Blaine Harden’s article in today’s Washington Post extolling the virtues of Japan’s broadband deployment reads like a bad knockoff of the 90’s thriller “Rising Sun”? The facts are muddled together in a way that suggests we should drop what we are doing and follow the Japanese model. Of course, they also suggested this in “Rising Sun”? Too bad the Japanese economy collapsed leaving us solely with a so-so action picture starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes.
Muddling together a different regulatory framework with different geographic and technological realities paints a picture of despair that will no doubt be used by sound bite opportunists to take cheap shots at America’s broadband deployment. The piece suggests that compelling phone and cable companies to open up their wires to Internet providers would lead to an explosion in broadband. But we’ve already seen an explosion in broadband in the U.S. triggered by government policies based on market-based competition.
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