Almost every great public initiative in America’s history, the electrification of rural communities, the creation of the interstate highway system or the 60s-era mission to the moon, started with a powerful vision and the political leadership to get it done.

We need both as we face a challenge to reawaken our democracy and drive economic growth in a world where America’s greatest commodity is its people.

This challenge, of course, is delivering high-speed Internet access to everyone.

And it’s no small lift as we have already dug ourselves a hole. Access to broadband today is held in the grip of the cable and phone cartel. This duopoly controls access for more than 98 percent of online American homes. And it’s the main reason why American pay far more for much slower speeds than what’s available in the rest of the developed world.

Sharing the Broadband Dividend

It has put us at a tremendous disadvantage – one that has been widely documented. But what’s alarming is new information about the demographics of access – the so-called “digital divide.” According to new analysis by Free Press, only 35 percent of U.S. homes with less than $50,000 in annual income have a high-speed Internet connection.

And the broadband dividend is not paying out equally. Only 40 percent of racial and ethnic minority households in the United States have access to broadband, while 55 percent of non-Hispanic white households are connected.

“The digital divide is alive and well,” Van Jones, the founder of Green For All, said during yesterday’s launch of InternetforEveryone.org – a new initiative to solve America’s gaping broadband access problems. “There’s a whole section of people who have not even caught up to where we are now and are in grave danger of being left behind.”

“As we create new entertainment and news for the Internet we want as large and diverse an audience as possible,” Said Michael Winship, president of the Writers Guild of America – East. “And the best way to do that is by supporting Internet freedom — access to high-speed Internet for everyone.”

Like Hot Water

“Why Internet for all? I think Internet access is required for full participation in society today. Maybe it’s not as basic as water, but it’s definitely as basic as hot water,” Robin Chase, the founder of Zipcar, said.

According to Chase, Internet access is fundamental to maintaining a high quality of life and for addressing such pressing social problems as America’s energy dependency.

“When you add the amount of money the average American spends on Internet bandwidth and their cell phones, it’s almost as much as Americans spend on energy, their cars and heating oil,” Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu said.

The oil problem has similarities to our bandwidth problem, Wu added. “Production is controlled by a tiny cartel that sets prices high and keeps them there. And so we have a similar economic and structural problem … and something needs to be done about it.”

Getting Beyond Rhetoric

Returning to the top of international rankings would translate into millions of new jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in increased economic activity for the United States.

For good reason, other developed countries have enacted comprehensive national plans to connect more of their citizens to a fast, affordable and open Internet. The U.S. stands doesn’t have a plan or the leadership to get it done.

We do have national broadband rhetoric, though. In 2004, President Bush pledged “to have a universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007.”

As if on cue, last year, Mr. Bush’s chief Internet officer, John Kneuer, declared “mission accomplished” — that all the international surveys were misleading and that the “free market” had ensured that Americans across the country enjoy real choice in high-speed Internet access.

What he and his White House compatriots refuse to acknowledge, though, is that a free market approach for Internet services in the U.S. is a chimera. The only hand in play here belongs to the phone and cable duopoly and a government that’s been held in their thrall for too long.

The real solution is a little more nuanced.

Neanderthals and the Three Legged Stool

During the launch of InternetforEveryone.org, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein described himself as a “frustrated policymaker” in Washington. “At the FCC I have a stack of proposals on my desk about a national broadband policy,” he said. “What we’re lacking is the leadership to actually implement those policies.”

Adelstein looks at a successful broadband plan as a three-legged stool:

“You have businesses, who will invest and drive deployment, you have the government on all levels hopefully working in concert, and then you have the public both directly involved and through public interest groups like this coalition.”

“This is social infrastructure,” Professor Larry Lessig said:

“What’s bizarre about where we are in the history of building infrastructure is that this is the first time we have tried to undertake the building of fundamental social infrastructure against the background of a Neanderthal philosophy, which is that you don’t need government to do anything.

“That Neanderthal philosophy has governed for about the last eight years, and it has allowed us to slide from a leader in this field to an abysmal position. And it’s about time when people recognize that of course the private sector has a role, a central role, maybe the most important role, but it’s never enough.

Making it Happen

InternetforEveryone.org is bringing together public interest and for-profit institutions to raise public awareness of the digital divide and spark the political will to address this massive problem.

Closing the broadband digital divide should have been a real national priority for the past eight years. We can’t afford NOT to make it a priority for the next eight. While our status as world technology leader went into free fall, Congress sat on the sidelines and the White House ducked and dodged.

There’s a reason for that. Getting everyone connected is a political issue at its core. The policy process has been dominated thus far by the broadband incumbents and their well-heeled lobbyists. These companies prefer our lagging Internet status quo to public involvement, choice and real innovation.

And the community that uses the Internet is only now beginning to get organized to guide the debates that will shape its future. We clearly need to do more organizing with the tens of millions of people in communities that can’t access the Web.

Getting us back on top will require a national broadband framework that is supported by those beyond the Beltway – who stand to gain the most from a national broadband agenda that promotes access, choice, openness and innovation. And we need bold leadership willing to reject the conventional political wisdom and explore real solutions.

NPR’s Brian Lehrer today found that there is an issue in 2008, on which many from both the left and the right agree.

It happens about 23 minutes into an interview with Glenn Reynolds of right-leaning blog Instapundit.com and Adam Green of the progressive MoveOn.org Civic Action.

Lehrer had focused the topic on the Internet and presidential campaigns, but the conversation soon turned to Net Neutrality and its impact on what Green called “people-powered” Internet and “people-powered” politics.

MoveOn’s Green said that YouTube and online video are “revolutionizing the way that everyday people can put together political messages and spread them rapidly.”

Net Neutrality is central to this revolution, Green added, calling it an issue that “more enlightened people on both the left and right support.”

Lehrer asked Instapundit blogger-in-chief Reynolds to verify that. Said Reynolds:

“A lot of people on the right who don’t favor Net Neutrality, or are skeptical of it, are worried that it’s going to lead to regulating Internet providers as common carriers the way that you regulate the telephone companies and that that’s a bad idea.

“I understand the point but the fact is that most of them are common carriers, the telephone company that provides my DSL certainly are already. And the genius of the Internet has been that it is a level playing field. When you go to visit my site, when you go to visit the New York Times site, when you go to visit MoveOn.org or whatever, they’re sort of all out there in the same place and you can seemlessly go from one to another and that really does elevate the little guy.

“And the concern, which I think is completely legitimate, is that if big sites can engage in what’s basically payola for better treatement people will start visiting them more because they load faster and start paying less attention to troublesome little guys such as myself because our sites don’t load as well, don’t display as well, and don’t play on the same field.”

Lehrer was surprised by the “loaded” reference to payola, describing the negative impact radio payola has had on his industry. “The old payola scandals were when record companies would pay radio stations bribes in effect to give their records more airplay rather than just going on what was popular,” he said. Lehrer asked Reynolds whether he truly meant to draw such a parallel.

“I was very consciously drawing that analogy, yes,” Reynolds responded.

Comcast’s discriminatory practices against peer-to-peer traffic are so blatant and nefarious, even AT&T and Verizon – no friends of Network Neutrality – think the cable giant has gone over the line.

The companies have publicly lambasted Comcast for its behavior, and are calling on the FCC to take action. Tom Tauke, executive vice president of public affairs and policy for Verizon, said, “It’s in the best interest of the industry for the FCC to make a judgment on the Comcast/BitTorrent case.”

The case against Comcast is easy and straightforward, and even industry groups agree that one of their own should be reprimanded. So why hasn’t the FCC acted already?

The FCC has rules against discriminatory practices, and they should be enforced quickly. Kudos to the FCC for doing field hearings to ask the public for input on Internet policy. Now the case has been made – it’s time to act. There’s not a moment to lose, since Comcast is still discriminating, and the public is suffering the consequences.

It’s no big conundrum, and AT&T and Verizon agree – the FCC must impose their anti-discrimination rules now.

As hard as it may be for some to believe, last Saturday night an FCC commissioner was transformed into an Internet superstar.

Copps at NCMR

Twitter traffic of Commissioner Michael Copps’ speech in Minneapolis on Saturday rocketed to the top of the popular network — garnering more mentions than “Obama,” “Clinton,” “Big Brown” and all other newsworthy terms posted that day by the millions of users of the viral Internet service.

And for good reason. On Saturday night Copps told an enthusiastic crowd of thousands at the National Conference for Media Reform that “reform is coming to Washington, DC, and my goal is to make media reform one of the first out of the gate.”

A Down Payment on Internet Freedom

Copps’ introduced a reform initiative, which he called the “Down Payment on Media Democracy.” According to Copps, the Down Payment has two parts: “Internet freedom” and “better TV and radio.”

Talking about Internet freedom, Copps was clear: We must have enforceable principle of Internet non-discrimination.

“If you want to blog about local politics, should you really have to pay some huge gate-keeper for every reader you get? Should anyone be telling you what you can read and see and hear on the Internet? Which applications you can run? Which devices you can use?” Copps asked, citing the Net Neutrality terms signed on to by AT&T as a condition of their merger with BellSouth.

Real Network Neutrality

“AT&T doesn’t seem any worse for wear,” he said. “But that commitment expires at the end of the year. It’s time that we had a Net Neutrality principle that applies to all gatekeepers. Real Network Neutrality.”

“I know we can get this done,” Copps concluded. “So tonight, moving forward in hope, let us move forward in a mutual pledge to get that Down Payment and then push on to the final installment. Commissioner Adelstein and I will be doing everything we can, but what really makes it happen is you.”

Copps views were echoed in several keynote addresses over the weekend.

Veteran news anchor Dan Rather:

“We need to ensure that the Internet, where free speech reigns and where journalism does not have to pass through a corporate filter, remains free.”

Legendary journalist Bill Moyers:

“Inspired by Free Press, SavetheInternet, a bipartisan coalition, has become crucial to the fight to keep the worldwide web a bastion of free speech. The fate of the cyber commons is up for grabs here… The future Internet must have open architecture. We’ll lose that fight without you because the only antidote to the power of money in Washington is the power of organized people at the net roots.”

Senator Byron Dorgan:

“We have to understand that Net Neutrality or what I call Internet freedom is unbelievably important … and there are people who have now decided that they want to become gatekeepers. They want to have toll booths,” he said. “What if there are a couple of kids in a dorm room tonight, perhaps in Minneapolis, maybe in Bismarck and they have an idea? Will they ever get there? Will they ever get past those who really want to establish gates? The way the Internet has worked, the way it has always worked, is we have open architecture — a free Internet. Anyone can go anywhere, at any time. That’s the open architecture that we want to protect and preserve in the Internet.”

(Photo courtesy of salvationinc, Flickr)

While a generation of connected Americans can barely remember life without Google or iTunes at our fingertips, millions of others are still stuck beyond the grid — unable to send an e-mail to a loved one, look for a job online, check up on their local city council or research a book report for school.

The state of the Internet, and our fight to safeguard and spread access to the Web, was the focus of a crowded panel discussion at the National Conference for Media Reform last Friday in Minneapolis.

The discussion comes on the heels of a survey released late last month showing the U.S. to be more of a broadband backwater than a world leader. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Internet access and service in America have slid to 15th place among 30 developed nations, a drop from our 12th place ranking in 2006.

Free Speech and the Free Market

At the same time, policymakers in Washington have been divided over how to ensure free speech over new digital media. The largest network providers — companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast — have said market dynamics compel them not to police their networks too heavily. Internet rights advocates, such as those of us at the SavetheInternet.com Coalition, aren’t buying it — calling for baseline legal protections to prevent these companies from blocking or degrading the free flow of user information over the Web.

“People have begun to realize that any threat to the Internet is a threat to the whole national infrastructure,” said Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu, a panelist. “This has made Internet issues real political issues — and this is a good thing.”

There are no real free-market dynamics guiding the Internet. For more than a decade, Internet policymaking has been controlled by well-heeled lobbyists acting on behalf of the powerful phone and cable companies.

For all their talk about the free market and deregulation, the telecommunications giants work aggressively to force through rules that protect their market duopoly, close the door to new market entrants and competitive technologies, and increase their control over the content that travels across the Web.

The Failed Duopoly

The net result has been the emergence of a phone and cable duopoly that controls broadband access for more than 98 percent of homes.

Wu, who coined the term “Network Neutrality,” warned that we are re-entering an age of national monopoly similar to the early 20th Century. He added that, “Media industries are consolidating to a degree that we have never seen before.”

According to Wu, it’s reached a point where we either have to act to heavily regulate these monopolies, or look for alternative ways to get Americans connected to the Internet.

“This country is too addicted to the phone companies and cable companies as a source of bandwidth,” Wu said. “I think we’re in the early days of a movement — not unlike the one in the alternative energy world — to develop alternative, realistic sources of bandwidth that are under our control.”

Our Last Hope

Wu pointed to experiments with grassroots fiber-optic networks, municipal Wi-Fi and innovations using unlicensed spectrum such as white spaces.

Susan Crawford, the founder of OneWebDay, said the “Titanic battle” for the future of the Internet pits two competing forces against one another: the network operators, and groups and people who want to democratize the Web.

Crawford said the network operators allege that the Internet is in danger of collapse, mostly because “they’re not making enough money off of it so they have to push it back into a managed box.”

“On the other side are those that understand the great social change that an open and free Internet can bring about, and the empowerment it can bring for everybody around the world,” she said.

The Right Policies, Right Now

Crawford has launched OneWebDay to create a global constituency that cares about the future of the Internet “and will rise up when stupid policies come down the pipe towards us, backed by very powerful incumbents.” Crawford pointed to looming threats from powerful interests in Hollywood — and also among law enforcement and network operators.

The policy decisions that we make in the next couple of years will determine the type of Internet we’ll have for generations to come. There was broad consensus among people at this discussion that now is the time to get started to protect our most fundamental rights online.

You can see them parked outside of libraries and coffee shops in towns scattered across the hills of Western Massachusetts. They’re identified by the blue glow emitting from inside their cars.

Across the state, 95 towns have limited or no access to high-speed Internet. People in Massachusetts’ more rural western half have had to resort to a game of Internet hide and seek — searching out wireless hotspots, with laptops plugged into car lighters and nestled in their laps.

Building the Net Superhighway

Maureen Mullaney of Ashfield, Massachusetts, lives in one of these under-served towns. She seeks out these roadside hotspots so her children can do research for school projects. “How silly is it that in this day and age you have to get in your car, drive to the general store so your daughter can researchers the rivers and traditional clothing of Chile?” she asks.

“Even if every person in my town is screaming out loud for high-speed Internet that would still just be 1,800 people.”

But Maureen and her neighbors are not alone. While a generation of Americans can barely remember life without a Google search at our fingertips, millions of households still can’t send an e-mail, let alone pay bills online, check the weather or conduct research for school.

A Broadband Backwater

The shortcomings of the U.S. broadband market are tremendous – more than 10 million U.S. households remain un-served, while nearly 50 million homes are priced out of subscribing to broadband services – and the social and economic consequences are dire.

Late last month, yet another global survey confirmed this, showing the U.S. to be more of an Internet backwater than a world leader. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Internet access and services in America have slid to 15th place among 30 developed nations, a drop from our 12th place ranking in 2006, and from fourth in 2001 when the OECD began its international survey.

In real terms this means Internet users in Japan pay little more than half the price (65 cents to the dollar) for an Internet connection that’s 20 times faster than what’s commonly available to people in the United States.

Yet people in the U.S. are still stuck off the grid, or with unreliable and slow dial-up, with little relief in sight.

A Man, No Plan, The Internet

The reasons for America’s digital decline are many. But first is this: Other developed countries have enacted comprehensive national plans to connect more of their citizens to a fast, affordable and open Internet. The U.S. stands alone among OECD countries without a national broadband program.

We do have national broadband rhetoric, though — and an army of well-heeled apologists to trumpet “successes” and gloss over problems. And the damage is now beginning to show.

In 2004, President Bush pledged “to have a universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007.”

As if on cue, last year, Mr. Bush’s chief Internet officer John Kneuer declared “Mission Accomplished” — that all the international surveys were misleading and that the “free market” had ensured that Americans across the country enjoy real choice in high-speed internet access.

The Hand of the Duopoly

Kneuer’s Pontius Pilate approach is now familiar to the Bush administration –America’s problems will disappear with a wave of the magical hand of the free market.

What he and his White House compatriots refuse to acknowledge, though, is that a free market approach for Internet services in the U.S. is a chimera. The only hand in play here belongs to the phone and cable duopoly, which controls broadband access for more than 98 percent of homes.

The net effect of this duopoly is a dearth or real choices; allowing providers like AT&T and Comcast to exact high prices from Internet users, while delivering connections that are too slow — and, often in the case of cable, too congested – to meet growing demand.

The market imbalance is beginning to take its toll. A Brookings Institution study counts 300,000 new American jobs each year for every 1 percent increase in broadband adoption.

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and president, put it a different way. “We’re pretty far behind and for us it’s a big problem because we have our main headquarters in the U.S. and our employees have only a one megabit service,” he told me during his recent visit to Washington.

“If we’re thinking about building the next generation of Internet services they’re not going to be on one megabit services, they’re going to be 100 megabit services and we’re not going to end up developing those… In terms of the U.S. being competitive, it’s very important for us to be leading that rather than following. And we show no signs of being able to do that.”

Free Market Mumbo Jumbo

Our inability to truly wire the nation is itself the result of poor policy decisions. For decades, U.S. communications legislation has been held captive by lobbyists working for–you guessed it– the phone and cable companies.

These Internet service providers are among the most prolific spenders in Washington. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbyists, campaign contributions, P.R. firms and paid junkets to help ensure that special rules are written in their favor.

For all their talk about the free market, the cable and telephone giants work aggressively to force through regulations that protect their market duopoly, close the door to new market entrants and competitive technologies, and increase their control over the content that travels across the Web

Japan Pries Open Its Market

In 2000, Japan faced a similar dilemma – an Internet industry stifled by the heavy hand of a few network gatekeepers. But the government responded by pulling together the nation’s leaders from the pubic and private sector to launch an “e-Japan strategy” aimed at connecting 40 million of Japan’s 46 million households within five years.

The Japanese government quickly moved to create a highly competitive private sector by compelling regional telephone companies to open their residential lines to wholesale access by other competitors. They also adopted policies to prevent the type of online discrimination that has reared its head recently in the U.S.

In 2001, Japan counted only 2.2 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants. By mid-2004, ultra-high-speed broadband connections were available to more than 80 percent of Japan’s citizens. By 2006, Japan declared that it had surpassed the broadband goals of e-Japan and was ready to launch its next national strategy, called “u-Japan“. The “u” takes the nation’s broadband beyond “ubiquitous,” to become “universal,” “user-oriented,” and “unique.”

Getting Behind a Big Idea

Free Press’ own research found that most of the countries with similar universal and open access policies had nearly twice the level of broadband penetration as those that did not.

The OECD seems to agree. “Governments providing money to fund broadband rollouts should avoid creating new monopolies,” according to its report summary. They recommended that any public broadband infrastructure “should be open access, meaning that access to that network is provided on non-discriminatory terms to other market participants.”

Public policy should be designed to make it profitable for corporations to behave in ways that better serve both the free market and the public interest. And we’re seeing more and more from international examples that that requires a shared vision with a light but clear legislative touch. (This issue will be widely discussed this coming weekend as Internet activists, visionaries and innovators come together in Minneapolis at the National Conference for Media Reform).

When President Eisenhower set Americans to work building the nations’ Interstate Highway System he mobilized members of Congress from both sides of the aisle to appropriate federal funds and create corporate incentives for the construction of 41,000 miles of new roads. It was the largest infrastructure project in American history to that point, but the $25 billion in federal money set aside to build the nations main arteries yielded an almost immediate boost to our economy.

The construction of a universally accessible Internet superhighway ranks as important today, and it can be accomplished with even stronger collaboration between the public and private sector.

Future policymakers who are serious about America’s well-being should learn from our failings and from success in other countries so we can deliver the vast benefits of an open connection to every American. It’s time we started construction.

(photo Courtesy of Pete and Genevieve on Flickr)

The fight for Network Neutrality is spreading as quickly as a flu through a day care. Everybody’s got a touch of open-Internet fever.

Activists in the US aren’t the only ones trying to keep the Internet healthy and robust – our northern neighbors are pushing back against attempts from corporations to block and discriminate against online content in Canada.

Rally at Parliament Hill

Last week, Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) introduced legislation to the House of Commons designed to enshrine Net Neutrality principles into law. The bill would amend Canada’s Telecommunications Act and “prohibit network operators from engaging in network management practices that favor, degrade or prioritize any content, application or service transmitted over a broadband network based on its source, ownership or destination, subject to certain exceptions.”

The bill comes on the heels of national outrage after the country’s largest Internet service providers – Bell Canada and Rogers Communications – were caught limiting customers’ access to the Internet. Sound familiar? The move is straight out of the playbook of ISPs in the U.S. who have been vying for “content management” control of the Internet.

Even more alarming, it was recently revealed that Bell Canada was using deep packet inspection technology to steer, shape and throttle access to the Web.

Just one day before the NDP introduced Network Neutrality legislation, activists held a rally on Parliament Hill calling for government action. Led by the Campaign for Democratic Media and SaveOurNet.ca, protesters called for three specific Net Neutrality principles: competition, innovation and consumer rights.

As the debate in Canada moves forward, it looks like we share more in common with our neighbor than Niagara Falls – on either side of the border, people want an open Internet and a vibrant democracy.