Moving Slowly in the Fast Lane
The Federal Communications Commission, our national communications regulatory body, is asking the wrong questions and heading in the wrong direction. We need new leadership in this country that has the political muscle to implement radical change. A key national priority, on a par with funding Head Start programs and adequate national healthcare, must be to ensure that access to an unfettered internet is universal, speedy, and cheap.
Thirty years ago, two-way communications in this country were controlled by Ma Bell. After eight years of litigation, AT&T agreed to divest itself of its local telephone companies, and those local telephone companies (the “Baby Bells”) agreed not to leverage their local monopolies into the market for long distance service.
Where are we today? The Baby Bells have re-consolidated. Telephone service in this country is essentially controlled by AT&T (in the West) and Verizon (in the East), with Qwest filling in gaps. And two-way communications in this country – which, these days, means highspeed internet access – are controlled by a duopoly of Big Phone and Big Cable. Many Americans don’t have a choice of highspeed providers, and, as Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, Free Press, Media Access Project, and U.S. Public Interest Group recently told the FCC, “Americans pay 10 to 20 times as much [as people do in other countries] for far less service.” The duopoly is something like Shamu and Godzilla on hire for televised wrestling – giant beasts gently swatting at one another for the cameras. They aren’t competing, these giants. There is a clear failure in the market for highspeed internet access in this country.
Even people who don’t often think about interactive communications have heard that the U.S. is lagging far behind many other developed nations when it comes to highspeed internet access. As with other key infrastructure issues – like Head Start and healthcare – we just don’t seem to care about giving our people a firm foundation for life.
Network operators, the Shamus and Godzillas of interactive communication in this country, want to control and monetize highspeed access to the internet. They believe that they can and should control this complex system by, among other things, deliberately degrading upload speeds (so that we users can’t produce and host our own materials) and keeping highspeed access for their own content.
Many other countries have taken a hard look at their communications policy and have understood that communications and economic growth are tightly intertwined. Economic growth is driven by new ideas creating ever-newer goods and services and new ways of making a living. We have never had an interactive communications platform like the internet before – it’s capable of producing enormously diverse ideas (in the form of new niches, new roles, and new understandings of information) and allowing them to be disseminated on a large scale. Universal highspeed access to the internet could trigger crucial economic growth that would benefit U.S. society as a whole.
And this access has to be fast. We are beginning to see the video future of the internet, and that future requires that information flow far more quickly over the now-monopoly-controlled local bottlenecks in this country than it does now.
We should care about the economic health of our country. Access to the internet at high speeds should be something that we make available to everyone in the U.S. as a public infrastructure. We don’t even know what we’ll be capable of using this access for – yet – because our expectations have been so dimmed by the craven practices of our local Shamus and Godzillas.
In an ongoing regulatory factfinding mission (undertaken because the Commission didn’t have the political will or sensitivity to actually act), the FCC is asking whether anyone using a U.S. network operator has been blocked from accessing particular sites. That’s the wrong question, as Consumers Union and its colleague advocates have told the Commission. The FCC should instead be asking why we haven’t mandated competition for highspeed access by requiring that all providers sell unfettered transport services at wholesale rates into a competitive market for retail transport. Even better, Congress should take the reins and demand that the duopolies divest themselves of their transport services so that they aren’t tempted to try to monetize internet access in favor of their own movies and phone services.
But for the FCC and Congress to change direction and start asking the right questions will take leadership. We don’t have that kind of leadership now. All acts are incremental; all steps are taken with the advice and approval of the incumbents. We don’t have a national economic policy that is tied to internet access because no one is willing to step up and lead. Sen. Kerry made a good speech at a recent hearing about auctioning off key airwaves, but even if that auction is run as he suggests it won’t solve the larger infrastructural problem.
We need much more from our national leaders. Who will be the candidate who will understand this central issue? Mike Bloomberg has run networks, even if they are proprietary, and might be the guy. We’re waiting, but in the meantime we’re moving excruciatingly slowly in the supposed American fast lane.
==Do read the CFA/CU/MAP/FreePress/USPIRG comments - they're excellent.