Tag Archives: Susan Crawford

U.S. broadband among most expensive worldwide: why?

We don’t have to continue letting the duopoly gouge us for
slow and expensive Internet access.

We don’t have to wait for Washington

or Atlanta, either.
We do need our local leaders to stop defining away the issue
and get on with doing something about.

Tom Geoghegan wrote for BBC News 27 October 2013,

Why is broadband more expensive in the US?

Home broadband in the US costs twice as much as it does in Europe
and three times as much as it does in South Korea, according to a
new report. Why?

Because we let the duopoly get away with it,
as

Susan Crawford has been reminding us for a while now. Continue reading →

How to get fast Internet service —Susan Crawford

Susan Crawford has a plan

for getting us fast Internet access for jobs, community, education,
and health care.



Susan Crawford wrote for Wired 2 October 2012,

We Can’t All Be in Google’s Kansas: A Plan for Winning the Bandwidth
Race,
about how the incumbent telephone and cable companies that provide
our Internet access aren’t going to help:

They have no incentive to do so. Because they never enter one
another’s territories, they don’t face the competition that might
spur such expansion.

Instead, incumbent internet access providers such as Comcast and
Time Warner (for wired access) and AT&T and Verizon (for
complementary wireless access) are in “harvesting” mode.
They’re raising average revenue per user through special pricing for
planned “specialized services” and usage-based billing,
which allows the incumbents to constrain demand. The ecosystem these
companies have built is never under stress, because consumers do
their best to avoid heavy charges for using more data than they’re
supposed to. Where users have no expectation of abundance, there’s
no need to build fiber on the wired side of the business or build
small cells fed by fiber on the wireless side.

If the current internet access providers that dominate the American
telecommunications landscape could get away with it, they’d sell
nothing but specialized services and turn internet access into a
dirt road.

So what is her plan?

Continue reading →

Captive cable audience —Susan Crawford


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

Continue reading →