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Krugman On the Connectivity Power Shift
In today's NYTimes (registration required), Paul Krugman's op-ed piece lays out in simple terms the statistical power shift in the online economy among Europe, Japan, and the US. This shift has been discussed here for some time, but it's good to see it coming to the attention of a wider audience. Quoting: "As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did... [W]hen the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the FCC, the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there's little competition in U.S. broadband — if you're lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go."
Another problem is that the population of the United States is much more stretched out than in those other countries (especially, duh, Japan) and therefore harder to physically reach. It's easy to reach the 50% of the population nearest the population centers, harder to reach the 50% that's farther away.
It's like the problem we had in the US of upgrading television stations to Hi-Def. In Europe, you only have to upgrade two or three transmitters per country. In the US you have hundreds of transmitters dotted throughout the country (not to mention the added trickiness of local ownership of individual local television stations)...
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
Knowledgeable masses are scary to politicians of any stripe. Period. Liberals are just as afraid of an educated, emancipated population as the conservatives, and for the same reason: it's harder to get elected/re-elected on a platform of unadulterated bullshit when the people have the mental tools to see right through you. Twisted statistics don't work well on people who can handle numbers, for one, and citizens with a broad knowledge of world history don't get taken in as easily either.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Germany broadband to New York, or France to California.
So why is Germany's broadband access so much better than New York's? Why is France's broadband so much better than California's?
I hope you're joking, because I know I, for one, am not moving overseas, leaving my life behind, just to get the broadband service I should be getting here in the US. The idiot who modded you insightful is the reason we have these issues. If people really think that packing up their bags and leaving the country is the best fix for the problems in the US, they suddenly learn to live with those problems, telling themselves that they can leave it all behind whenever they want. Wake up people! We need to face down these issues ourselves. Vote with your wallet and, when the time comes around, your ballot, and encourage others to do the same. It may not do much, but it's definitely better than nothing.
Every time somebody trots out this lame excuse I will persist in pointing out that in bucolic Ephrata, Washinton - the middle of nowhere on the road to nowhere - they have gigabit broadband. That's fiber to the premises and gigabit Ethernet to the house, a symmetrical unmetered gigabit link to each subscriber, for less than I pay to Comcast each month.
They get it through their power company and they're grandfathered in but I can't get that deal because the big players bought legislation prohibiting municipal broadband.
So stop already with the story that the last mile is expensive, bandwidth is costly, density is the key lies already. It's about the incumbent monopolies maintaining their profits at the cost of depriving the average citizen of necessary infrastructure full stop.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That seems like a reasonable arguement but if that were the case then with the massive housing boom we have been in for the past 10 years we should have a significant number of homes with the latest fiber optic last mile technology, but guess what, we dont.
I've watched thousands of houses go up and hundreds of new neighborhoods, and whats going in the ground you ask, the same coax and twisted pair copper they've been using for the past 30+ years.
And when people get fed up and try to band together to build there own fiber optic network because the digital robber barons refuse to invest in the latest technology do we finally get the latest technology, no we get lawyers and lobbying to turn citizens into criminals and outlaws.
And now with our pathetic outdated infrastructure that provides limited broadband at high prices what are the robber barons trying to do, drop their requirements for network neutrality and charge us and content providers even more for what we've already paid for.
Its not distance or age, its plain and simple greed and governmental complicity with illegal monpolization of markets. This country is getting passed by in the name of capitalism for the few and screw the other half.
Lots of those high rise office buildings have fibre connections. The cities you mention are among some of the prime switching points for the internet. The available bandwidth is obscene.
There are available technologies for getting the bandwidth from where it's switched to the common citizen without negotiating a million rights of way. They are not employed for the reason in my post below: the incumbent monopolies have an unlimited budget to maintain the scarcity - and as such the price - of their product.
Let us not pretend there is some other reason. If you can see that skyscraper on the horizon from your roof, it could hit you with more broadband than you and your million neighbors could use, even if you shared it further out. This is about money and nothing else.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If you're "lucky", you have a buffet of connection options in the US. You have cable access (in most places that's 1MB or faster) and DSL from a variety of providers (256K and up, often 1MB and faster). In many places you can get residential wireless, with speeds dependent on how many people are sharing an AP. If you live in high-density housing you may have access to fiber, with speeds from 3MB and up. Generally speaking, the cost of this access is less than $100 per month, and may be as little as $50 per month.
A rough estimate would be that 70% or more of the US population is "lucky" by the above definition.
"Broadband" connections in the US are not hard to get, are not prohibitively expensive, and generally work as advertised with little tech support required. The people who are not well served in the US are rural users, and some users in old inner city areas with a poor existing infrastructure. The people with the most technical support issues are those attempting to host servers and other business class services on residential networks, or those using old, outdated, or unsupported combinations of hardware & software; the average user, with an average hardware/software mix for the most part achieves plug & play connectivity. Tech support loads at most ISPs are 1:10 or higher (in other words, less than 10% of the customers need tech support for connectivity issues) and in most cases, tech support problems are traced to user error.
I suspect that the poor adoption rates for broadband in the US have more to do with lack of interest on the part of consumers than with technical availability. Many people don't view the internet as something they need or want - especially the 40+ percent of the US population 50 and older, who grew up without it don't know what they're missing.
First of all, the post above was a joke. Then, we would vote with the wallet if we could. The article implies that one cannot go to another vendor because there is an oligopoly like in other industries. That's typical to US. Not a real competitive market but one that "seems" to be competitive from 10000 feet. Get a clue.
Look regardless of how much you might dispute the desirability of the French health care system, the analogy he is making is logically correct. That is, the French are not holding themselves prisoner to free-market ideology.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The reason why germany got so many broadband connections is rather simple. It's way cheaper to have broadband here than dial-up.
Traditionally you had to pay for every single phonecall, even local ones. So dialing-in into an ISP _really_ cost you a lot of money. In fact back then most ISPs didn't charge you for their services so you only had to pay to your local phone company.
Then with DSL and cable modems you suddenly got a flat-rate for a moderately low price.
Currently the costs are about this: (all in Euro)
dial-up 0.1 cents/minute => 43.2 Euro a month (wow, this suddenly even became affordable)
DSL is about 50 Euros a month including an ISDN phone-line with flat-rate service for data-calls for all of germany.
Dial-up used to be even more expensive, costing as much as 3 cents per minute.
...we would vote with the wallet if we could. The article implies that one cannot go to another vendor because there is an oligopoly like in other industries. That's typical to US. Not a real competitive market but one that "seems" to be competitive from 10000 feet. Get a clue.
Exactly. Libertarians will hate this idea, but the free market can not fix everything. That is because the free market has a weakness: monopolies. Over time, companies purchase and consume one another until one, dominant entity takes over a section of the market. Copyright, patent, and trademark law protect the monopoly and prevent competitors from establishing themselves. At that point, all innovation stops. The evidence is out there in industry after industry from telephones to software.
And again, libertarians will hate this, but the government must step in for cases like this. The government needs to shake these companies up and break up their monopolies. Only once we get some actual competition will we get good service.
So you need government to prevent what government created, and you think libertarians are confused?
Telecom companies were given $200 billion by US tax payers over 10 years ago to give us 45mbps both ways fiber optic wiring.
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They took the money to invest in the profitable long distance market while still laying down old copper. They invented the barely faster than dialup technology we all know as DSL.
This was to trick the government into thinking people were getting the faster speeds they were supposed to without having to remove those old copper wires.
Educate yourselves, spread the news, and call your local representative.
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseactio
http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm
No, libertarians are dangerous -- or more likely, impotent -- utopians.
There's lots of precedent for a market regulated for maximum competitiveness being a very productive force. If you let the free market stay completely unregulated, you get the restoration of the monopolies. Markets hate to be free, because everybody's always trying to corner it. So it takes regulation to keep everybody honest.
So ignore the messenger and concentrate on the message. Does having broadband services carved up between a limited number of companies make for more competition than making th telecom and cable companies act only as carriers for the same services? And if they are the only ones who can make an economically viable business doing this, are they going to have any real incentive to improve the service and reduce the cost to end users? Its a perfectly valid question, and many will agree with the author's conclusion.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
That's actually pretty insightful in a bumper-sticker kind of way. I think the hidden truth, however, is that the tools that help protect the struggling technology and the inventive individual can be abused. Or, to rephrase it, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
The copyright that protects a musician should not, also, be used to allow the RIAA to dictate technology policy throughout the U.S.. In the same way, specific patents that protect the start up biomedical company are good while overly broad, obvious patents in the hands of huge companies should not be used to bury competitors under a mountain of lawsuits.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
The real question is, does anyone really know what would happen in a completely free market? Would the government still have to step in to try to discourage cooperation between companies and other monopolistic practices, or is such cooperation completely inherent in the system and very difficult to prevent?
When us young capitalists were taught in the classroom about how communism meant no choice, and capitalism meant lots of choice, we were also taught that competition between companies was the reason. But, what happens when companies put down their swords, and realize that cooperating is much more beneficial than competition? Perhaps competition is an old theory back in the days when business owners had too much testosterone that, now days, no longer applies.I'm still amazed how this practice isn't being banned by the U.S. government. The E.U. has some sense to block similar practices in support of consumers, but of course here in the U.S. we apparently love our monopolistic practices. Contract agreements like these are extremely common here, the consumers all get fucked over, and no one seems to care, or realize the goods and prices they *could* be getting, simply because they can't see them in front of their noses.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.