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their efforts are routinely squelched by lobbying campaigns and other tactics launched by incumbent network providers at the state level. Because America has deregulated the entire high-speed Internet access sector, the result is expensive, second-rate, carefully curated wired services for the rich, provided by Comcast and Time Warner; expensive, third-rate, care-fully curated wireless services (or no services at all) for those who cannot afford a wire; close cooperation among the incumbent providers of wired and wireless services; and no public commitment to the advanced commu-nications networks the rest of the developed world is adopting. At the same time, the longtime consensus in the United States that basic, nondis-criminatory, affordable utility communications services should be made available to all Americans is being dismantled, state by state—just as America’s peer countries are coming to the view that it is a national priority to replace copper with fiber for all of their citizens as soon as possible. As Bernstein Research noted in a 2012 report, “What is most remarkable, in our view, is how little attention [the end of the copper phone network] has received. When confronted with the question ‘Will we still operate a national scale low-bandwidth wired network in 20 years?’, most investors and policy makers quickly acknowledge that the likely answer is ‘no.’ But when faced with the question of ‘what should be done about it?’—one draws blank stares.”
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None of this is good news for consumers or for American innovation.The sea change in policy that led to the current situation has been coordinated over the past twenty years by legions of lobbyists, hired-gun economists, and credulous regulators. The cable companies have no incen-tive to upgrade their core network hardware to ensure that advanced fiber connections are available to every home throughout the country. Commu-nications companies describe globally competitive high-speed access as a luxury, just as the private electricity companies did a century ago.Yet communications services are now as important as electricity. Today if you asked American mayors what technology they most want for their city, the majority would say, “affordable high-speed Internet access.” And they want these networks not simply for the jobs created to construct them but because the Internet brings the world to their community. High-speed Internet access gives towns and cities online commerce and services, the
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ability to reach world markets, to invent and innovate, to learn and communicate. It brings a wealth of economic activity and information. But despite these manifold benefits, Americans continue to treat such services as the exclusive domain of private monopolies and as luxuries obtainable only by the wealthy.Not coincidentally, the United States has fallen from the forefront of new developments in technology and communications. It now lags behind countries that long ago defined communications as a public, and publicly overseen, good. America is rapidly losing the global race for high-speed connectivity, as fewer than 8 percent of Americans currently receive fiber service to their homes.
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And the country has plateaued: adoption gains have slowed sharply, even though nearly 30 percent of the country is still not connected.Not surprisingly, cost is the most commonly cited reason people in America do not subscribe to high-speed Internet access, and nonadoption is closely tied to economic status; lack of data access reinforces other inequalities.
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Meanwhile, the future of start-up businesses, independent programmers, the computing industry, the quality of life of many Americans, and free expres-sion online are all in jeopardy; neither businesses nor people can count on fast, open access to new markets, new ways of getting an education, new ways of obtaining health care, and new ways of making a living.It is clear from extensive evidence around the world that this publicly supervised infrastructure should be made available to everyone and pro-vided on a wholesale basis to last-mile competitors in order to keep speeds high and prices low. Yet vertically integrated incumbent monopoly commu-nications providers have every incentive to discriminate in favor of their own information and content—to the detriment of innovation coming from the rest of us, and to the detriment of the flow of information generally. America has emerged decades after the breakup of AT&T with a communi-cations system that has all the monopolistic characteristics of the old Bell system but none of the oversight or universality.Yet this inequality is not irrevocable. It is not a product of “market forces” absent human intervention. But to fix it, a new approach is needed.The first step is to decide what the goal of telecommunications policy should be. Network access providers—and the FCC—are stuck on the idea