« Going to see Lawrence Lessig speak | Main | Satellite service goes out--and we're excited »
September 20, 2005
Lessig on "Assuring the Adequate Provision of Broadband"
Listening to Larry Lessig talking about Assuring the Adequate Provision of Broadband at Broadband Cities.
"if the market can do it, the government shouldn't do it at all"
Larry questions the (current) assumption that "if the market can do it, the government shouldn't do it at all," and whether it is universally applied.
Point is not the market vs something else, but what creates needed (economic) growth.
What is the role of government: not to replace the market, but to support it. The market cannot always provide all of the needed resources to create necessary growth. Growth cannot be restricted to just what the market can provide, when the commercial market cannot provide the adequate resources needed. The government must support the infrastructure (through building it or regulating it) so the infrastructure can provide the necessary (economic) growth.
If governments did not support the airline industry (by building and maintaining airports), the airline industry would exist, but not on the scale it does now. A private-sector-only airline industry would not provide the economic growth that the government-supported airline industry provides.
There's nothing new in the Internet from this perspective. This is just another infrastructure like electricity, roads, airports, etc, that supports commercial, non-commercial and social activities just like all of the others. If the government plays no role in the development of Internet infrastructure, the infrastructure developed by the private sector will be inadequate to support growth.
The private sector is increasingly being modeled after the cable industry, where building the network means that you control the network, as opposed to the telecom industry, where government took a regulatory role to ensure that the network was open and neutral. The application of the cable industry model to the development of Internet infrastructure so far has left the U.S. in 16th place in world-wide broadband deployment.
This principle (layer of regulation enforcing network neutrality, aka end-to-end principle) is the model that the U.S. needs to adopt (open access model failed abismally). This principle is fundamental to the Internet model, and supports the innovation that fuels growth.
Current staff draft of new telecom act being developed in Congress appears to support network neutrality. However, there is (intentionally) ambiguous language that would allow network owners to discriminate through the use of Quality of Service.
Lessons about the nature of infrastructure are simple truths that we've known for a long time, but they are increasingly smothered by a kind of stupidity about the nature of networks. However, nobody in this debate is stupid. The smothering is a result of competing interests: those attempting to maximize the growth of an individual company, and those attempting to maximize economic growth.
What's good for the builders of the network is (probably) not good for economic growth.
Posted by pete at September 20, 2005 9:09 AM