OpenLeft.com, July 27, 2007
By Jim Baller

[Editor's note: This post is part of the last evening of blogging with Sen. Dick Durbin for his Legislation 2.0 experiment, where he is asking the public to join him in crafting broadband legislation. Click here for all the posts.]

Senator Durbin, thanks very much for inviting me to participate in your creative online forum. As you know, I strongly believe that the United States must promptly develop an aggressive national broadband strategy if it is to remain competitive in the emerging global economy. My partner Casey Lide and I have written two articles about this, the first discussing the need for such a strategy, and the second setting forth a specific 8-step action plan. These two articles and a great deal of other pertinent material, including information about what the leading nations are doing, are collected on the National Broadband Strategy page of our website, www.baller.com/national_broadband.html.

Over the last several months, a large and growing number of organizations and thought leaders have called for the United States to develop a national broadband strategy. At the same time, a small but vocal opposition has also emerged.

Some proponents of a national broadband strategy believe that its main purpose should be to ensure that all Americans will have prompt and affordable access to a reasonable minimum level of broadband, as well as the computers and training necessary to take advantage of it. Others focus on the need to accelerate the pace of deployment of high-capacity next generation networks with data speeds of at least 100 megabits per second. All agree that a national broadband strategy is necessary to preserve a free, democratic, and vibrant society — although they may have different ideas about how to achieve these goals.
The opponents claim that a national broadband strategy is unnecessary, as the United States is doing well enough in broadband deployment without one. They say that comparing the United States to other countries is uninformative and that studies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's report showing that the United States has recently fallen from 12th to 15th among the OECD's 30 members is unreliable and biased against the United States. They also contend that a national broadband strategy is infeasible in a society as complex as ours and will inevitably lead to re-regulation of the communications industry.

I disagree with the opponents on several levels. For one thing, in labeling the United States a "success," they rely heavily on the Federal Communications Commission's definition of broadband and methodology for measuring and reporting broadband. These approaches are now widely regarded as inadequate because treat a puny 200 kbps in one direction as "broadband" and pretend that a single broadband connection in a zip code indicates that broadband is available to everyone in the zip code. The opponents' criticisms of the OECD data are also unpersuasive, as the OECD's results are consistent with those of other prominent studies and show a clear and disturbing trend that has continued for several years — i.e., America's global ranking is steadily sinking rather than rising.

More important, we need to stop thinking about America's broadband deployment in a vacuum and view it from a strategic standpoint. In the years ahead, America's manufacturing industries are going to come under tremendous pressure from low-cost countries like China, India, Brazil, and many others. For example, focusing on China, Ted Fishman gave the following chilling forecast in his book China Inc.:

Future Shock

The most daunting thing about China is not that it is doing so well at the low-end manufacturing industries. Americans will be okay losing the furniture business to China. In the grand scheme of things, tables and chairs are small potatoes in the U.S. economy. The Japanese, for their part, have lost the television business. The Italians are losing the fine-silk business. Germans cannot compete in Christmas ornaments. Everyone but the Chinese will lose their textile and clothing factories. More worrisome for America and other countries is the contour of the future, where manufacturing shifts overwhelmingly to China from all directions, including the United States. Consumer goods trade on the surface of the world's economy and their movement is easy for consumers to see. The far bigger shift, just now picking up steam, is occurring among the products that manufacturers and marketers trade with each other: the infinite number and variety of components that make up everything else that is made, whether it is the hundreds of parts in a washing machine or computer or the hundreds of thousands of parts in an airplane. And then there are the big products themselves: cars, trucks, planes, ships, switching networks for national phone systems, factories, submarines, satellites, and rockets. China is taking on those industries too.

At the same time, our information-based industries are also going to face severe competitive pressure from nations that are now focusing on building high-capacity next generation networks, such Japan, South Korea, the Scandanavian countries, France, Singapore, and many others. If we do not keep apace — or better, forge ahead — in developing advanced telecommunications networks, we will suffer incalculable losses of opportunity and may never catch up.

So what is the United States to do? I am confident that our great Nation can survive and thrive in the emerging global economy, but to do so, we must act boldly and wisely without delay. We cannot expect our workforce to lower its wages and benefits sufficiently to compete with the low-cost countries, so we must prepare ourselves to compete effectively in cutting-edge high-technology industries.

Our 8 step plan is designed to achieve this, but whether it's our plan or someone else's plan, the main thing is that we need to get moving. We must set candid, clear, and comprehensive goals, and we must pursue them aggressively, with our public and private sectors working together in harmony, in a spirit of mutual respect.

Jim Baller is a Senior Principal of the Baller Herbst Law Group, a national law firm based in Washington, DC, and Minneapolis, MN. The Firm specializes in representing local governments and public power utilities in matters involving telecommunications, cable television, high-speed data communications, Internet access, wireless communications, right-of-way management, pole and conduit attachments, barriers to the public-sector entry into communications, bankruptcy, and antitrust. He is also a founder and spokesman of the Community Broadband Coalition, a broad consortium of associations, consumer groups, and high technology companies that support community broadband initiatives.

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