^{Democracy & Technology Blog} Krugman’s Depression Economics

Paul Krugman’s got it all backwards. He says the deregulatory policies of the Bush FCC have plunged the U.S. downward on the international broadband rankings. In fact, we are just starting to catch up after the long hangover from the Clinton-Gore-Hundt policies of the late-90s. The U.S. began with a lead in Internet access because we invented the Net. But the Hundt FCC quickly gave away our lead with a flurry of anti-investment price-controls and complicated mandates. The result was the telecom crash of 2000 and several more years of heavy fall-out that depressed Silicon Valley and global technology. After regrouping, the U.S. is now on the verge of a massive rebound in broadband technology and access, thanks in large part to the elimination or relaxation of Hundt’s onerous rules. Verizon and AT&T are now building the world’s most advanced fiber-optic networks to homes, businesses, and neighborhoods, and the cable TV companies will be forced, through competition, to follow suit and yet again upgrade their already capacious hybrid-fiber-coax nets. These are projects that cost many tens of billions of dollars and take years to complete. But after 10 long years, after an essentially wasted decade, just as we are finally crawling out from the rubble of the Clinton-Gore broadband cataclysm, as we are about to scale the gigabit hills and climb the international broadband comparisons, Krugman swoops in, hoping to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Just hope your house gets connected before Krugman gets his hyper-regulatory wish.
-Bret Swanson