Policy Changes Are Needed to Assure Affordable Access to Broadband Connectivity.

I just listened to Susan Crawford talk about her book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. She spoke for about an hour on After Words, the great weekend product on C-SPAN's Book TV. (You won't be able to watch the streaming video linked above until the broadcasts of the talk are completed this weekend. A video of a shorter presentation is included at the end of this post.)

She pointed out that people in the United States invented the Internet. (Indeed, people at UCLA -- at the time I was there as an undergraduate -- played an important role in the creation of computer networking and the Internet.) This country was in a great position to lead in the Internet revolution, but now a number of countries are way ahead of us in providing broadband connectivity to their people and their businesses.

She is convincing. It makes no more sense to have several pipes providing information to your home or office than to have several wires providing electricity or several pipes providing water. So there is a natural monopoly.

When cable was the major game in town we gave that monopoly to the cable companies. They were, at that time, purveyors of entertainment via a relatively small number of television channels. Today my FIOS line provides many channels of television, feeds two or three computer connections to the Internet, and provides phone service, and we are not heavy users. Homeowners buy, sell, work and manage their finances via the same line as they use for entertainment.

Crawford makes the case that we should treat the information pipe as a common carrier, a public utility. The firm that provides the pipe should not provide the content, and certainly should not have the monopoly on content. And the information pipe utility should be regulated as are other utilities. The problem is that the cable companies have gotten very large and very profitable, and want to maintain their privileges, and that many of our political leaders still believe in deregulation with ideological fever.

I suggest we need policies that make broadband internet connectivity a right of all Americans, and that we find ways to make it affordable for the poor. We also need to understand that the information pipes are an infrastructure that is of fundamental importance for out economic growth and international competitiveness. Regulations that break up monopolies are an important aspect of the implementation of such a policy.