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.
I was disappointed. The FCC’s National Broadband Plan reads like an FCC opinion. The FCC generally regurgitates what the parties tell it, but the input is often more appealing than the output.
For example, the FCC jumped right into outlining how to increase broadband without first defining what broadband is and second explaining why it is important. Maybe by now Americans should know these things but given the FCC’s finding that 100 million American homes don’t have access to broadband, these two points seem relevant. The plan also lacks “that vision thing.” You know, what are we trying to achieve other than throw up a bunch of bullet points.
A simple, clear statement of the role of the public and private sectors and wired and wireless and an analysis of the need for speed would have been useful. For example, if one aim is to give 100 million homes 100 Megabits per second, isn’t that going to have to be wired? Shouldn’t the FCC have talked about its vision for the relationship between wired and wireless broadband and the purpose of each?
The sections on health care and education are strange and strained. Almost every product or service in the world can be related to health care and education. Cars, trucks, trains, planes, highways, airports, and farms also play a role in health care and education, but the FCC doesn’t have any greater role in this regard than the Departments of Transportation or Agriculture.
On the positive side, the National Broadband Plan is the first time the federal government has tried to articulate a policy on broadband. It is like the converse of the joke that you’ll feel much better if you stop hitting yourself over the head with a hammer. Still, the FCC might have phrased it better when saying that after a year of effort, the plan was in “beta.”
In sum, the Plan strikes me as a lost opportunity. The document isn’t horrible but it should have been better than it is.