What Lessons can the U.S. learn from Broadband Policies in Europe?

How a focus on open, competitive networks helps boost broadband

"From all my teachers I have grown wise,
and from my students more than anyone else:"
What Lessons can the U.S. learn from Broadband Policies in Europe?
Amit M. Schejter,
Assistant Professor of Telecommunications,
Pennsylvania State University
schejter@psu.edu
814-865-3717
www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/a/m/ams37/

Europeans may be on the way to taking a more innovative and effective approach to accelerating broadband deployment. They have quickly moved ahead of the U.S. on broadband and have embraced, perfected, and are benefiting from the open competitive network concepts first developed by U.S. policymakers but later abandoned in the U.S.

Key findings:

Making use of policy terminology and concepts coined in the United States, the European Union has caught up and even surpassed broadband penetration levels in some countries.
The Europeans, for whom industry development through competition was initially a novelty, developed a focused competition policy that eventually required minimal government intervention or subsidies in to advance broadband.
Europeans may be on the way to taking a more innovative and effective approach to what was once considered a badge of pride of the U.S. telecommunications policy â€“ Internet access and competition â€“ by adopting American competition concepts and perfecting them to serve the actual policy goals.
The strengths of the European system are focus, simplicity, relative efficiency and willingness to change the course of policy as needed, an effective balance between centralization and delegation of power, and innovation. While in the U.S. we are still debating the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Europeans have since 1994 rewritten their rules twice, adjusting them to realities on the ground and are now reviewing them for rewriting them by 2010.
By contract in the U.S., policymakers have recently been mired in regulating the relationship among the operators. Instead of managing competition, the U.S. manages the competitors. It perceives the issue as one that arises from the need to allow operators to provide certain services, and as a result the regulator does not deliberate the goals of the policy. Indeed the focus of policy in the United States, particularly in the Universal Service debate, is, too often, on the needs of the carriers and not on consumers.
The debate in the U.S. takes place in the courts, where operators constantly challenge the policy and slow down the development of competition. In the E.U. the debate takes place at the regulatory level, the courts are there to enforce the rules on the operators.
While Europeans launched their universal service policy as a strategy amid low penetration levels, saw the blessing in their competitively focused efforts, and are therefore discussing the universality of broadband at its infancy, the US is not creating the vision necessary at the initial stages of the introduction of a new technology.

Conclusions:

The United States, in order to stay competitive with the European Union must learn from its past mistakes and adopt policies that promote broadband competition, and use universal service as a policy concept for ensuring more rapid diffusion of broadband access, and in an ironic reversal of past trends, will learn from those who once learned from it.
What is it then that makes Europe different than the United States, and what can the United States learn from the European experience in order to revive broadband penetration?
- The European debate focuses on many issues, among them the scope of universal service, while the debate in the United States debate focuses on franchising, with little focus on achieving universal broadband and its relevance with the introduction of new technologies and services.
- The Europeans stuck to their goal of crafting an "information society," did not take their eyes off the ball, and tweaked the policy to meet the goals.