Building A National Broadband Policy

I'm going to step aside from the Blagojevich chronicles for a minute to address a crucially needed investment for our future - a national broadband strategy. The United States is 15th in the world in broadband penetration, and offers download speeds at 10 times slower rates than in Japan, for example. This is despite the costliness of broadband usage in this country (we are 18th in cost per megabyte).

Over the weekend I was able to take part in a first-of-its-kind town hall meeting put together by Internet for Everyone and its parent company Free Press. The program featured speakers and short videos stressing the need for universal broadband access and a network-neutral Web, but the main thrust of the meeting was to start a conversation. Internet for Everyone introduced four topics:

Access: Every home, business and civic institution in America must have access to high-speed Internet.

Choice: Consumers must enjoy real competition among Internet providers to achieve lower prices and higher speeds.

Innovation: The Internet should continue to create good jobs, spread new ideas be an engine of economic growth.

Openness: Internet users should have the right to freedom of speech and commerce without gatekeepers or discrimination.

Attendees strategized around these topics, came up with possible solutions that could be taken by municipalities, federal government, business, and citizen groups, and worked toward consensus on a national broadband strategy. Free Press' Tim Karr described it to me as "an experiment in deliberative democracy." While the perspectives of those involved in the meeting were not quite as diverse as needed for the conversation, there were nonetheless a variety of good ideas discussed. One thing that is key is debunking the idea put forward by telecoms that bandwidth is finite and those who use more of it must be sanctioned through greater fees. In reality, the companies are creating scarcity where it doesn't have to exist, and perhaps with incentives to fatten the pipe and increase access, these so-called scarcity issues would melt away, exposed as just an attempt to create a new revenue stream. Not to mention the fact that this artificial scarcity has caused the United States to fall far behind the rest of the world, reduce competitiveness, and become marginalized on the Internet for the first time since its inception. This has major impacts on job creation and countless other issues. For instance, a wired country is a country that can handle expansions in telecommuting, can cut down greenhouse gas emissions through driving and the wasteful use of paper, reduce unproductive time spent waiting for downloads, etc., etc.

The digital divide (only 35% of households making under $50,000 a year have a high-speed Internet connection) is a large impediment to equal participation in society today. Lower-income communities have substantially lower access to the Internet, which impacts education, economic output and political engagement, among other things. As society increasingly ports a fair degree of the tools for civics online, in an effort to be more efficient and inclusive, they are simultaneously shutting out needed voices among communities of color and the poor. Mandating universal broadband would be an update of President Roosevelt's rural electrification policies in the 1930s. It is just as important to economic and social growth to provide access to a free and open Internet for everyone.

Fortunately, we now have a President-elect who understands the broadband issue as an infrastructure issue. In his most recent weekly address, Barack Obama highlighted the need to bring broadband access to every corner of the country.

"It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption," President-elect Obama said in the address. "Here, in the country that invented the internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they'll get that chance when I’m President -- because that’s how we'll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world....[and] the economic recovery plan I’m proposing will help modernize our health care system -- and that won’t just save jobs, it will save lives."

Technology leaders have been cheered, not just by the commitment but by the understanding of the issue as one that effects jobs, upward mobility and economic growth. As Sara Robinson notes in a larger piece about investing in America:

Yes, making these investments will create more debt, which in turn will cast a shadow on the health of the American dollar for the next few decades. But if we choose our projects wisely and well, they will create more -- much more -- than enough wealth to enable us to pay those bills. After all, the infrastructure and education investments of the 30s and 40s were the foundation of the tremendous prosperity we saw in the 50s and 60s, which more than enabled us to discharge the debt.

Free-market fundamentalism was wrong in the 1880s, wrong in the 1920s, and wrong in the 1990s, too. Anybody who's still hanging onto that 30-year-old conventional wisdom -- or who thinks balanced budgets are so important that we should sacrifice our entire economy on that altar -- is not only admitting that they're incapable of rational, objective thought; they're also demonstrating that they're too ideologically addled to understand the clear lessons of history, let alone understand what's going on around them now.

It was Keynes's theories that got us out of the last depression; and if we're betting our futures on this (which we are), we'd be wise to follow that course again. Our choice here is clear: Invest in America and get our people back to work; or shrivel up and allow ourselves to become a third world country.

The free speech of the 21st century increasingly depends on a broadband connection. I think we need Internet in the same way we need an electrical outlet in every home. Access is essential to keep this country as an economic leader.