Reforming Telecom Policy for the Big Broadband Era

All new media, taught Marshall McLuhan, are destined to subsume and extend all old media, and to use the old media as their content, much like large fish filling their stomachs with small fish. The fish metaphor belongs to me, not McLuhan, since he was rarely so dull in his imagery.

The big fish of today is Big Broadband – access to the Web at 10 to 100 megabits per second for homes and 1 to 10 gigabits per second for businesses. The small fish are broadcast, DSL, cable modem, and voice.

The questions are not whether Big Broadband will swallow the fish, and perhaps the whole ocean, but how, when and by whom will the swallowing be done? Who will create value and who will capture it? How much capital will regulation and market failures cause to be wasted in the process? Lastly, will we include all Americans in the new medium, so as to create community and greater social value? And if all Americans, rich and not rich, urban and rural, are eventually weaved into the fabric of Big Broadband, will that happen at more or less the same rate for all, or will Big Broadband be distributed like the benefits of the Big Tax Cuts of 2001 – that is, on a trickle down basis.

The answers to these questions will define not only Information and Communications Technology (“ICT”) policy, but also a major part of America’s domestic and economic policy.

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