The New York Times has an interesting article on South Korea’s broadband success story. As much as the high rate of broadband household connections attests to the success of their semi-interventionist government policy, it’s also an indictment of the semi-non-interventionism of American de-regulation, in particular the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which offered competition in spots, but kept monopoly power on the local level intact. One just has to look at the absurdity of an otherwise technologically-oriented city like Boston, where large portions of the city (like the North End) are incapable of getting broadband, while other neighborhoods (parts of Jamaica Plain and Cambridge) are capable of getting only one delivery method (cable or DSL).
The mixed experience we have may seem justified given the low profits and high failure rate the telecoms are now facing. But better connectivity would help our society and economy as a whole. Mind you, we shouldn’t inflate the stakes, as one expert quoted in the Times does:
“People must have access to high-speed Internet from home, as well as work,” said Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future, a technology industry forecasting group in Menlo Park, Calif., “or we won’t be full players in the global economy.”
The US will still be a full player in the global economy, even if we don’t all have broadband. But given the difficulty in pinning down what exactly drives productivity growth in our economy and what might in the future, it seems worthwhile investing our efforts in aiding the more pervasive spread of information.
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