Why Do We Care About FCC Authority Over Broadband?

"Progressive Era philosophy" means going back to a basic idea over why we care about services like broadband. When we have a service offered to the public, when members of the public depend on accessing this service reliably, and when a failure to have reliable access can have dire consequences, these services are "affected with the public interest."

For these services, we need some basic safeguards to ensure fundamental fairness and, to the extent possible, prevent disasters before they occur - whether that disaster is limited to a subscriber or small business cut off from a vital service or a failure to serve rural areas or a massive failure on order of a BP or Katrina-type disaster. We once took pride in having an electric grid and a telephone network that were the envy of the world because they reached everyone, worked reliably, and treated everyone fairly. We should want the same for our broadband networks in the 21st Century. Those who ignore the quiet role of government in ensuring basic principles of fundamental fairness and standards or reliability in making these previous networks the envy of the world leave us at the mercy of the market. But the market cannot protect either fundamental fairness or impose basic standards of reliability. Without these two principles, our broadband network will not flourish, and we will all pay the price.