Matt Yglesias

Where’s My Fast Broadband?

For the life of me, I’ve never understood the argument that America’s low population density explains why our broadband is so slow. If it were the case that American broadband was slow on average this might be the explanation. But New York City is really dense! Much denser than Stockholm. And yet the broadband is faster in Stockholm. South Korea is about as dense as New Jersey, but the broadband’s way faster in South Korea. Perhaps it’s not feasible, at this point, to deploy ultra-fast broadband across the entire United States. But this doesn’t explain why the densely populated parts of the United States don’t have state-of-the-art broadbrand. The reason we don’t have state-of-the-art broadband is that we haven’t made the regulatory policies and public investments that would bring it about. In part, perhaps, because the consumer surplus of quality internet connections outpaces the available private profits.

Note that this is precisely analogous to certain tired arguments over mass transit. It’s true that given the U.S.’s low average population density compared to the Netherlands, that it’s not realistic for us to have as much mass transit as they have. But this doesn’t do anything to explain why a fairly dense city like Los Angeles should have third-rate mass transit. LA doesn’t have modern streetcar lines because instead of upgrading the old ones to modern technology over time, they tore them up! Everyone understands why there’s no subway in Montana—that’s not the issue.

Policy Solipsism: Broadband Policy Edition

If you ask me, one of the most disturbing trends in American public discourse is the incredibly provincialism and solipsism of a lot of our policy debate. The idea that other countries are doing better than we are in various ways is totally off the radar. Instead, when foreign countries are mentioned at all you get stuff like this:

“We have fundamental philosophical differences. We’re in an era of unfunded liabilities,” said John Culberson , R-Texas. “This stimulus is really a Trojan horse. It’s part of a plan that would turn the United States into France.”

France! A country so impoverished that its citizens are fleeing in droves, washing up on our shores desperate to experience the good life as it’s lived in suburban Houston.

I was reminded of that by this post from Tim Lee pointing out that broadband internet access in the United States is a lot better and cheaper than it was nine years ago so he “can’t get too upset about the possibility that in 2018 Americans might be limping along with 2 gbps broadband connections while the average Japanese family has a 20 gbps connection.” I, for one, am pretty upset about that possibility. The United States isn’t a poor country dealing with some objective shortfall of national resources. And yet across a whole variety of dimensions—from broadband speed to train quality to the cleanliness of streets to life expectancy to the crime rate—we fall far short of standards that are reached elsewhere. What we do have, on the other hand, is the richest multi-millionaires in the world. And an awful lot of people’s first instinct is to try to explain these things away or explain why it would be impossible to bring some of these quality of life features to the United States.

It seems to me people would do better to get more upset.

Broadband Stimulus

When talking about the idea of doing some infrastructure investments as part of a stimulus package, I’ve mostly focused on things like transportation infrastructure and our sorry electrical grid. But my friend Julian Sanchez has an informative report out about a coalition of telecom firms and advocacy groups that have often clashed with the telecoms in the past over regulatory issues coming together to advocate expenditures on enhancing the country’s broadband infrastructure.

That sounds fine to me, though my understanding (possibly somewhat out of date since I last looked at this a few years ago) is that the largest impediments to getting really fast broadband in the United States are more regulatory in nature than physical. In other words, technology exists and could be deployed and even is being deployed to some extent but it’s all being done at a snail’s pace because there isn’t much competition.