Public Broadband Investment Needed to Ensure American Prosperity, Panelists Say
"Doubling down” on the move toward an all-digital economy is the fastest way to drive economic growth and increase the standard of living of all Americans, Blair Levin, principal author of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, said at a New America Foundation event Wednesday (http://xrl.us/bnoirt). He and former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt discussed their upcoming e-book, “Faster, Better, Cheaper,” which focuses on opportunities for economic growth enabled by technological change. Set to be published the day after the presidential election, the book will offer advice to the new administration. Other panelists encouraged public investment in broadband infrastructure in order to buoy every other industry in the American economy.
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Levin recommended “a strategy of doubling down where we have a potential for doubling up,” accelerating the move to a digital platform at what he called a “threshold moment” in history. By using the Internet to transform the healthcare, education and public safety, while striving for constant improvement in the way goods and services are delivered, the country can ensure its place as a world leader while saving up to a trillion dollars in the next decade, he said. “Today knowledge and power are the two key inputs to everything in the economy,” he said. “If we have the best energy and broadband platforms, we will continue to grow and we will continue to lead."
"All the evidence that I have -- all the evidence that anyone has -- tells us that we're on the very verge of an opportunity for the creation of abundance the likes of which has never been seen,” Hundt said. He discussed price breakthroughs in the last few years that he said would change the discussion over clean and sustainable energy.
Purely market-driven advances in information technology will not be sufficient to build a 21st century communications network, which will require extensive public support, said Mark Cooper, chief economist at the Consumer Federation of America. He called for an incentive structure to ensure a high-speed national network is built and a regulatory structure to ensure full benefits of competition in an industry that “tends toward monopoly, or at best duopoly."
"It is time to face reality,” Cooper said. “It is time to give up the fiction that competition between platforms will ensure universal service or freedom of speech. It is time to admit that there will not be a sufficient number of well-matched rivals to protect consumers from abuse, or deliver the benefits we normally associate with competition, which starts with a relentless drive to innovate and invest."
Michael Calabrese, director of NAF’s Wireless Future Project, agreed with the need expressed by others on the panel to redirect national policy priorities from managing scarcity to facilitating abundance. Because power and broadband are inputs into everything else in the economy, upgrading core common infrastructures should be a priority for public investment, just as it was in the context of the country’s canals, railroads, electric grid, airports and interstate highway system, he said.