Universal Access and Its Asymmetries: The Untold Story of the Last 200 Years

In March 2021, President Biden announced the American Jobs Plan, a precursor to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act designed to kick-start the U.S. economy amid the global coronavirus pandemic. As part of the announcement, the President made a prophetic statement: “broadband is the new electricity.” Comparing the Internet and electricity connected the dots between a centuries-long experiment in universal access. It invokes questions of which technologies, utilities, and services are so crucial to contemporary life that the government has a moral, ethical, and legal obligation to make them accessible to everyone. In this one statement, President Biden placed broadband within a select list of other universal access priorities over the history of the United States, including the postal service, telephone, education, and yes, electricity. The story of universal broadband also illustrates two much larger, normative problems when it comes to universal service: how to define it and how to pay for it.