Larry Downes

[Commentary] The Internet is celebrating some important milestones. The week of Aug 22 marked both the 40th anniversary of the first mobile connection and the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Millennials can’t even remember what life was like without it and, even for us baby boomers, the changes to everyday activities have been at once profound and subtle. But the information revolution is far from finished. Indeed, for many living in the developing world, and even for some Americans, the Internet still hasn’t arrived.

Over the past 25 years, the Internet has steadily absorbed every network and every technology imaginable — or, more to the point, unimaginable. Once-separate radio, TV, voice and data all travel over the same systems, a virtual Postal Service now delivering a sextillion bytes a year. For the remaining digital holdouts, however, availability and cost are no longer the main obstacles. While the rest of us find ourselves unable to look away from our screens even for a few minutes, the unconnected — primarily older, rural, or less educated — consistently tell researchers that their principal reason not to go online is that there’s nothing there for them. Given the Web’s growing importance for education, health care and jobs, non-adopters are wrong about relevance. So the focus now needs to be on persuading them to join us. And join us they must. The Internet’s gravity is such that the more users who join the network, the faster each added connection increases its value, exhibiting what economists call network effects. That means the communities absent from the Internet’s global village are as valuable to us as we are to them, if not more.

[Larry Downes is a project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy]

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission published a pair of decisions recently that show in sharp contrast the right and wrong ways regulators use their authority to shape the trajectory of disruptive technologies. This time, the continuing evolution of the Internet is at stake.

First, the agency voted to open large amounts of very high frequency radio spectrum for early developers of next generation mobile broadband, known as 5G. The United States is poised to be the first country in the world to take this critical step. In keeping with long-standing US policy, some of the newly allocated bands will be auctioned off to network operators, some will be set aside for anyone to use, and some will be shared. At the other end of the innovation life-cycle, the second decision further delayed the ongoing retirement of the decaying analog telephone network, which has long since been made obsolete by better and cheaper digital technologies. The proceedings have dragged on for more than a decade, and the FCC has once again punted on the final conclusion. The first decision, in short, was visionary. The second, on the other hand, will waste valuable time and resources.

[Downes is a project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy]

[Commentary] Open Internet advocates celebrated long and loud in June when a federal court upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s “net neutrality” rules that prohibit broadband-access providers from blocking websites or accepting payment to prioritize traffic. But consumers and businesses should look beneath the rhetoric to see larger dangers lurking in the FCC’s actions. The new limits and the uncertainty over how the agency will interpret them could seriously constrain future evolution of the Internet. But the bigger danger comes less in the rules themselves than in how the FCC finally got them past the courts.

To overcome explicit congressional limits on Internet regulation, and at the insistence of the White House, the FCC began this time by “reclassifying” broadband access as a public utility. The commercial Internet has become crucial in virtually everything from business and employment to civic engagement and social interaction. But there is a world of difference between essential services and public utilities. Food, clothing and shelter are also essential, yet none of them are regulated as public utilities. That legal designation, codified in the late 19th-century Progressive Era, has always been limited to a small class of basic infrastructure, such as electricity, gas and water, which shared unique economic features, including a need for universal availability and extremely high financial barriers for potential competitors. For the Internet, regulation as a public utility represents a dangerously poor fit.

[Downes is a project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy]