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The Hard Questions in Broadband Policy
Andy Oram has written a nice article looking at broadband internet access and the governmental policies that need to be in place if fast, symmetric internet access is to be widely available and affordable in the U.S. The U.S. still doesn't have fiber to the home, and if the last couple of competing DSL providers go under, we may never get it. In the meantime, the U.S. government is approaching the problem by eliminating regulations on the Baby Bells, which is sort of like combating street crime by taking police officers off the street.
I mean, really. What good is having 1GB to your house when you're all going through a 100Mbps box in the CO, which goes to a 45Mb backbone in another location? I can now share at 1GB to my neighbor? I can pay $8 to watch a movie? I can get phone service that has lower QOS than cell or POTS?
The problem with broadband as currently implemented is that it's too centralized--and problems with availability of service in the event of downtime are just a small part of it. Because it's so centralized, it's open to heavy governmental regulation. And everyone suffers.
Under the 10th amendment of the US Constitution, broadband cannot be regulated by Congress unless it is part of interstate commerce as defined by Article I. If a broadband network were entirely located within a single state, then Congress couldn't reach it.
But state regulations are also a problem. The idea that states are somehow a better protector of civil liberties because they answer more to their constituencies is lunatic: they're just as prone to tyranny as any other legislative government, and the lording minorities can be even smaller and more extreme. No, states can't be trusted to regulate broadband either, because then you'll have rabid right-wing states like Utah and Vermont implementing censorware at the legislative level, and you'll have rabid left-wing states like Massachusetts and Michigan stumbling over each other to mandate subsidized access for the poor.
What I propose is that we should go back to the old pre-ISP model where each user was responsible for his own access. We got it to work back then even though the technology was more primitive and almost prohibitively expensive. If each user is his own master, then he can decide whether to be tyrannical in his little fiefdom (for example, by exercising proper parenting techniques and restricting his children's internet access) or free and easy. There aren't any technological impediments, so let's start today.
The solution to this problem is very simple for cities. The local government, either the city or the county, needs to own the physical infrastructure. They need to run the wires or fibers into every building in town, and run the other end into large, empty, central offices. Then the building owner or whoever is at the end of the wire gets to decide what to hook up to his wire in the central office. If he chooses an Internet service provider, that ISP has to lease space in the publically owned central office and install its own equipment. There would not be any exclusion of anyone from central office space, as long as they could pay the rent and someone wanted their services.
There are several movements afoot to provide fiber to rural homes; but not by the telephone companies. The movements are largely being undertaken by Public Utility Districts (PUDs).
In Washington State the mostly-agricultural Grant County has over 7,000 miles of fiber laid by the Grant County PUD (http://www.gcpud.org/zipp/default2.htm). This system, when it's completed, will connect every home, farm, and business to the fiber network and allow the users to select from a among a group of competing ISPs for their email and bandwidth. Local ISPs can also sign on for their bandwidth out to the 'net.
The 1-year-old project originated when the PUD engineers lobbied for a remote-meter-reading system and escalated when someone suggested that they could just as well provide high-bandwidth using fiber.
GCPUD is farther along than most but it's far from alone. Several other Public Utility Districts in the State are following close behind them. However, there are some pitfalls: a few legislators, supported by the telephone companies, are fighting it with legislation prohibiting the PUDs from providing Internet access.
How ironic that rural America, long ignored by the large ISPs (AOL doesn't even have a local phone number in this county), telephone companies and cable/DSL providers, will be among the first to get bandwidth connections that will be the envy of the country.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
From the article:
Kushnick thinks that, if the fiber had been laid, a wealth of new businesses would have sprung up to offer services and we wouldn't be experiencing the Internet downturn we have now.
What killed the dot-coms wasn't a lack of connectivity. It was more likely a lack of a solid business plan.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's ironic that the problems currently facing the centralized communication networks -- the baby bells, I mean -- are exactly the sort of problems that the 'de-centralized' internet (assuming the 'internet' is the content flowing over the networks) was supposed to solve.
It's also becoming increasingly interesting -- to say the least -- to see how centralized networks (or, more specifically, corporations whose livelihoods depend on the centralization of their resources) cannot -- under any circumstances -- co-exist with de-centralized users or content.
De-centralized 'content' threatens the centralized 'form'.
Katz, are you listening?