Wednesday, May 17, 2006
The World is Flat - Should Government be Behind Broadband?
As I have already said, I love the book The World is Flat. I do not agree with all of Friedman’s suggestions or conclusions, but I do think it is a must read. However
Mr. Friedman proposes in Chapter Seven, on the great American crisis, that Pres. Bush has not served the nation by failing to make the making broadband more widely available, faster, and cheaper one of his policy initiatives.
This raises one of those questions I never bothered to ask myself...should government be in the broadband business?
The parallel that Friedman makes in an earlier chapter is with the U.S. highway system that President Ike put into place throughout the country. Are highways and broadband equivelent? Of course, private business could have done the highway system (a thought that has reappeared in Colorado with a toll-road covering all of the Front Range), but then we would have had toll-way hell to deal with. I don’t know one person, conservative or liberal, who thinks the U.S. interstate highway system was a bad idea.
But is it the job of the U.S. government to do the same with broadband? Friedman believes that broadband is no longer a luxery but a necessity for the future of America (strangly, he also points to the negative that kids are spending too much time on the web playing). I know one group that would love the idea - the pornography industry. To quote the great philosopher, Homer Simpson, “Downloading porn at 100X faster, ooooo.”
Personally, I have a hard time seeing broadband as being something that the federal government should be involved in. Would government subsidies make it cheaper? Sure, relatively (there is no such thing as a free lunch), but it would also damage the longrun competitiveness of the broadband market.
The real problem with the government being involved (and I am not a liberatarian or an enemy of the role of government), is that it tends to not do a good job. Further, there are all the technical decisions that must be made - back cable or service through phone? Wireless?
Yes, Japan is better wired than the U.S., as is just about every other Asian nation. But Friedman doesn’t take into account the various other means of accessing broadband - at Starbucks, at work, at school. A lot of people I know don’t have broadband in their homes because after a day of staring at a PC the last thing they want to do is come home to more computer time.
Would cheap, universal broadband make Americans more competitive? Maybe at the margins, but I am not sure that of all the things the government can do, that is where the biggest bang for the buck is at. Then again, Friedman seems to think that the federal government is the solution to just about everything (well, that and parents).
Having said that, I am surprised that more cities and localities have not seen this is as a way of bringing competitive advantage to their areas by subsidizing or otherwise encouraging the spread of broadband. If I am an employer looking to place a business operation in a city, a well-connected populace might make the differnece between one city and another.
But come on Friedman, you chide Bush for only mentioned broadband in three speeches in five years of his presidency. You don’t think he might have had a few other things to worry about?
