Intellectual Property Law

American exception: telecommunications policy

By Susan Crawford

During 2007-2008, The New York Times ran a terrific series of articles by Adam Liptak about legal stances that the US takes alone:  convicting juveniles as adults and sentencing them to life, making accomplices as liable as the killer for murders committed during felonies, allowing bail bondsmen to do business, having less than 5 percent of the world?s population but almost a quarter of its prisoners, electing judges, hiring partisan expert witnesses..

Today’s release of the Berkman Center’s thoughtful and exhaustive report, Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transition and policy from around the world, adds high-speed Internet access policy to the list of American exceptions.

Some of the report’s highlights:

• Across many sets of rankings published by a variety of actors, the US is a weak performer on prices for high-speed access.  Prices in this country are high and speeds are relatively slow.  US performance has declined relative to other countries.
• There is a very broad consensus in developed countries outside the US that open access policies requiring shared infrastructure are both necessary (to competition, ubiquity, lower prices, higher speeds) and work.  These policies prompt competition by lowering barriers to entry, thus enabling lower prices and higher speeds.
• Greater fiber penetration is a goal of many countries, because of its vastly higher capacity and upgradeability.
• High-speed Internet access is related to economic growth.
• Incumbents all over the world always complain about open access, but professional, persistent regulators succeed.
• There are many different ways to implement open access.
• The theory that unbundling deters investment is not proven by either empirical or theoretical literature.  Nor have the theories that attempt to explain why unbundling works been proven.  But countries that have effectively pursued open access have done better than the US has over the last few years - so it’s very valuable to compare the case studies in those countries to our situation.

This report is an enormous contribution.  It shows that the US has much to learn from the rest of the world.

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on February 16, 2010 (boomark / email).