Two (Radical?) Thoughts on Infrastructure
By Yochai Benkler

We hear a lot about infrastructure investment today: roads and bridges, mostly. But we live in an information society and an information economy. We need investment in information infrastructure, and that, in the near term that is relevant for a recovery package, means massive public investment in Fiber To The Home (FTTH) and creating a fundamentally new system for adult education and its conversion into greater local involvement in education programs at local public schools.

Fiber to the Home

Sometimes, in the context of the need for infrastructure investment, we hear about communications infrastructure and broadband. Up to this point, however, this has meant some forms of subsidy or tax relief to current firms in the broadband business, and an increase in what the United States defines as "broadband" so that within two years we will define broadband as 10 megabits per second downstream to the home. To get a sense of how ambitious this is for the world's largest economy, consider that Japanese consumers have already been enjoying 100 megabits per second service for a few years. Future to the Back, I guess, more than Back to the Future.

The fundamental mistake is to take as given that communications infrastructure must be produced, from the ditch digging up, by private firms. No one imagines that we will privatize highway and bridge construction in order to update them. They are shared core infrastructure, that is run as a commons, and are maintained at public expense by private companies that employ workers, foremen, and managers, and whose employment fuels the economy. Why can't communications infrastructure be the same?

Link to con.