Editorial by Jeffrey Barlow <barlowj@pacificu.edu>
Editor, Interface
about
To many, it must seem as though the development of digital broadband is pretty much an accomplished fact. The highly respected Pew Foundation "Internet and American Life" project has been reporting on the impact of broadband on users since at least 2002. [1] In 2007, Pew reported, "47 percent of adults have high-speed internet connections at home as of early March 2007, up five percentage points from a year earlier." [2] At Interface we have published on the issue repeatedly. [3]
Yet at the August 2007 Aspen Institute conference Focus on Communication and Society (FOCAS), where I was an observer[4], after three days of presentations, debate and discussion, policy initiatives were proposed by a very knowledgeable and influential group. [5] Among these proposals, none was ranked higher than that the United States adopt a federal policy to facilitate digital broadband access at reasonable costs to all Americans. [6]
Even this call for a national policy might seem unnecessary or redundant because, after all, President George Bush made it a national goal to provide every American with broadband by 2007. [7] However, as the Pew report indicates, we are less than half way to that goal.
Why, with almost half of American adults having broadband access, and after many years of development, is broadband development still a pressing issue in the United States? The answer is a fairly simple one. The United States lags behind most of the developed world in terms of the speed and cost of broadband access. There are a number of ways in which to measure broadband access, but by almost any measure, the United States is surprisingly backward. [8] Furthermore, the rate of growth itself in the United States lags well behind many other countries.
In addition, the problem is much worse than a superficial examination suggests, because the U.S. data is tilted so as to obscure the issue. We define "broadband" as including much slower speeds than do most nations. The American definition is found in a twelve year old FCC act, and defines "broadband" as 200 kilobits per second, which was said at that time to be "enough capacity to provide the most popular forms of broadband—to change web pages as fast as one can flip through the pages of a book and to transmit full-motion video." [9] If broadband were defined in the U.S. as it is in many countries, we would be much farther behind.
Neither is the definition of broadband merely a theoretical issue. A recent study showed:
The report, based on aggregated data from nearly 80,000 broadband users, found that the median real-time download speed in the U.S. is 1.9Mbit/sec., compared with 61Mbit/sec. in Japan, 45Mbit/sec. in South Korea, 17Mbit/sec. in France and 7Mbit/sec. in Canada. [10]
Perhaps the unfavorable comparison with Canada is not that shocking, coming as it does when the American dollar has just fallen below the Canadian dollar, but to imagine the average American user downloading at speeds some thirty times slower than the average Japanese suggests technological backwardness.
To some, this may seem an unimportant issue. What, after all, does it matter if Korea and Japan rank well above us, as does most of Europe (Including some former East Bloc nations), and so what if China is growing much faster in broadband penetration? The issue, however, is not merely one of consumer convenience.
Broadband penetration is known to be a factor in encouraging economic growth, particularly in the most modern or digital sectors of the economy [11]. While the data is still not fully developed and there are certainly contrarian perspectives, it is generally accepted worldwide that broadband penetration facilitates a number of highly desirable consequences.
Having read or heard a number of discussions on the advantages of high bandwidth at the municipal level, including some at FOCAS, I am aware that while the issue is most often debated in terms of economic growth and productivity, there are many other social goods involved.
Public access to public data, minimizing the digital divide between urban and rural students, teleconferencing among varying levels of educational administrations, the exchange of information between police administrations, are but a few of these we might mention.
There are also, I believe, important issues dealing not only with national economic growth, but with national security as well. Let us introduce one, which may seem farfetched, though perhaps not as farfetched as average Asian download speeds.
One of the sinews of American national power over the 20th century has been the ability of the United States to dominate entertainment via American film, music and Internet content to name only the most conspicuous examples. These Joseph Nye has defined as "Soft Power:
A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense, it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons. This aspect of power—getting others to want what you want—I call soft power. [12]
Soft Power, I would suggest, is easily lost. The sheer ability to feed content at something resembling widely acceptable speeds is certainly one element of soft power. Moreover, if we accept artificially low delivery speeds—relative to those of other countries—our need to keep pace with our data-bearing infrastructure is also adversely impacted. [13] There is an interesting debate precipitated by Om Malik "Can Broadband Predict Economic Shifts?" in which writers of varying levels of authority argue the economic impact of Asian data pipes routing around the currently dominant American carriers.
And the impact for important "soft power" industries is also potentially catastrophic. The virtual destruction of the American musical and recording industries, at least as they were long structured by the major labels, is due precisely to a lag in industry understanding of the inevitable effects of the downloading of MP3 and other file formats. It is also due in part to a failure to develop countervailing technology and applications, all of which were long made to seem less critical by the agonizingly slow speed of American data transfer.
Once Chinese and Indian audiences can trade Hollywood films substantially outside of American law and at what amounts to instantaneous speeds, what will happen to Hollywood? And to all those "soft power" ideals promulgated for decades by the likes of John Wayne or now, the both decent and seemingly invulnerable Matt Damon?
This relative failure is, I believe, a direct result of flawed federal policy, which places the economic interests of a few corporations over both the national interest and the interest of individual citizens.
I heard many exciting voices at the FOCAS conference on Communication and Society at Aspen, but one of the most compelling was that of Viviane Reding, the Commissioner for Information Society & Media of the European Commission. Reding is the most influential administrator in defining policy with regard to digital and other forms of entertainment for the entire European continent. At one point she stated that it was clear to Europeans that high bandwidth was going to be the "killer app." At another, frustrated with much discussion among Americans of the advantages of high bandwidth, she stated that, clearly, we Americans just did not "get it."
So to summarize the problem, it is relatively simply put: to fail to keep up with the high penetration and lower cost of broadband in other countries is to lose the future in many senses.
As suggested above, the cause is not a surprising one: Successive administrations, but particularly the latter Bush administrations, have repeatedly chosen to protect the entrenched interests of a few large corporations rather than the public interest, or the collective American future.
This has been done in a deliberate effort to protect these oligopolies from competition caused by disruptive technology. These firms prefer to avoid market-driven brawls in which relatively unknown or even new competitors might suddenly seize an advantage because of a willingness to compete in developing break-through technologies. They prefer, rather, the usual "competition" waged primarily not by engineers but by public relations departments and advertising flacks. The end result is that the consumer is offered a number of confusing plans, deceptive claims as to speed and coverage, but not a competitively priced truly high-speed broadband network.[14]
The free market has more than proven its worth in the area of electronic communications. The rise of unheralded competitors such as Google from garage operations to dominance is sufficient evidence of the market's importance. The broadband industry, however, is almost uniquely and deliberately protected from market forces. In addition, this is an industry where a coherent progressive national policy repeatedly has demonstrated its importance—for example in all those nations that now are well in advance of the United States in broadband development.
[1] See "Technology & Media Use The Broadband Difference: How online Americans' behavior changes with high-speed Internet connections at home" http://www.pewinternet.org/report_display.asp?r=63
[2] See "Technology & Media Use Home Broadband Adoption" 2007 at http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/217/report_display.asp
[3] See search items at http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=broadband&btnG=Google+Search&domains=http%3A%2F%2Fbcis.pacificu.edu%2Fjournal%2F&sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Fbcis.pacificu.edu%2Fjournal%2F
[4] See http://www.aspeninstitute.org/site/c.huLWJeMRKpH/b.2628837/k.F34F/FOCAS_2007.htm
[5] Participants included, among many others: Kevin Martin- Chairman, Federal Communications Commission; Viviane Reding- Commissioner for Information Society & Media- European Commission; Jonathan Adelstein- Federal Communications Commission; Madeleine Albright- The Albright Group; Esther Dyson- EDventure Holdings; Michael Eisner- The Tornante Company, former Disney CEO; Jordan Greenhall- DivX, Inc.; Arianna Huffington- The Huffington Post: Craig Newmark- craigslist; and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.- The New York Times
[6] The actual wording of the resolution had not been finalized at the end of the conference and may differ slightly in the final Conference report.
[7] See "Broadband internet Wiring rural America" Sep 13th 2007 | BOWLING GREEN, KENTUCKY From The Economist print edition, http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9803963
[8] For various ways of parsing the data, see "US Falls to 25th in Broadband Penetration Worldwide - US Broadband Growth Below OECD Average" - April 2007 Bandwidth Report at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0704/ A subsequent criticism of this report which believes the United States to rank 12th rather than the 25th reported earlier can be found at: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0705/
[9] Cybertelecom "Federal Internet Law & Policy" An Educational Project found at: http://www.cybertelecom.org/broadband/706.htm
[10] Linda Rosencrance "Study: US Lags Behind in Broadband Speeds" Computerworld, June 25, 2007 at: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/133390/study_us_lags_behind_in_broadband_speeds.html
[11] Again, there are many ways in which to analyze the data, however the agreement as to the link between broadband growth and economic growth seems well established. See for example, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=925973#PaperDownload provides a local case study drawn from comparable Florida communities. See also Cathy Swirlbul, "Broadband Boosts Economic Growth in Bristol" Public Power magazine, March-April 2007 http://www.appanet.org/legislative/index.cfm?ItemNumber=18991&sn.ItemNumber=9965 for a Virginia study.
[12] Nye, Joseph S, Jr. The Paradox of American Power, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. p. 9. See our review of this work at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2002/03/editorial.php
[13] There is an interesting debate precipitated by Om Malik's article "Can Broadband Predict Economic Shifts?" In which writers of varying levels of authority argue the economic impact of Asian data pipes routing around the hitherto fore dominant American carriers. http://gigaom.com/2005/12/14/can-broadband-predict-economic-shifts/
[14] See our review of Fransman, Martin, (ed.) Global Broadband Battles. Why the U.S. and Europe Lag While Asia Leads. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. At http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2007/06/fransman.php in this issue.
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