Richard Martin Blog: Why Universal Broadband Is Necessary

By mandating that every business and residence in the country have reasonably priced broadband access, Finland has issued an implicit challenge to the rest of the developed world. That challenge is not “See how progressive and enlightened we are!” It’s “We’re moving rapidly into the 21st century. Try and keep up.”

Meanwhile, in the good old U.S. of A., the FCC can’t even convince a recalcitrant Congress, nor the major telecom carriers, nor much of the public, that it has any right to oversee or regulate the most important communications medium of our time in any way. Provide broadband to all citizens? Hah! That’s how they do things in those pantywaist European social-democrat countries, not here in America.

One of the many problems with this debate over broadband access (which, unfortunately, is often conflated with the poisonous battle over Net neutrality) is that it quickly becomes a shouting match over ideology. Universal broadband access is a human right, up there with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, if you’re from the Free Press or Public Knowledge. If you’re from the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute, it’s a Commie plot to stifle competition and innovation, as represented by those competitive, innovative Big Telcos.

Actually, it’s neither. There’s no moral imperative associated with offering all citizens broadband access. If the Internet had been around in Thomas Jefferson’s day, I’m sure he’d have been an avid blogger – but I doubt he’d say his slaves had a right to broadband access, too.

Many commentators liken the debate over the public’s right to fairly priced Internet access to the struggle over press freedom. A better analogy is the interstate highway system. When President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, giving rise to the largest public-works project in history, few people argued that all citizens have an innate right to drive from Miami to Seattle without encountering a stoplight. What they did say was that an open, high-speed, well-maintained system of freeways was critical to unifying an expansive country and promoting economic growth through freedom of movement. Turns out they were right.

The same goes for the Information Superhighway (when’s the last time you heard that term?). Whether you think broadband access is a human right or not, there’s no question that it’s a basic engine of prosperity and freedom of information.

For another way of looking at this, read the profile of economist Paul Romer in this month’s Atlantic. The story focuses on Romer’s unconventional, not to say outlandish, ideas for economic development in impoverished countries, but it also describes Romer’s earlier economics work on the notion of “ideas” as a fundamental input to economic performance. Under the category of “ideas,” Romer includes rules and social norms around business competition and social welfare – one idea being that everyone is entitled to a few basic necessities, like food, clothing, shelter, and clean, safe drinking water, that enable them to pursue prosperity and happiness.

“To drive home the importance of good rules to economic growth,” writes author Stephen Mallaby, “Romer sometimes shows a photograph of Guinean teenagers doing their homework under streetlights. The line of hunched, concentrating figures presents a mystery, Romer says; from the photo it is clear that the teens are not dirt poor, and youths like these generally own cell phones. Yet they evidently have no electric light at home, or they would not be studying by the curbside. ‘So here is the puzzle,’ Romer declares: Why do these kids have access to a cutting-edge technology like the cell phone, but not to a 100-year-old technology for generating electric light in the home? The answer, in a word, is rules. Because of misguided price controls in the teenagers’ country, the local electricity utility has no incentive to connect their houses to the power grid. Their society lacks the rules that make technological advance meaningful.”

You can easily re-word those last two sentences to apply to our current situation in the U.S.: Because of misguided price controls, the major carriers have no incentive to connect all homes and businesses to the broadband grid. Our society lacks the rules that make technological advance meaningful.

I wouldn’t care to listen to the argument between a House Republican and a Finnish parliamentarian over whether broadband access is a basic human right. I do know where I’d put my money if I were betting on which country is positioning itself intelligently for the great upheavals occurring in a competitive world economy ever more reliant on technological advancement and the free flow of information.