The Facts and Future of Broadband Competition

The growing bandwidth demands of businesses and consumers are changing the competitive broadband landscape. My goal is not to criticize, but to recognize that meaningful competition for high-speed wired broadband is lacking and Americans need more competitive choices for faster and better Internet connections, both to take advantage of today’s new services, and to incentivize the development of tomorrow’s innovations.

The underpinning of broadband policy today is that competition is the most effective tool for driving innovation, investment, and consumer and economic benefits. Unfortunately, the reality we face today is that as bandwidth increases, competitive choice decreases. It was the absence of competition that historically forced the imposition of strict government regulation in telecommunications. One of the consequences of such a regulated monopoly was the thwarting of the kind of innovation that competition stimulates. Today, we are buffeted by constant innovation precisely because of the policy decisions to promote competition made by the FCC and Justice Department since the 1970s and 1980s. The path from narrowband, to broadband, to high-speed broadband, was forged by competition. The simple lesson of history is that competition drives deployment and network innovation. That was true yesterday and it will be true tomorrow. Our challenge is to keep that competition alive and growing. What is the FCC prepared to do in the face of this competitive reality? As must be clear by now, incentivizing competition should precede regulation. We must try our best -- companies and communities, incumbents and insurgents -- to foster more competition. The best answer for limited competition is more competition, plain and simple.

Here’s an Agenda for Broadband Competition:

1. Where competition exists, the FCC will protect it
2. Where greater competition can exist, we will encourage it: The entire Open Internet proceeding is about ensuring that the Internet remains free from barriers erected by last-mile providers.
3. Where meaningful competition is not available, the FCC will work to create it: Incentivizing competition is a job for governments at every level. Working together, we can implement policies at the federal, state, and local level that serve consumers by facilitating construction and encouraging competition in the broadband marketplace.
4. Where competition cannot be expected to exist, we must shoulder the responsibility of promoting the deployment of broadband: We cannot allow rural America to be behind the broadband curve. Our universal service efforts are focused on bringing better broadband to rural America by whomever steps up to the challenge -- not the highest speeds all at once, but steadily to prevent the creation of a new digital divide.