Does the FCC Want Our Internet Slow?

[Commentary] It looks as though the Obama pledge for evidence-based policy will take a blow on Tuesday, when FCC commissioners will testify in House and Senate hearings about the national broadband plan.

The Bush administration policy was not to have a broadband plan at all, and so at the dawn of Obama things looked bright for Internet users across the United States. The new Obama FCC started by requesting extensive academic research on broadband from Harvard, Columbia, and elsewhere. The researchers and the FCC both linked broadband to economic opportunity, health care, education, government performance, civic engagement, clean energy and public safety. Whether these links work in the way they are described poses important issues that we leave for another time. However, there's no question that broadband is positioned in public discourse as the most critical of critical infrastructures. So then why is the US such a laggard?

The researchers suggested that the FCC needed to make some hard decisions to implement the next generation of the Internet in the US, and so the FCC threw the research away.