What Europe can teach us about keeping the Internet open and free

[Commentary] What would a more competitive broadband market look like? One way to find out is to look at what other countries have done.

Experts point to Europe, where nations have committed themselves to something called local loop unbundling. That's a fancy term for when major network operators are required to share the infrastructure they built with other service providers. In France, unbundling dropped the costs of starting a new Internet Service Provider to attractive levels. Start-ups didn't have to worry about laying their own cables; they just piggybacked off the existing ones. As the market flourished with more ISPs, according to the New America Foundation's Danielle Kehl, some of those providers even began building their own Internet infrastructure that could compete with the big carriers. As a result, a 100 megabit-per-second, triple-play bundle now costs around $35 — which is 17 times as fast and roughly half as expensive as the most cost-effective Internet plan in the United States. The US market could have turned out much like that. In fact, with the telephone industry, it did. But then the Federal Communications Commission decided not to regulate broadband the same way. Whereas telecom providers had to practice unbundling, Internet providers didn't — the better to encourage them to build more infrastructure, or so the logic went. If all the companies expected to freeload, nobody would take the responsibility to lay the cables. Today, that means every ISP owns its own network. But it also means there are fewer competitors in the marketplace.