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from the cue-the-America-is-too-big-apologists dept.
Ezra Klein of Vox.com interviews Susan Crawford about treating the internet as a utility. Crawford is the author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry & Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. Former Special Assistant to president Obama on Science, Technology and Innovation Policy, she may well be the Telecomm Lobby's enemy #1.
From the interview:
We need a public option for internet access because internet access is just like electricity or a road grid. This is something that the private market doesn't provide left to its own devices. What they'll do is systematically provide extraordinarily expensive services for the richest people in America, leave out a huge percentage of the population and, in general, try to make their own profits at the expense of social good.
When it comes to fiber penetration - that's the world class kind of network we should have - we're behind Sweden, Estonia, Korea, Hong Kong, Japan. A whole host of other developed countries. We should be looking the rest of the world in the rearview mirror. Instead, for more than 77% of Americans, their only choice for a high capacity connection is their local cable monopoly. So just as we have a postal service that's a public option for communications in the form of mail, we also need public options in every city for very high-capacity, very high-speed fiber internet access. That way we'll make sure and we can compete with every other nation in the 21st century.
What happens is that we deregulated this entire sector about 10 years ago and the cable guys already had exclusive franchises across across the country. They were able to very inexpensively upgrade those to pretty high-speed internet access connections. Meanwhile the telephone companies have totally withdrawn. They have copper line in the ground and it's expensive for them to build and replace it with fiber. Because of both deregulation and sweeping consolidation in the cable industry we've ended up on this plateau where for about 80% of Americans their only choice for a high-capacity internet access connection is their local cable monopoly.
In a sense I'm trying to have it both ways. This is by nature a monopoly. It really makes sense to have one wire going to your house. The problem is we've gotten stuck with the wrong wire. We've got a cable wire and it should be fiber and it should be then shared by lots of competitors. That's what drives prices down. If you hand the one company the ability to control that market they'll just reap their rewards and price discriminate and make lots of profits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03 2014, @02:56AM
Think of what the United States would be like if the government didn't build the Interstate Highway System. The country would be a mess of private and toll roads and no one would be able to get anywhere without paying extortionate fees to the various private road builders and maintainers. And I have a question for you. Does your wife's family vote in the mayors and other elected officials? More to the point, do they pay taxes to the city? If so, then they have the right to demand such things as roads and water and sanitation that their taxes are supposed to give them. If not, then they don't belong to the city at all, and they need to incorporate their own township or whatever.
Your government gave billions to the telcos to build out precisely this sort of infrastructure. The telcos never delivered, and haven't been punished for not delivering the goods. Just because your government is victim to regulatory capture doesn't mean that the idea of publicly owned Internet infrastructure is a bad thing.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 03 2014, @03:20AM
You were going great till the last paragraph.
The government didn't give billions to the telcos to build any sort infrastructure.
It was almost all private money. The government coughed up the right-of-way for wires, but that was largely local government.
The telcos built each successive generation of the network with the revenue earned by billing customers of the current network.
If any part of this was left to the government, we would still be using only the post office. That is the only public communication system implemented by the government.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by naubol on Thursday April 03 2014, @03:41AM
It does seem to me that the interstate highway system is a communications system that is wildly successful.
OTOH, you mentioned the Post Office. How is this not an excellent example of a "government run business"? It has operated without tax revenue since 1980, last year it handled 158.4 billion dollars worth of items, and so forth. It delivers 6 days a week everywhere in the United States. It is an amazing achievement.
That said, I think a possible answer is simply to convert internet telecommunications to common carrier status. I have yet to hear a good argument against this, and I would really like to hear one.