The Cure for America's Internet

You can see them parked outside of libraries and coffee shops in towns scattered across the hills of Western Massachusetts. They're identified by the blue glow emitting from inside their cars.

Across the state, 95 towns have limited or no access to high-speed Internet. People in Massachusetts' more rural western half have had to resort to a game of Internet hide and seek -- searching out wireless hotspots, with laptops plugged into car lighters and nestled in their laps.

Building the Net Superhighway

Maureen Mullaney of Ashfield, Massachusetts, lives in one of these under-served towns. She seeks out these roadside hotspots so her children can do research for school projects. "How silly is it that in this day and age you have to get in your car, drive to the general store so your daughter can researchers the rivers and traditional clothing of Chile?" she asks.

"Even if every person in my town is screaming out loud for high-speed Internet that would still just be 1,800 people."

But Maureen and her neighbors are not alone. While a generation of Americans can barely remember life without a Google search at our fingertips, millions of households still can't send an e-mail, let alone pay bills online, check the weather or conduct research for school.

A Broadband Backwater

The shortcomings of the U.S. broadband market are tremendous - more than 10 million U.S. households remain un-served, while nearly 50 million homes are priced out of subscribing to broadband services - and the social and economic consequences are dire.

Late last month, yet another global survey confirmed this, showing the U.S. to be more of an Internet backwater than a world leader. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Internet access and services in America have slid to 15th place among 30 developed nations, a drop from our 12th place ranking in 2006, and from fourth in 2001 when the OECD began its international survey.

In real terms this means Internet users in Japan pay little more than half the price (65 cents to the dollar) for an Internet connection that's 20 times faster than what's commonly available to people in the United States.

Yet people in the U.S. are still stuck off the grid, or with unreliable and slow dial-up, with little relief in sight.

A Man, No Plan, The Internet

The reasons for America's digital decline are many. But first is this: Other developed countries have enacted comprehensive national plans to connect more of their citizens to a fast, affordable and open Internet. The U.S. stands alone among OECD countries without a national broadband program.

We do have national broadband rhetoric, though -- and an army of well-heeled apologists to trumpet "successes" and gloss over problems. And the damage is now beginning to show.

In 2004, President Bush pledged "to have a universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007."

As if on cue, last year, Mr. Bush's chief Internet officer John Kneuer declared "Mission Accomplished" -- that all the international surveys were misleading and that the "free market" had ensured that Americans across the country enjoy real choice in high-speed internet access.

The Hand of the Duopoly

Kneuer's Pontius Pilate approach is now familiar to the Bush administration -- America's problems will disappear with a wave of the magical hand of the free market.

What he and his White House compatriots refuse to acknowledge, though, is that a free market approach for Internet services in the U.S. is a chimera. The only hand in play here belongs to the phone and cable duopoly, which controls broadband access for more than 98 percent of homes.

The net effect of this duopoly is a dearth or real choices; allowing providers like AT&T and Comcast to exact high prices from Internet users, while delivering connections that are too slow -- and, often in the case of cable, too congested - to meet growing demand.

The market imbalance is beginning to take its toll. A Brookings Institution study counts 300,000 new American jobs each year for every 1 percent increase in broadband adoption.

Larry Page, Google's co-founder and president, put it a different way. "We're pretty far behind and for us it's a big problem because we have our main headquarters in the U.S. and our employees have only a one megabit service," he told me during his recent visit to Washington.

"If we're thinking about building the next generation of Internet services they're not going to be on one megabit services, they're going to be 100 megabit services and we're not going to end up developing those... In terms of the U.S. being competitive, it's very important for us to be leading that rather than following. And we show no signs of being able to do that."

Free Market Mumbo Jumbo

Our inability to truly wire the nation is itself the result of poor policy decisions. For decades, U.S. communications legislation has been held captive by lobbyists working for--you guessed it-- the phone and cable companies.

These Internet service providers are among the most prolific spenders in Washington. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbyists, campaign contributions, P.R. firms and paid junkets to help ensure that special rules are written in their favor.

For all their talk about the free market, the cable and telephone giants work aggressively to force through regulations that protect their market duopoly, close the door to new market entrants and competitive technologies, and increase their control over the content that travels across the Web

Japan Pries Open Its Market

In 2000, Japan faced a similar dilemma -- an Internet industry stifled by the heavy hand of a few network gatekeepers. But the government responded by pulling together the nation's leaders from the pubic and private sector to launch an "e-Japan strategy" aimed at connecting 40 million of Japan's 46 million households within five years.

The Japanese government quickly moved to create a highly competitive private sector by compelling regional telephone companies to open their residential lines to wholesale access by other competitors. They also adopted policies to prevent the type of online discrimination that has reared its head recently in the U.S.

In 2001, Japan counted only 2.2 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants. By mid-2004, ultra-high-speed broadband connections were available to more than 80 percent of Japan's citizens. By 2006, Japan declared that it had surpassed the broadband goals of e-Japan and was ready to launch its next national strategy, called "u-Japan". The "u" takes the nation's broadband beyond "ubiquitous," to become "universal," "user-oriented," and "unique."

Getting Behind a Big American Idea

Free Press' own research found that most of the countries with similar universal and open access policies had nearly twice the level of broadband penetration as those that did not.

The OECD seems to agree. "Governments providing money to fund broadband rollouts should avoid creating new monopolies," according to its report summary. They recommended that any public broadband infrastructure "should be open access, meaning that access to that network is provided on non-discriminatory terms to other market participants."

Public policy should be designed to make it profitable for corporations to behave in ways that better serve both the free market and the public interest. And we're seeing more and more from international examples that that requires a shared vision with a light but clear legislative touch. (This issue will be widely discussed this coming weekend as Internet activists, visionaries and innovators come together in Minneapolis at the National Conference for Media Reform).

When President Eisenhower set Americans to work building the nations' Interstate Highway System he mobilized members of Congress from both sides of the aisle to appropriate federal funds and create corporate incentives for the construction of 41,000 miles of new roads. It was the largest infrastructure project in American history to that point, but the $25 billion in federal money set aside to build the nations main arteries yielded an almost immediate return to our nation's economy.

The construction of a universally accessible Internet superhighway ranks as important today, and it can be accomplished with even stronger collaboration between the public and private sector.

Future policymakers who are serious about America's well-being should learn from our failings and from success in other countries so we can deliver the vast benefits of an open connection to every American. It's time we started construction.

(photo Courtesy of Pete and Genevieve on Flickr)

Comments

[JBS]

Where are the R.E.A. and T.V.A. for broadband internet?

[larry278]

Some people move to remote areas to avoid the annoying aspects of modern life. If you can't get telephone service you miss out on robo-calls, tele-marketers, etc, if you don't have access to TV; do I need to go on?
Some people don't want a phone or access to the web. Live with it.

[roald]

Larry - what does your comment have to do with people who do want access getting it? You can live in an urban area and choose not to have a television, telephone, and Internet access.

[mgloraine]

The Washington Post makes it sound as it it's all over but the whining (ours).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/03/AR2008060303248.html?hpid=topnews

Did we already lose this battle while we weren't looking? It sounds like a tacit go-ahead from the FCC since both Comcast and Time Warner Cable are moving forward with throttle'n'charge schemes.

[Sumocat]

I agree with the sentiment, but disagree this is a problem for the federal government. States, not the nation, need to step up and establish data infrastructures. At most, the feds should upgrade the pipes connecting the States. When interstate highways were built, the feds didn't build roads to every house. That's an issue for state and local government.

[walk0nwalls]

I DEMAND SOCIALIZED T1

[ErnestineBass]

If I'm not mistaken, there are several towns in New Hampshire and Vermont (?) that don't even have land line phone service. America...the greatest country on earth? NOT.

[Sciguy]

There are also lots of homes in rural Kentucky without electricity, running water, and phone service. For those of us who live out in the country, cable Internet and phone Internet are not options - they simply do not exist (no cable service, phone line has copper wire).

Our television comes through dishes (C-band and small dish) and our Internet access comes through another dish. The Internet service we have isn't particularly fast, and the $70 it costs every month is pretty steep, but our other option is dialup - even worse.

The free market may work for city folks, but for people who live where the population density is low, there is no free market at all. We have to take whatever is available, or nothing at all. When dish Internet became available out here, we were thrilled! There was no point in looking around at competitors - there were none. It was just take it or leave it - not my idea of that "free market."

[Thermodynamics]

One of the things i have learned over the years is that your phone company wants to rip you off, whoever they are.

When I lived in NM the phone company there was billing people a rental charge for the "house wiring" that the homeowners owned. This was the wiring from room to room that builders had put in. Eventually there was an enormous class-action lawsuit in NM and CO that consumers won.

I just signed up for phone and HS internet in FL with ATT. I am paying $20 more per month than they quoted. It is simply bait-and-switch.

Thirty years ago state public utilities commissions watched the utilities like hawks but they are now just rubber stamps.

Huey Long (The Kingfish) required ATT to price phone booth calls at 5 cents in LA.

[Shaddup]

Once again, a subject that the free market pirateers never bother to bring up. A free market. Remember back in the 90's when the phone companies all said that they would provide fiber optics by the year 2000 as long as they weren't forced? Well, they made obscene profits, now Comcast is trying to run by a plan that charges by the gigabyte, and we still don't have fiber optics.

[burnt]

good post... I agree wholeheartedly with you. This country would reap incredible benefits from free high-speed access. One example of just one approach to free broadband (though admittedly on the low end).

WiFi mesh networking using repeaters:
http://sf.meraki.com/faq#tech

http://sf.meraki.com