What’s the best way to deal with broadband?

Earlier this year Thomas Bleha published a provocative essay in Foreign Affairs that argued the U.S. had lost its technological leadership on the Internet:

[T]he United States has fallen far behind Japan and other Asian states in deploying broadband and the latest mobile-phone technology. This lag will cost it dearly. By outdoing the United States, Japan and its neighbors are positioning themselves to be the first states to reap the benefits of the broadband era: economic growth, increased productivity, and a better quality of life.

The September/October issue of Foreign Affairs has an interesting exchange of letters between Bleha and Philip Weiner on how best to rectify the situation. Bleha prefers “top-level political leadership” and “a national broadband strategy with bold deployment goals.” Weiner offers some excellent cautions to this strategy, including this fascinating bit of protectionist trivia:

The current fcc is not to blame for the lack of spectrum available for wireless broadband; U.S. broadband policy is hamstrung by a series of protectionist decisions that Congress and earlier commissions made years ago to govern the transition from analog to digital television. These decisions, intended to protect U.S. television manufacturers from Japanese competition, dedicated large swaths of spectrum to television broadcasters, which now reach only approximately 15 percent of their viewers “over the air” (as opposed to via satellite or cable connections)…. Bleha’s most troubling argument is his claim that the U.S. government should support certain technologies as part of its economic development strategy. To appreciate how risky the proposal is, consider the rise of advanced television and advanced mobile-phone service, both of which prompted regulatory strategies of the kind Bleha champions — and both of which ultimately backfired. It was the threat of Japan’s rise in the 1980s that spurred the course toward digital television that the United States still follows today. Washington committed wide swaths of spectrum to digital television, leaving U.S. mobile-phone providers with less bandwidth than they needed and only about half the amount of their European counterparts. The entire effort assumed that Americans would continue to watch television shows broadcast over the air. Yet over the past two decades, more U.S. consumers have begun to watch cable and satellite television, undermining the rationale for this expensive policy, which has also delayed innovation and imposed unjustifiable costs on the nation. Meanwhile, the European regulatory authority decided that the advent of digital, second-generation cell phones required governments to promote the technology known as the global system for mobile communications, or gsm, to ensure a compatible system throughout Europe. Wisely, the United States refused to favor any given technology and instead allowed marketplace experimentation to guide development. That strategy yielded the superior code division multiple access (cdma) technology developed by the California company Qualcomm, which uses spectrum more efficiently. The transition to the next generation of mobile telecommunications standards (which are based on cdma technology) will be much smoother for those U.S. companies that have adopted cdma, such as Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS, than for their European counterparts. Bleha also urges Washington to commit to supporting the installation of ultra-high-speed fiber connections to one-third of U.S. households by 2010. But his proposal may be foolhardy: even though fiber appears to be a promising technology today, such technologies have failed in the past for a variety of reasons, leaving investors with little to show for their money. (Remember digital audio tape recorders?) The U.S. government should be leery of endorsing particular technologies — or even certain transmission speeds — before it knows more about them and whether the market can support them.

Read the whole exchange.