One of the biggest issues that I see in tech right now is the speed and price of American internet. As the second largest economy in the world and the sole superpower, you would imagine that we would have the best internet. Alas, the opposite is true. Among the 34 member countries of the OECD, the US has the fourth most expensive fixed-line broadband services. According to netindex.com, we rank 29th in the world for internet speed. How is the country that literally invented the internet, so far behind?
The biggest factor that is driving up costs and lowering speeds is the monopolistic status that our telecommunications companies have. In 1996, the Telecommunications Act was passed in an effort to foster competition by deregulating a lot of things. What happened instead was telecom companies dividing up the markets and creating agreements of no contest in these markets. This allows the telecom that owns that market to raise prices with little incentive to provide better service. Even when competitors, like Google Fiber, try to start up, the cost for moving into regions is so high that expansion is slow or stagnant.
So how do we fix this? Most agree that new forms of regulation could help. Looking at South Korea's model, they implemented very specific regulation for open access and continued to support startups over incumbents. I tend to lean more towards free market but in this situation, I see where regulation could be best. I think if the government can provide the infrastructure, we can charge a base access fee to those that wish to be providers (obviously showing no preference over one another). This a tricky problem and one that will take years to fix but I believe that if we do not work towards correcting it now, the stagnation will only set us further and further behind.
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