Beyond Broadband Access: Developing Data-Based Information Policy Strategies

CHAPTER 7 “Rulers of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens”

113 CHAPTER 7 “Rulers of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens” Does Democracy Count? amit m. schejter During his presidential campaign in 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama stated his belief “that America should lead the world in broadband penetration and Internet access.”1 Following up on his campaign agenda and upon becoming president, Obama promised in his inaugural address to “build . . . digital lines.” Neither the campaign promise nor the presidential commitment revealed anything new of note. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, also called for “universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007,”2 and both presidents’ political rivals made similar campaign promises in their respective campaigns. When it came to actual action, the Bush administration claimed to have “implemented a wide range of policy directives to create economic incentives, remove regulatory barriers, and promote new technologies to help make broadband affordable;”3 while the Obama administration initiated the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, which was enacted by Congress a few weeks after President Obama’s inauguration, and which mandated the Federal Communications Commission to draft within a year a plan that will “ensure that all people of the United States have access to broadband capability.” The National Broadband Plan (NBP), which was made public a year later, set numerical goals for access to telecommunications for the first time in US history.Indeed,thegoalofuniversalaccessdidappearintheCommunications Act of 1934, which was enacted in order “to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of amit m. schejter 114 race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, a rapid, efficient, nationwide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities ;” however, that goal was never quantified. The NBP stated its quantifiable goals as: • At least 100 million US homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second by 2020. • Every American community should have affordable access to at least 1 gigabit per second broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals and government buildings. • Every first responder should have access to a nationwide, wireless, interoperable broadband public safety network. The quantification of policy goals with regards to penetration levels of telecommunications infrastructure is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States as is its positioning in an internationally comparative context. It was probably not until the first decade of the twenty-first century that either discussion would even emerge; however, the NBP was initiated as a result of a general sense of international inferiority in access levels. During the twentieth century, the telecommunications infrastructure in the United States was far more robust than anywhere else in the world—in particular with regards to the two leading communications technologies of the era, the telephone and the television, and their penetration seemed to be virtually universal with the exception of distinct outlying populations. This reality took a dramatic turn in the late 1990s with the emergence of the twenty-first–century technologies: mobile communications and broadband Internet. According to International Telecommunications Union Statistics (ITU), by 2009 at least seventy-seven countries boasted mobile penetration of more than one hundred lines per one hundred inhabitants, while the United States was still at 94 percent. Indeed, many of these countries are small or lacking a wireline infrastructure, but among them are large nations such as Russia (163.62), and developed economies such as Germany (127.79), the United Kingdom (130.55), and Finland (144.59), to name a few. When it comes to broadband penetration, the United States has been consistently lagging behind members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the original fifteen members of the European Union (EU15) and even countries that traditionally had no prior success in ICT development and boast fewer financial resources than the United States.4 In fact, between 2000 and 2006, the United States dropped from fourth to fifteenth place in broadband deployment among the OECD “rulers of thousand s , hun d r e d s , fi fti e s , an d te n s” 115 countries and between the end of 2005 and the end of 2006, the United States stood twentieth among the thirty-four OECD members in the growth rate of broadband adoption.5 Upon President Obama’s inauguration, the United States was...