Is U.S. broadband fast enough? Let the market decide
[Commentary] American ingenuity is also creating an out-of-this-world experience right here on the ground. Today we are able to wirelessly download books and magazines to a tablet we can manipulate with our fingertips. We can access Spotify, the world's largest record store, from anywhere -- for free. We can chat with friends and loved ones with crystal clear video and audio quality. Our mobile phones now double as everything from credit cards to house keys. All of these technologies rely on America's robust high-speed Internet infrastructure, a network born in part from the kind of bipartisan political agreement -- in this case, the decision in 1996 to replace regulation with competition to spawn what would become high-speed data networks -- that almost seems alien to us today. Indeed the loss of this bipartisan consensus-building has, on telecommunications, created a fractured debate where the extremes get the attention, and where consensus on how to build the next phase of broadband revolution is lost. What's especially troubling is that these squeaky wheels are trying to drive a debate with -- shall we say -- a rusty fact checker.
Our broadband investment has helped new entrepreneurs find financial success in what the prestigious Progressive Policy Institute calls the "app economy," which has created half a million jobs and is the key to future productivity. Without investment in broadband, names like Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hastings and Larry Page would not be known in every U.S. household. Neither would Elon Musk -- the man who made millions inventing PayPal, the revolutionary online payment system, and turned it into SpaceX. By any measure, the Internet is a sturdy launch pad to new frontiers -- even the final frontier.
[Young is a professor of public administration at California State University, San Bernardino]