Author: When It Comes To High-Speed Internet, U.S. 'Falling Way Behind' : All Tech Considered : NPR - 0 views
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They're just like the railroad in that if you were a farmer in the 1890s, the only way to get your goods to market would be to work through the railroad. ... We just can't operate without it. They're also like them in that they're expensive businesses to build in the first place — it's very hard to come in and compete against one of these guys once they've built one of these giant networks. They're also like the railroad in that it takes intentional policy to make them stretch all the way across the United States.
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We seem to currently assume that communications access is a luxury, something that should be entirely left to the private market unconstrained by any form of oversight. The problem is that it's just not true in the modern era. You can't get a job, you can't get access to adequate health care, you can't educate your children, we can't keep up with other countries in the developed world without having very high capacity, very high speed access for everybody in the country. And the only way you get there is through government involvement in this market. That's how we did it for the telephone, that's how we did it for the federal highway system, and we seem to have forgotten that when it comes to these utility basic services, we can't create a level playing field for all Americans or indeed compete on the world stage without having some form of government involvement.
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"Unless somebody in the system has industrial policy in mind, a long-term picture of where the United States needs to be and has the political power to act on it, we'll be a Third World country when it comes to communications."