Some Wouldn’t Subscribe to Broadband Even If It Were Free, Economist Says
The reason some Americans don’t or won’t subscribe to broadband has nothing to do with FCC policies, Phoenix Center Chief Economist George Ford said Monday during a debate sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Some don’t subscribe because they don’t want broadband in their homes, Ford said. Others can’t because of costs.
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"Some people in this country would require payment to subscribe to broadband,” Ford said. “What a broadband circuit does is it brings every freak in the world into your house. If you have children you realize what a problem that is. In the state of Alabama, one of the number one reasons people don’t subscribe to broadband is because they do not want to bring pornography into their house. Some people just don’t want it.”
Cost is also a big issue, often not given full weight at the FCC in looking at why people don’t subscribe, Ford said. “There will be people who can’t afford it because they can’t afford gas to get to work. … Get out of the Beltway. There are poor people in this country."
Ford cautioned against giving too much weight to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development numbers that show the U.S. 15th in the world among developed nations on per capita broadband deployment. “Broadband per capita is a meaningless measure of comparative adoption,” he said. “I don’t care how many broadband circuits we have. I care what benefit we get from broadband adoption. What are the benefits thrown off by the connection and this may vary substantially from country to country.” A broadband connection in the U.S. has a gross domestic product (GDP) value 75 times the value of one circuit in Finland, he said.
ITIF President Robert Atkinson said broadband adoption numbers are complicated. The U.S. lags, in part, because fewer Americans have PCs at home -- 62 percent in the U.S., versus 75 percent in Sweden. “If we had the same level of PC ownership as the top six countries in the world on broadband access, we would actually rank fifth in the world on broadband adoption,” he said. “The real problem is not that we have bad broadband, expensive broadband or limited broadband. The real problem is … digital literacy and people who don’t know how to use [broadband] or won’t use it."
Build out is also more difficult in the U.S., Atkinson said. “It is a lot cheaper to deploy high-speed broadband in densely populated metros than in Washington, D.C., where I've got fiber to the home and I've got a quarter of an acre lot in Bethesda,” he said. “In South Korea, for example, 50 percent of the housing units in the county are multi-tenant, 12-25 stories tall.” Atkinson added, “We are behind, but really because of factors that have nothing to do with policy. … They have to do with geography. They have to do with computer ownership."
But Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, said the FCC is right to be worried about how the U.S. stacks up against other nations. “Clearly, rankings do matter and they are important indicators,” Meinrath said. “The overwhelming preponderance of evidence is all pointing to this exact same conclusion that the U.S. is seriously behind a growing number of other countries on broadband access. This isn’t actually about the sky is falling or imminent destruction. It’s about the slow and steady deterioration of U.S. competitiveness within an increasingly connected global economy."
The FCC is on the right track in seeking more and better data about broadband speeds and penetration, Meinrath said. The OECD numbers are “incomplete and can be refined and improved upon,” he said. “That’s entirely different than saying that they are a lie or should be dismissed outright. We have to move forward based upon the best available data that is in the public domain today. This is one of those data sets that’s out there that we can utilize.”
Meinrath said the OECD rankings are not alone in showing a problem: “We can argue about how fast we are sinking, but we are sinking. … Throughout Indian Country and rural America and communities about the country people who want broadband access and are willing to pay for broadband access don’t have access to any service provider."
Matthew Wood, Media Access Project associate director, agreed that the U.S. needs better, more independent data. “We don’t know what’s going on out there and that speaks for the need for the FCC and other governmental agencies to collect their own data,” Wood said. “We've relied for a long time on third-party sources, especially in the wireless area. … We've called for the government to collect its own data. Obviously, that has been a long time coming.”