Broadband Bad News Is Good News … but It’s Bad News

Headlines are meant to draw readers in, and this one did me: Broadband’s Double-Digit Growth Coming to an End.

Something’s gone wrong with broadband! Quick! To the BroadbandMobile!

In the next instant, I realized that something had actually gone right. You see, double-digit change in percentage-based figures can’t keep going forever. In fact, it can’t last more than about ten time-periods. (Because then you’d have 110% of something, which only makes sense in rock ‘n’ roll, where the loudest speakers go to 11.)

Adoption of broadband is slowing as people who want it have already got it and people who don’t want it persist in not having it. (Bizarrely to people who live every minute of every day online, some people live no minute of every day online - ever. That is perfectly acceptable.)

There is undoubtedly a tiny margin of poor people who can’t afford broadband. But “can’t afford” is subjective. Many prioritize things other than broadband to buy with their limited resources (which is fine - remember, sans broadband is an acceptable way to live).

But the news report says this is all bad news:

One of the goals of US public policy when it comes to broadband is to ensure all US residents have access to broadband. President Bush said in 2004 that he wanted universal access to broadband in 2007, an achievement that appears unlikely at this point.

But, but … if people who want it are getting it, and people who don’t are not, isn’t that universal access to broadband? Apparently not. Affordability has been added to the metric, moving the goal posts so that federal subsidies for telecommunications seem important once again. Our news report continues:

The Democrats think it’s a great idea too—one plank in their platform for the 2006 mid-term elections is universal access. The telecom law rewrite which may or may not emerge from Congress this year intends to further that goal by funding broadband in areas currently unserved via the Universal Service Fund.

That’s the Universal Service Fund about which Daniel Berninger asks: What have we gotten for our $50 billion dollars?

In the end, this report amounts to an argument that satiation is a basis for subsidy.

Huh.