Re: we're not number one

arthur wouk wrote:
guess why? allowing the monopolists to control as much of the internet as
they could.
The French Connections

By PAUL KRUGMAN

There was a time when everyone thought that the Europeans and the
Japanese were better at business than we were. In the early 1990s airport
bookstores were full of volumes with samurai warriors on their covers,
promising to teach you the secrets of Japanese business success. Lester
Thurows 1992 book, Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan,
Europe and America, which spent more than six months on the Times
best-seller list, predicted that Europe would win.

Then it all changed, and American despondency turned into triumphalism.
Partly this was because the Clinton boom contrasted so sharply with
Europes slow growth and Japans decade-long slump. Above all, however, our
new confidence reflected the rise of the Internet. Jacques Chirac
complained that the Internet was an Anglo-Saxon network, and he had a
point France, like most of Europe except Scandinavia, lagged far behind
the U.S. when it came to getting online.

What most Americans probably dont know is that over the last few years
the situation has totally reversed. As the Internet has evolved in
particular, as dial-up has given way to broadband connections using DSL,
cable and other high-speed links its the United States that has fallen
behind.

The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the
population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that
in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of
2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100
people than we did.

Even more striking is the fact that our high speed connections are
painfully slow by other countries standards. According to the Information
Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are,
on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections
are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both
countries than it is here.

As a result, were lagging in new applications of the Internet that depend
on high speed. France leads the world in the number of subscribers to
Internet TV; the United States isnt even in the top 10.

What happened to Americas Internet lead? Bad policy. Specifically, the
United States made the same mistake in Internet policy that California
made in energy policy: it forgot or was persuaded by special interests to
ignore the reality that sometimes you cant have effective market
competition without effective regulation.

You see, the world may look flat once youre in cyberspace but to get
there you need to go through a narrow passageway, down your phone line or
down your TV cable. And if the companies controlling these passageways
can behave like the robber barons of yore, levying whatever tolls they
like on those who pass by, commerce suffers.

Americas Internet flourished in the dial-up era because federal
regulators didnt let that happen they forced local phone companies to act
as common carriers, allowing competing service providers to use their
lines. Clinton administration officials, including Al Gore and Reed
Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, tried to
ensure that this open competition would continue but the
telecommunications giants sabotaged their efforts, while The Wall Street
Journals editorial page ridiculed them as people with the minds of French
bureaucrats.

And when the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the
F.C.C., the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever
they liked. As a result, theres little competition in U.S. broadband if
youre lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local
cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the
service is poor, but theres nowhere else to go.

Meanwhile, as a recent article in Business Week explains, the real French
bureaucrats used judicious regulation to promote competition. As a
result, French consumers get to choose from a variety of service
providers who offer reasonably priced Internet access thats much faster
than anything I can get, and comes with free voice calls, TV and Wi-Fi.

Its too early to say how much harm the broadband lag will do to the U.S.
economy as a whole. But its interesting to learn that health care isnt
the only area in which the French, who can take a pragmatic approach
because they arent prisoners of free-market ideology, simply do things
better.

(c) New York Times Company

I didn't have the nerve to post Krugman's article, arthur. You are a braver man than I.

Imagine. The frogs have internet access at three times or better our speed, and cheaper.

Wow.

That will rile some members of s.r. They will tell you the US is number one, and if anybody doesn't like that they can leave.

How about it, Justine? McDave?

Socialized internet, hmmph! Next thing you know, it will be socialized medicine.

It's liberalistic, that's what it is.
.

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