Affordable high-speed Internet access would bring us
jobs, community, “online commerce and services, the ability to reach world
markets, to invent and innovate, to learn and communicate” and
“a wealth of economic activity and information”
writes Susan Crawford, a very savvy and experienced communications law professor
who has been recommended by many as a potential chair of the FCC,
who also explains why we aren’t currently getting it.

The Diane Rehm Show 10 January 2013,

Susan Crawford: “Captive Audience”,
and that’s the title of her book,

Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age,
excerpted here:

The sea change in policy that led to the current situation has
been coordinated over the past twenty years by legions of lobbyists,
hired-guneconomists, and credulous regulators. The cable companies
have no incentive to upgrade their core network hardware to ensure
that advanced fiberconnections are available to every home
throughout the country. Communications companies describe globally
competitive high-speed access as aluxury, just as the private
electricity companies did a century ago.

Yet communications services are now as important as electricity.

Today if you asked American mayors what technology they most want
for their city, the majority would say, “affordable high-speed
Internet access.” And they want these networks not simply for
the jobs created to construct them but because the Internet brings
the world to their community.

High-speed Internet access gives towns
and cities online commerce and services, the ability to reach world
markets, to invent and innovate, to learn and communicate. It brings
a wealth of economic activity and information.
But despite these
manifold benefits, Americans continue to treat such services as the
exclusive domain of private monopolies and as luxuries
obtainable only by the wealthy.

Not coincidentally, the United States has fallen from the forefront

of new developments in technology and communications. It now lags
behind countries that long ago defined communications as

a public, and publicly overseen, good.
America is rapidly losing the global
race for high-speed connectivity, as fewer than 8 percent of
Americans currently receive fiber service to their homes. And the
country has plateaued: adoption gains have slowed sharply, even
though nearly 30 percent of the country is still not connected.

Not surprisingly, cost is the most commonly cited reason people in
America do not subscribe to high-speed Internet access, and
nonadoption is closely tied to economic status; lack of data access
reinforces other inequalities. Meanwhile, the future of start-up
businesses, independent programmers, the computing industry, the
quality of life of many Americans, and free expression online are
all in jeopardy; neither businesses nor people can count on fast,
open access to new markets, new ways of getting an education, new
ways of obtaining health care, and new ways of making a living.

It is clear from extensive evidence around the world that this
publicly supervised infrastructure should be made available to
everyone and provided on a wholesale basis to last-mile competitors
in order to keep speeds high and prices low. Yet vertically
integrated incumbent monopoly communications providers have every
incentive to discriminate in favor of their own information and
content—to the detriment of innovation coming from the rest of
us, and to the detriment of the flow of information
generally. America has emerged decades after the breakup of AT&T with
a communications system that has all the monopolistic
characteristics of the old Bell system but none of the oversight or
universality.

Yet this inequality is not irrevocable. It is not a product of
“market forces”
absent human intervention. But to fix it, a new approach is needed…

For what she recommends, see

next post.

-jsq