WurfWhile

Illinois U.S. Senator Dick Durbin will discuss American broadband strategy OpenLeft.com for four evenings starting tomorrow (Tuesday, July 24) at 7 PM. Senator Durbin hopes to use the discussion for ideas to craft legislation, and starts off with three principles:

• Broadband access must be universal and affordable;
• We need to preserve an online environment for innovation; and
• We need to ensure that broadband technology enables more voices to be heard.

I applaud Dick Durbin for developing legislative ideas with the online community - it will be interesting to see how it goes. While I’m not an expert on the issue, one of the major “principles” should be that America keeps up with the technology on a worldwide basis - and that we have regulations to enforce it. As Paul Krugman mentions today, and Matt Yglesias has mentioned before, the United States is falling far, far behind in broadband speed, access and affordability. That’s a big deal - and should be in any discussion of broadband strategy. Krugman writes,

“[t]he numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.

Even more striking is the fact that our ‘high speed’ connections are painfully slow by other countries’ standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.

As a result, we’re lagging in new applications of the Internet that depend on high speed. France leads the world in the number of subscribers to Internet TV; the United States isn’t even in the top 10.

What happened to America’s Internet lead? Bad policy. Specifically, the United States made the same mistake in Internet policy that California made in energy policy: it forgot - or was persuaded by special interests to ignore - the reality that sometimes you can’t have effective market competition without effective regulation.”

Time for some effective regulation. Senator and members of the online community with policy chops on the issue?