Better Broadband Through Better Regulation
Siva Vaidhyanathan has a book in progress, The Googlization of Everything. There he posted today an August interview he did with Vint Cerf, Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist. Siva calls it a brief but rich exchange. When Cerf says Google is committed to keeping the Internet open, Siva follows up:
SV: Let’s talk about that. There is all this dueling lobbying and arguing going on at the FCC and in Congress between firms like Google and the telecoms. What can Google do to change the narrative to make this issue seem clearer or understood in different terms?
VC: That’s a good question. We have to get beyond the bumper sticker slogans about all this. Look at it historically. When we all used dial-up, we had thousands of Internet service providers. Now that we use broadband there are at most two players available to subscribers – often just one. Competition is not disciplining that market. Unless you have enough competitors you have the potential for very uncompetitive practices. I am afraid that the system in the United States is just not set up to deliver the best broadband service.
Now in some places in the world – the United Kingdom, Japan, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand – carriers are compelled by the state to make service competitive. But we seem to be stuck in this odd loop that says deregulation always creates competition. It’s just not true.
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2 Responses to “Better Broadband Through Better Regulation”
I think that the broadband infrastructure needs to not be owned by one company. We'd be better off if there were some kind of non-profit pool organization that was in charge of the actual fiber (Let's dump the copper ASAP.). Then anyone who wants to can buy into having access based on number of customers they attract and therefore the bandwidth they are using. Then the providers compete on programming, features, technology they provide the customers and customer service. It's the only way for us to have real competition in broadband.
Great quote of the day:
“We seem to be stuck in this odd loop that says deregulation always creates competition. It’s just not true.”
When the last e-infrastructure monopolists, the electric utilities, decided not to serve areas with inadequate population to make them a quick buck, the government said, “OK, we'll do it.” Suddenly, that “last mile” of wire to electrify rural America was less of a problem than the specter of nonprofit competition. The same should be done for broadband (and for that matter, health care).
For the whole story, see this 2006 article. We might just get some traction on this issue, as the author now heads the Obama transition team. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/…