Will The National Broadband Plan Come Up Short?

The Federal Communications Commission says its much anticipated national broadband plan, which will be unveiled Tuesday, will help make Internet access faster, cheaper and more pervasive.

To help deliver on that promise, FCC officials commissioned a study from Yochai Benkler at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. They wanted to know more about how people in other countries connect to the Internet. Benkler says broadband in other developed countries is generally faster and cheaper than it is in the US. "You're looking at prices in the leading countries that are a third or a fifth of the prices that we're paying — and they're getting better speeds for it. So the differences are not subtle based on what we found," Benkler says. When it comes to speed and price of Internet connections, Benkler found that American cities trail far behind their counterparts in South Korea, Sweden — even eastern Slovakia. The big reason, Benkler says, is competition. You need lots of different companies competing for your Internet business, hustling to provide better service at a lower cost than their rivals. The way other countries do this is by essentially forcing the big companies to share their wires with the smaller ones. Benkler admits that won't be an easy sell in the US. "There will be enormous political resistance. But at the same time, the FCC has to get the next generation market structure right. This is the moment to do it," Benkler asserts. "Either you are willing to take the step to get to more competition, or you are engaged in cosmetics."

The FCC got Benkler's report and basically said, "Thanks, but no thanks." Blair Levin, executive director of the FCC's broadband initiative, says forcing companies to open their circuits to competitors — what's called "open access" — just won't work in the US. "Other countries tend to have broadband dominated by a single telecom carrier: the phone company. The U.S. is very different. The majority of broadband subscribers [there] actually subscribe through cable. So it's not always an apples-to-apples comparison," Levin says.