Broadband Reality Check

12:00 AM Sep 13, 2006

Courtesy of Save The Internet comes a fresh report, Broadband Reality Check. (Executive summary | Full report)

The report, as Save The Internet notes, throws cold water all over the already foundering telco cause.

It also, sadly, points up the iceberg floating along beneath -- for the woes afflicting Internet access and service extend vastly beyond the issue of net neutrality. Important as that principle is, the current debate is merely to hold the status quo ante against the aggrandizement of that sclerotic telco nobility.

But the many extant rights of seigniorage asserted by these worthies would nowise be reduced by the most sweeping net neutrality victory. Check these recommendations from the report:

• Restore the non-discriminatory, open-access principles — such as Net Neutrality — that enabled the birth and historic proliferation of the Internet.
• Remove existing barriers to entry to encourage the development of "Community Internet" systems by municipalities, public-private partnerships and local groups.
• Make more "unlicensed spectrum" available for broadband Internet and other innovations by opening up unused TV "white spaces" — the vacant portions of the public airwaves between TV channels.
• Enhance competition by prohibiting the owners of wireline broadband systems from bidding on new licenses to the public airwaves for wireless broadband.
• Modernize the Universal Service Fund programs to support broadband deployment.
• Require the FCC to improve its broadband data collection and analysis. The FCC uses a low standard for broadband and employs meaningless metrics for coverage and competition.
• Encourage and facilitate state efforts to better monitor broadband markets, so they can act
where the federal government has failed

No small skirmishes there, but fastnesses buttressed under the long reign of neoliberalism. What's to be gained in "a serious policy debate ... that will generate the big ideas necessary for systemic changes ... in American broadband markets" for anyone with the power to make it happen?

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