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US Broadband Policy Called "Magical Thinking"
eWeekPete writes "Is the pipe half full or half empty? Not surprisingly, the talk at the second annual Tech Policy Summit was decidedly mixed. 'The US is still the most dynamic broadband economy in the world,' said Ambassador Richard Russell, the associate director of the White House's Office on Science and Technology Policy. 'As opposed to being miles ahead, though, we're only a little ahead.' But Yale Law School's Susan Crawford called Russell's position 'magical thinking. We're not doing well at all.' She proceeded to call the White House's effort 'completely inadequate on broadband competition.'"
It's certainly magical ... like LSD-induced magical. What is this administration smoking? Can I have some?
I don't know about Washington, DC, (which I suspect has great broadband) but where I live in South Carolina all I can get is dial-up. I get better connectivity when I'm in China.
My boss's mother in Korea has 1Gbps coming into her house via ethernet. It costs less than 30$ a month. Considering that a t3 functions at 45Mbps and costs a few thousand dollars a month, I'd say we're lagging behind. Badly. Most of our national infrastructure is still using lines which were installed in the 50s and 60s that have been retrofitted with newer equipment.
"More pipes into the home is the key," Russell said.
We already have "more pipes" and their bandwidths are too narrow and too expensive. We pay $70 for 10MB and many European and Asian countries pay $15 for 40MB to 100MB.
We should have had a PUBLICLY OWNED 100GB optical fiber pipe across the nation FIFTEEN YEARS AGO but the cable and telcos reniged on their promise to build it after Congress gave them to money to do so in order to prevent local governments from building their own. Much of that pipe my city government installed is still buried and is still good. One line goes under my yard. We should demand that the cable and telcos FULFILL their promise and finish the job they were paid to do, and finish it without being paid a single penny more or raising their rates. That's right... take it out of the profits and stockholder dividends. The stockholder's didn't mind receiving windfall dividends while the cable and telcos management was taking the money and paying themselves huge salaries and bonuses and giving those dividends. It's time to pay up, with interest... just like they'd charge.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I have cows in my back yard.
On Main Street in the center of my town, people keep horses and sheep. I don't think you could categorize my town as anything buy "rural".
However, Boston is 30 miles to the east of me. I've got Fiber to my house. Nobody in Boston does.
Why do I mention this? It's because the problem is much more complicated than you imply. We've got a city with a high population density with no access, and rural farming communities with the option for 50Mbit symmetric connections, because while it's typically easier to serve a higher density population, the problem reverses when you start talking about a place where everything is hundreds of years old. It's hard to lay cable in a city that has gone through hundreds of years of layered construction projects, so those of us in the sticks end up with service first.
We need to come up with our own solutions. The only way we can be compared to European and Asian countries is in these statistical analyses. We can't always adopt their solutions. If you look at the European cities that have high penetration, they're generally fairly modern cities (even if they're "old", because many of them have had non-voluntary infrastructure resets (read: wars) over the years) compared to some US cities. We need solutions custom tailored to each of our regions. There isn't one magic solution.
Tax money shouldn't be pumped to the telcos to yet again waste instead of rebuilding critical infrastructure. Instead, the U.S. government should build its own national, public infrastructure to replace the crap that the telcos are trying to pass off as acceptable.
And of course your solution to this problem is... less government! But back up a second. That's quite a leap saying that more powerful government gives more opportunity for rent seeking. If that is true, why did the EPA try to claim it didn't have authority to regulate CO2 emissions? Why have fewer species than ever been added to the endangered species list? Maybe the FCC shouldn't have any authority over the electromagnetic spectrum, parts of which were recently reclaimed, repackaged, and auctioned off? Why did the Department of Homeland Security bungle Katrina so badly? Why does DHS insist on spending big $ for radiation detectors that won't reliably detect smuggling and which are subject to false alarms, while barely pursuing other, more promising methods? Maybe they don't have enough people? It couldn't be because consolidating several agencies into one overall smaller agency was a bad idea, could it?
The problem is not the size of the government, it's the size of the corruption, incompetence, and stupidity in government and in corporations. It's the extent to which these organizations and systems allow problems to be hidden and covered up. In some cases, government authority has been used for rent seeking, but in many other cases, lack of government authority has been used to put together monopolies and to get away with short changing the people. Just look at the subprime mess, and the way the telcos have not provided services, even going so far as to sue government entities set up to provide services where the telcos would not. If Bush and Cheney had less government to work with, they'd have fewer secrets to keep! Yeah. Transparency, not size, is the key.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"