We have this unquestioning faith
that the market will always provide.
It turns out,
we've gotten ourselves to a point
where we are leaving behind
tens of millions of Americans,
and actually our entire country is suffering
from a digital divide between us
and countries in Asia and in Northern Europe.
It's a tragedy.
Okay.
Public interest technology—take one.
I've been very interested in the public-private line
throughout my career.
I had a grad student say to me the other day,
"Well, couldn't the private sector do whatever
government does and just do it better?"
And my fear is that we've lost the idea
that government actually helps people have better lives.
And particularly when it comes to Internet access,
the entire idea of having some regulatory
role for government
seems to have disappeared from the scene.
In order to fix this, we need to make sure that there
are people serving in government
who understand that, left to its own devices,
the private market is never going to provide us
with this indispensable thing for our lives,
which is persistent, cheap, ubiquitous
fiber optic Internet access everywhere we are.
We can't afford to have the country in this position where
these five giant players have essentially divided up
the high-speed Internet access market among themselves,
leaving people with very few choices and extremely
expensive and extremely second-class service.
Their incentives aren't aligned with public incentives.
We faced the same battle with both electricity and highways.
It took Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and tremendous national leadership
to ensure that electricity reached everyone
in the country.
It took Eisenhower,
in 1952, to ensure that highways
reached across the country.
This doesn't happen absent government involvement.
We've known this for the railroad, electricity,
water, telephone, and highways.
These same principles apply to high-speed Internet access.
Other countries get this.
There's a hundred percent fiber availability
at very low prices
in Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Norway.
We don't have that here and it's because
we've had no industrial policy of ensuring an upgrade
to fiber and making it available at a reasonable cost.
We need people at the table
who both understand deeply the role of government
and what the regulatory ideal is,
and also understand technology—
and can't be bamboozled
by the blandishments of AT&T
and Verizon and Comcast and Spectrum,
who keep saying,
"Don't worry, just trust us. We'll fix this for you."
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