Still, broadband policy has become an issue for both Kerry and Bush, who have each made grand promises of expanded access to high-speed Internet. In a recent speech, the president called for broadband access in “every corner” of America by the year 2007. Kerry, who has yet to unveil a specific broadband policy, has hinted that making high-speed access universal would be a priority in his administration.
Bush and Kerry are simply the highest profile in a long line of politicians who have come to realize that promises of faster Internet service resonate with voters interested in modernizing the American infrastructure and improving the efficiency of the economy. What’s more, unlike so many campaign pledges, dramatic increases in broadband access in the short term are actually feasible, according to some experts. “It’s a reasonable goal,” says David Gabel, an economist at the City University of New York who’s written about the broadband market. “The technology’s been improving that allows people to increasingly provide products at lower and lower costs.”
The devil, of course, is in the details. Anyone who lives in heavily populated urban and suburban areas can attest to the tremendous surge in broadband availability in recent years. As cable television and local phone-service providers watched their market share plummet with the advent of wireless and satellite technology, they turned to high-speed Internet as a way of staying relevant in consumer life. As their competition drove prices down, many home Internet users living near urban centers abandoned dial-up for a high-speed connection.
But outside of heavily populated areas, the transition to broadband looks less like a revolution than an underattended high-school pep rally. The ’90s telecom boom, in which service providers emptied their coffers to put fiber-optic connections in the ground, never trickled out to scantly populated areas and, under the existing structure, local phone companies say further expansion makes little economic sense. “The real problem is in the rural areas that are served by Verizon, SBC, Quest and Bell South because they face less competition from cable in these areas …” says Gabel. “The return on an investment is going to be much greater in an urban area than it is in a rural area.”
Try explaining that, however, to the people who live in those rural areas. Denied fast Internet connections, these consumers see themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide. Their dissatisfaction goes beyond a psychic slight; in a world that seems to increasingly value productivity and speed, rural policymakers worry that lack of broadband access is leaving their areas out of the market for high-paced, high-paying jobs.
It’s that kind of anxiety, in part, that makes candidates pay a good deal of lip service to rural telecommunications policies. Bush’s plan is market-based–calling for deregulation on broadband spectrum and providing tax breaks to companies implementing a broadband infrastructure. Kerry is expected to advocate a universal access fee on households in heavily populated area that would be used to subsidize rural expansion of a more heavily regulated broadband market.
The divergence in the two candidates’ approaches will probably have little effect on all but the smallest sector of voters. But as more Americans start to make a mental link between the efficiency of the country’s economy with the speed with which they can access the Internet at home, politicians of the future could be forced to get more specific about expanding broadband policies on the stump. Of course, even if Bush or Kerry does deliver universal access in the next four years, he won’t have necessarily turned the U.S. economy into a lean, mean fighting machine. As Gabel points out, “If all we’re doing is providing subsidies so that people can have faster e-mail access or play more games at home, I’m not so sure that it does much to improve the productivity of our nation.”
