Good
Last week, the Susan Crawford blog featured a slow, close reading of the question/phrase “What is Broadband Good For.” We only got through “broadband” - that's the geologic pace of this blog.
Twice in the last week I've been presented with a lunch menu at a fancy midtown club that has the following entry as one of the choices for red wines by the glass. I am not making this up (as Dave Barry would say):
Chateau Routas, Internet, 2004.
So, if the internet can bring forth a great glass of wine, surely it's good for other things as well.
Good
Communications policy suffers from a certain perspective-blindness. Our tangles with line-drawing between “information services” and “telecommunications services” are embarrassing, because for anyone other than a communications lawyer these distinctions make no sense. From a user’s perspective, cable modem access to the internet is transport. Just like a DSL connection to the internet is transport. Users don’t care about the materials that are involved in transporting their communications.
“Good” suffers from this same potential perspective-blindness. Good for whom? Who decides what’s good? Good compared to what alternative state of the world? The use of “good” is as weighted in its policy implications as “broadband,” and carries with it a large number of questions. Even without a clear goal, the regulatory actions we take affect outcomes and create controversies about which economic and social benefits should be preferred or can be attained. We are stumbling forward, tinkering blindly with the greatest value-creation system we have ever seen.
Our national internet access policy suffers from a lack of a principled theory of “the good.” Other countries are doing better at this. In many Northern European countries, and in Asia, they’ve decided what’s “good” about internet access. They understand that choices made by government to stimulate the production of new ideas can have an significant effect on economic growth, and they have explicitly linked communications infrastructure and internet access to economic policy: better infrastructure leads to more new ideas, new ideas lead to a more flexible labor market, more flexible labor market and the ability of new businesses to operate at scale lead to economic growth. Other countries are making these explicit, national, public choices to support national internet infrastructure in a variety of ways.
We need a theory of “the good.” Mine is that “more, faster, open internet access is better for everyone.” Whether spectrum should be “licensed” at all is a fiercely-contested question. We can’t predict what business sectors will flourish and which will die as a result of this policy, and that’s as it should be. No one is guaranteed a return on their investment in this life. We need a national social policy for internet access that takes the country as a whole and tries to do better for all of us, rather than for the few companies that currently control internet access.
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