It was great to watch yesterday’s FCC meeting presenting the National Broadband Plan. It has been an embarrassment for years that we haven’t had a serious strategy for bringing high-speed (and higher-speed) Internet access to more people and more businesses more quickly.
The Internet is our nation’s common medium, as Reed Hundt recently said – open, expressive of American values, accessible to everyone, an engine for business, an organ for government. The Plan makes this clear, finally, and begins the task of making sure that high-speed Internet access is ubiquitous and cheap – a commodity input to the rest of the story.
I’ve been reading the Plan, starting at the end (good job outlining the classification issue) and there are many positive difficult issues to point to – more unlicensed spectrum, more competition through better information made available about what providers are actually doing, reform of basic broken subsidy programs, finishing the white spaces proceeding, and on and on.
But the basic move here is crucial: what’s our industrial policy for providing this commodity input to all Americans? The Plan starts to answer this question.