Downloading An Alternate Broadband Reality

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration issued a report from the alternate reality of the Bush administration yesterday, cheering “the nation’s broadband success story.” Some outlets expressed surprise that the government has a broadband policy in the first place. As Mark Lloyd explained in a recent Science Progress report, Ubiquity Require Redundancy, despite President Bush’s suggestion in 2004 that the United States should have “universal, affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007,” we have nothing resembling this system.

Lloyd went on to explain the ineffective approach from decision makers on broadband access:

The increasing noise from Washington about the lack of a U.S. broadband policy obscures the fact that a policy choice was made by the Bush administration to rely entirely on “market forces” to determine how and where advanced telecommunications services would be deployed. That policy has failed.

As Free Press and Ars Technica pointed out, the the U.S. has fallen far behind other developed nations in broadband availability. Lloyd explained, “There is no credible dispute that the United States has fallen behind Canada and France and Japan and a dozen other industrial countries in broadband deployment.”

The policy of relying on “market forces” that the Bush administration claimed for seven years would propel broadband access is irresponsible and insufficient. Without a robust broadband network connecting urban and rural America, the country is not only less competitive in the global economy, we will be ill-prepared to respond to national security threats and natural disasters.

Image: High-speed providers in U.S. zip codes, from the NTIA report, “Networked Nation: Broadband in America.”

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