Universal access in the information economy: Tracking policy innovations abroad

Several successful national broadband strategies have enabled many countries to overtake the U.S. in per capita broadband deployment. Many embrace "ubiquitous" broadband for the competitive advantages it offers not just as a societal goal. Their universal service goals extend beyond mere physical connectivity to fostering the "arenas of innovation" that generate innovations and drive broadband adoption.

Key findings:

• Universal broadband access in the emerging information economy is not just a social ideal or a redistributive tool, but an economic imperative with consequences for job creation, international competitiveness and individual empowerment.

• Countries that have now taken a lead in broadband deployment -- Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, Korea, Switzerland -- do not have a long history of telecommunications leadership, a role that has historically belonged to the United States. How did these countries leapfrog the United States and capture the lead in broadband deployment? They tend to embrace universality from the outset and see universal service as a driver rather than a remedial action. For instance, Japan has a U-Japan strategy—where the ‘U’ represents ‘ubiquitous’, ‘universal’, ‘user-friendly’ and ‘unique.’

The "New Universal Service":

• The new universal broadband initiatives that many countries are putting in place, especially those that have had remarkable success in promoting broadband deployment, are not as uni-dimensional as traditional U.S. universal service policy. These programs are premised on the assumption that consumers will voluntarily subscribe to network services, if such services provide a genuine value.

• The emphasis thus shifts from promoting network take-up through affordability ("low rates") to promoting it through increasing the value that consumers derive from network services. Also, instead of providing the least common denominator of services to all consumers uniformly, the new universal broadband initiatives offer a multiplicity of services, with consumers able to choose the services that they value the most.

• The New Universal Service has four dimensions: 1) supporting network deployment; 2) aiding network take-up by promoting digital literacy and consumer training; 3) providing incentives for service/business innovation; and 4) creating support infrastructures that enable the deployment of new services.

Conclusions:

• The objective of government policy has to be to intervene in a manner that fosters and drives broadband diffusion.

• The U.S. conceptualization of universal service as a corrective precludes alternative conceptions of universal service as a driver. The U.S. needs to go beyond traditional social equity and network externalities rationale for universal service and develop a new rationale -- innovation and economic growth.

• In the case of broadband, we need to move our thinking from “connectivity” to an “arena of innovation.”

• An arena of innovation requires both a physical substructure, namely a multitude of participants dispersed across space, for whom the very medium that interconnects them forms the object of ‘play’ or experimentation; and a social substructure or culture, implying that the experimentation is driven by fun rather than commercial gain, that the barriers for entry to the community are low, and that a competitive camaraderie and openness exists that facilitates cross-fertilization of ideas within the community.

Harmeet Sawhney
Associate Professor
Department of Telecommunications
Indiana University
Editor-in-Chief, The Information Society
hsawhney@indiana.edu
812-855-0954
www.indiana.edu/~telecom/faculty/sawhney.html