress & Freedom Foundation? They simply ignore the realities.
What can the government do to encourage competition? Wireless spectrum is a good place to start. It can be revved up three ways. 1 Add more part 15 spectrum (like wifi). 2 Add more non-exclusive registered spectrum (like 3.5ghz), 3 Add a new license that allows a licensee to only operate in a small geographic region. The latter will encourage small and mid sized wISP’s to cover a region that may already have crowded spectrum, (like a city).
But much bigger than wireless is fixing the Bush/Powell tariff fiasco that destroyed wholesale DSL. Force wholesale rates that are lower than retail and a whole new market will open up. Also, what ever happened to dark copper lines (alarm lines) many products work 20 or 100 mbit over these lines and they are not available.