Broadband for America

By Michael K. Powell, Honorary Co-Chairman

A Federal Appeals Court decision has spurred a lot of discussion about the future of the Internet.

The court’s recent ruling that the Federal Communications Commission did not properly exercise its authority when it attempted to enforce its net neutrality policy against Comcast opens the door to a much wider-ranging discussion about the appropriate role of the FCC over the Internet. I hope the FCC will use the ruling as a jumping off point to do just that.

First things first. I don’t know anyone—carrier, content provider, consumer or congressman—that does not support an open Internet. The end-to-end nature of the Internet and the ability for creators to easily reach consumers and for every consumer to be an innovator is the very thing that gives the Internet its celebrated character. It’s good for consumers and equally good for business. Read more

The news this week that Google will be building and testing ultra-fast fiber-optic networks in selected cities is good news for customers and good news for the industry.   As I have said and written many times, the private sector provides the capital, which fosters competition, that allows expansion, leading to new jobs – not just new jobs in old companies, but new jobs in companies that did not, and could not, have existed before.

While it remains to be seen how widespread Google’s test will be, the FCC should take note that it is the extraordinary success that Google has enjoyed as a search and applications platform as well as one of America’s premiere advertising media that has generated the cash necessary to engage in this kind of high-capital cost experiment.

Google was incorporated in September, 1998 – just over a dozen years ago.  While doing a Google search (or Yahoo, or Bing for that matter) is possible over dial-up connections, there is no question that none of those search engines are as useful without a broadband connection to the internet.  It’s the network of networks which make content applications like Google possible.  Internet access makes Google possible.  And it’s private investment by broadband companies which makes future Google success stories possible.  

We are all familiar with the history of the internet from a DARPA project to two computers in California sending a few characters from a computer on one campus to a computer on another campus.  We remember that Yahoo began as a text-only catalog of new websites in the early-1990’s and the concept of the web browser, as we know it today, was developed at the University of Illinois which, along with the development of HTML as the de facto language of the web, has led us to where we are today. Read more