isen.blog

Lawrence Lessig, writing on his blog, says

when the Internet first reached beyond research facilities to the masses, it did so on regulated lines — telephone lines. Had the telephone companies been free of the “heavy hand” of government regulation, it’s quite clear what they would have done — they would have killed it, just as they did when Paul Baran first proposed the idea in 1964. It was precisely because they were not free to kill it, because the “heavy hand[ed]” regulation required them to act neutrally, that the Internet was able to happen, and then flourish.

[snip]

Verizon’s entry-level broadband is $14.95 for 786 kbs. That about $20 per megabit. In FRANCE, for $36/m, you get 20 megabits/s — or about $1.80 per megabit.

How did France get it so good? By following the rules the US passed in 1996, but that telecoms never really followed (and cable companies didn’t have to follow): “strict unbundling.” That’s the same in Japan — fierce competition induced by “heavy handed” regulation producing a faster, cheaper Internet. Now of course, no one is pushing “open access” anymore. Net neutrality is a thin and light substitute for the strategy that has worked in France and Japan. But it is regulation, no doubt.

[snip]

Broadband is infrastructure — like highways, if not railroads. If you rely upon “markets” alone to provide infrastructure, you’ll get less of it, and at a higher price.

Lessig's blog posting points to a narrative he wrote of a briefing he gave to US House of Representatives staff on "open access." He writes:

There is deep confusion about the idea of "regulation" within our political culture and about its relationship to innovation and the Internet. The fashion is to say that regulation harms innovation . . . This attitude is profoundly mistaken. It betrays an extraordinary ignorance about the history of the Internet, and this ignorance threatens to undermine the innovation that the Internet has made possible. Innovation has always depended upon a certain kind of regulation; the greatest examples of innovation in our recent past evince this reliance. And unless we begin to see the relationship between this type of rule and the innovation it promotes, we are likely to kill the promise of the Internet.

The Internet would not be the success it is today were it not for the FCC's "Computer II" idea of Basic Service, which guaranteed that dial-up access to ISPs would be non-discriminatory. If we want the future to arrive in the US in timely fashion, we will follow the lead of Japan and Canada and France and twenty-some other systems of telecom regulation, and make sure that conduit knows not what content is carried.

Technorati Tags: Broadband, Competition, Content-Conduit, Deregulation, F2C, NetworkNeutrality, OpenAccess