National Strategy, Focus on Openness, Competition Can Inform U.S. Broadband Push

,New Research Shows

As key Congressional panels examine U.S. broadband competitiveness Tuesday, the Benton Foundation releases two new research papers highlighting the international, innovative policy approaches that have propelled other countries into positions of broadband leadership.

Pennsylvania State University’s Amit M. Schejter finds that Europeans have embraced, perfected, and are benefiting from the open competitive network concepts first developed, but later abandoned by, U.S. policymakers. 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. The result is broadband penetration that exceeds that of the U.S. in many European Union nations. (See paper online at http://www.benton.org/benton_files/Schejter.doc)

“US policymakers,” Prof Schejter warns, “have 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.”

Pennsylvania State University’s Krishna Jayakar and Indiana University’s Harmeet Sawhney examine the national broadband strategies adopted by countries around the world. Many embrace "ubiquitous" broadband for the competitive advantages it offers not just as a societal goal. Effective national strategies focus on development of “soft infrastructure” that enables broadband innovations -- applications, services, and devices – and thereby make broadband more valuable to ordinary consumers and drives its uptake. (See paper online at http://www.benton.org/benton_files/Jayakar_Sawhney.doc)

Professor Jayakar and Sawhney said, “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. Correspondingly, we need to move our thinking from ‘connectivity’ to an ‘arena of innovation.’ While the connectivity regime confines our thinking to a linear conceptualization of universal service, the ‘arena of innovation,’ a concept initially developed to understand bottom-up innovations on the Internet, expands the mental space within which policy options are framed. It prompts us to embrace universality from the outset, as opposed to a remedial action, so that we can benefit from the innovations not only by the lead users, as is currently the case, but also the lay users.”

The papers are part of the Benton Foundation’s Universal Affordable Broadband For All Americans program. Through a series of thought provoking targeted and timely essays, this effort will embrace the premise that Universal Broadband access is now as important to the advancement of the American ideal in the 21st century as universal access to education and universal phone service was in the last. For more on Benton’s work on Universal Broadband, see http://www.benton.org/index.php?q=broadband_benefits

“Broadband and the applications it enables will unquestionably become the dominant communications medium of the 21st century. Without a strong, comprehensive policy commitment to developing our broadband technologies and applications, we cannot hope to correct the problems that have plunged the U.S. down the ranks of global competitiveness,” said Benton Foundation Chairman and CEO Charles Benton.