MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. Perhaps, it's part of your morning routine on Tech Tuesday. You fire up the computer, log on to your e-mail, check your favorite news site, maybe, watch a video on YouTube. If your Internet is speedy the entire time you're doing this, consider yourself lucky. In many parts of the U.S., fast broadband is still far from reality.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIAnd there's no consensus on how to solve that problem. Some say we should consider broadband a public good, akin to highways or clean water. Others say broadband is best provided by a competitive private sector. And as the debate continues, many warned that we're falling behind Europe and Asia, a fact that could affect the ability of our businesses to compete. Joining us to talk about broadband in the U.S. and who should be in charge of improving it is Brendan Greeley. He's a reporter with The Economist. He joins us from studios at The Economist. Brendan, good to talk to you again.

MR. BRENDAN GREELEYIt's good to talk to you again. Thanks for having me on.

NNAMDIJoining us from studios at Northwestern University is Shane Greenstein. He is the Hobbs professor of management -- I should say Elinor and Wendell Hobbs professor of management and strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He's a leading researcher in the business economics of computing, communications and Internet infrastructure. Shane Greenstein, thank you for joining us.

MR. SHANE GREENSTEINThank you for having me.

NNAMDIWe've been hearing for years that the U.S. is falling behind countries like South Korea when it comes to broadband, but, now, we're also hearing that countries like Italy and Portugal are ahead of us in the broadband race. Should we be concerned about this, Brendan?

GREELEYYes is the short answer. The longer answer is there are lots of different ways to measure how a country is doing in terms of broadband access. And one of the figures that's been spoken about a lot in the last several years in the U.S. is broadband penetration. That is how many people per 100 actually have and use broadband access. And on their -- sort of depending on how you measure it, we're ranked between 13th and 17th. So let's just say that we're 15th in the world. That necessarily in of itself isn't catastrophic. I think it's a problem, and I think it's embarrassing, but, at the same time, we are not nearly as compact as countries like South Korea. It's much more difficult to get fiber optic cable to various places in rural America. So I think we have a different topography. And, in of itself, the fact that we're 15th in penetration is not a problem.

GREELEYWhat I think is a problem is that we also score very poorly on price versus download speed. So I think that's something that we should be worried about because the Internet is a basic input to almost every business now. And the problem is not whether you have it or not, necessarily, but even when you do have it, and this is something that Shane Greenstein can elaborate on, but it's much more expensive than it is elsewhere in the world. And not only is it more expensive, you're not getting nearly the speeds that you're getting elsewhere. And I think that really is a problem. We're sort of artificially -- or because of our market structure, which is unique to the United States, we are raising the cost of a basic good that everybody uses to run their businesses. And that worries me.

NNAMDIShane Greenstein, how about you? Do you feel that the cost, in some ways, I guess, exceeds the value of what we're getting?

GREENSTEINWell, there's two sides to this. First thing, recognize that penetration today is mostly about non-use by certain households. So when we talk about the -- I agree with Brendan. It's not catastrophic for U.S. competitiveness that we have low penetration rates because what that's actually telling you about is about households who aren't using the Internet. The things that actually matters for competitiveness is whether you have businesses getting high speeds for the amount of money that they spend. And, now, what there -- there, we do have concerns.

GREENSTEINFirst of all, at the household level, what we're observing is a lot of adaption as a consequence of improvement in the quality and speed. And, then, after adaption, not much change in price or quality. And the concern is that that's the same thing that's happening at the business level. We actually don't know. We don't have any statistics to tell us what the price per unit of quality looks like for most of the major businesses in the U.S.

GREENSTEINThe impression is that in most in the major cities of the United States -- that is downtown Manhattan, downtown San Francisco, downtown Chicago, downtown Atlanta, Washington, D.C. -- would be the same. You have adequate supply. However, outside of a high-density location, like a downtown area, there's concern that you don't have much supply or competitive supply. And that's the concern that Brendan is alluding to. And that is a concern, and that's one that a lot of people are worried about.

NNAMDIWe're having...

GREELEYAnd I would add to that before we move on about cities. Even when you talk about good supply in cities, the speeds that are available in our cities pale in comparison to the speeds that are available elsewhere in the world. So I haven't looked at the numbers recently, but about a year ago, we had one or two cities in the top 25 in terms of speed...

GREENSTEINYeah.

GREELEY...and price in the world. And so when we talk about America having a different topography, it's very difficult to get Internet access to rural communities. That's completely true. But even if you correct for that, even if you just look at what we're providing to our cities and what other countries are providing to their cities, we're way behind.

NNAMDIBrendan, when we talk about that, most people equate broadband with fast Internet, but as you were pointing out, not all broadband is created equal. What does broadband mean for most Americans, and what does it mean, say, in a place like South Korea, as you pointed out...

GREELEYWell...

NNAMDI...where there's more density?

GREELEYSo the national broadband plan that was released earlier this year sort of scrupulously avoided defining what broadband is. So it made it much easier to declare victory. And by some standards if you read the plan -- and unfortunately I read the entire plan, that's my job -- you could sort of say, "Well, we won." By our own standards, we've got broadband penetration everywhere. But -- so the best guess the way that we've decided to define the U.S. is four megabytes up and down. So what that basically means is the ability to watch a YouTube video. That's sort of what you need in order to be able to do basic Web surfing without noticing a huge lag time in page loads and basic Web videos.

GREELEYSo most of what we do already is contained within four megabytes. And the other half of that is that's four megabytes down. It's one megabyte back up. So that doesn't matter if you're a consumer. For the most part, you're pulling down from the Internet. But if you're a business, you might be uploading and you might need a lot more bandwidth, and so we have much lower down bandwidth. So to give you a point of comparison, and there are lots of reasons why Korea is different from America, but they're talking about a hundred megabytes down and 50 up. And that's almost an order of magnitude. That is, in fact, an order of magnitude difference. From what we're used to and what we're sort of hoping to make available in the U.S. in the next 10 years is a twentieth of what is right now available in South Korea.

NNAMDIBut give us an idea, Brendan, of why this is? Well, first of all, allow me to have our listeners join the conversation by calling 800-433-8850. That's 800-433-8850. How fast is the Internet service where you live? Do you think that you're getting a good value for the service that's provided to you? You can also join the conversation at our website, kojoshow.org. Send us a tweet @kojoshow or an e-mail to kojo@wamu.org. But back to you, Brendan Greeley, what is the history of why broadband is the way it is here in the U.S.?

GREELEYWell, first of all, I worry about comparing us to places like Japan and South Korea because they're small countries, they're dense countries, and they chucked a whole lot of money over the last 10 years into making optic fiber available everywhere. And we just don't have that option, and we're not the same country as they are. That said, directly to your question, so there's this ad right now that's running on tech websites, and it's sponsored by AT&T, that says let's get past the net neutrality, yada, yada, yada. And there's a link to the AT&T policy blog.

GREELEYNow, I kind of agree with them, but I suspect that I don't agree with them for the reasons that they would state it. I think that they want the issue with net neutrality to just kind of go away. And I think that we should get past net neutrality because net neutrality is a red herring for a real problem, which is lack of competition in America. So we have, I think, a unique conception of the Internet in America, which is that we see it as a consumer good and not vital infrastructure.

GREELEYThere's a legal concept called common carriage. So it's ancient. It goes back to Rome. In Rome, if you were an innkeeper, even if you owned your inn, you were obligated to provide every traveler room and board at your inn. They had to pay you for it of course, but you couldn't refuse a traveler. So basically, the idea was Rome recognized that travel is so important to commerce that nobody could refuse passage to any person moving through. That didn't mean that that choked off industry. The innkeepers were still making money, but it didn’t mean they were obligated to let commerce pass. So this concept has been applied legally in a lot of different ways. It was applied to ferry operators in medieval England. It was applied to the railroads in America. It was applied to telephone service in America as well. And essentially, the metaphor is always -- if a bit of information is crucial to a piece of commerce, if you supply the infrastructure to let that information pass, you should be duly paid for it. There should be a market for that.

GREELEYBut you can't decide that you're going to discriminate against that one person, that one package, that one piece of information because it fits your business plan. So how that all relates to the Internet is almost uniquely, America has decided not to apply common carriage to the Internet. So we don't do it. Slovakia does not do it. Mexico doesn't do it. But every other country in the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development --so any other country basically that you can name, treats Internet -- the Internet as a common carrier. So it's applied in all sorts of different ways, but the concept essentially says that the Internet is so vital -- the infrastructure of the Internet -- optic fiber cables are so vital to the functioning of commerce that it is a slightly different good than other commercial goods.

GREELEYAnd so there are obligations on the operators of that infrastructure to provide free passage to all packets or to guarantee competition on the infrastructure. There are a lot of different ways to apply common carriage. But it basically says, this is important to the economy. So that is the debate that's going on right now. The underlying debate is not about network neutrality. It's about whether or not the telecoms operators in the United States will allow the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, to apply common carriage to what they do. And they, for obvious reasons, don't wanna be restrained. They don't wanna have to provide free passage to every packet of information that somebody wants to send over the Internet.

NNAMDIHere is Ross in Falls Church, Va. Ross, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

ROSSHey, Kojo. I have a Sprint broadband about 50 a month and it's only, I believe, 230 kbps. And it seems kind of a low-value proposition. And I'm just wondering if FiOS -- Verizon FiOS -- I don't -- I use it mostly at home. And I'm wondering between Wi-Fi and perhaps Verizon FiOS or something at 100 bucks a pop a month is a better proposition (unintelligible)

NNAMDIWell, at least you can discuss Verizon FiOS. I won't be able to get it in my neighborhood for at least another year. But Shane Greenstein, let's talk about what Ross is concerned about, and that's what people pay for broadband. He's paying about $50 a month right now and not getting enough speed. Talk about how the market has changed over the past decade. Until recently no one really had the answer to that question, right?

GREENSTEINYeah. So, you know, let's first notice what we just discussed. Fifty bucks a month, maybe $500 a year or $600 a year for a good that didn't even exist two decades ago. So, already, you know, the children are using something that the parents never had access to. And in, you know, in the history of economics, you don't see that very often. You don't see budget change that way so dramatically one generation to the next. So something that didn't exist is now becoming close to a necessity for many people.

NNAMDIAnd that said...

GREENSTEINThat said -- and that's why it's on everyone's agenda to try to discuss prices. There was an upgrade. So let's recognize what we just went through. In the last decade, we went through an upgrade from dialup to broadband. And that generated a lot of benefit for the users. It was as if you were getting a huge price break. It was as if you were getting a huge qualitative improvement. And the consequence of that was you could stay online longer. It was a better experience. It was better for the advertisers online because they had a better surfer to advertise to. And it was better for the e-tailers online because they had a better surfer to sell their goods to. That era of extensive growth, where household after household was upgrading, that era is close to an end. And now we have this issue. Everyone's got this broadband and they're asking themselves, well, how come this isn't like my PC? How come it's not doubling in speed every year?

NNAMDIAnd being reduced in price.

GREENSTEINAnd being reduced in price. Why doesn't it look like my handset on my -- you know, that comes down to nothing. And there's -- that's the essence of the problem. Broadband does not seem to have the same price quality trajectory that you find in other goods. And that means we're very close to being in a different era. I think the question we've got here is the question we're gonna be hearing for a couple of years. And the same dilemma facing our caller is the same dilemma a lot of people face, which is if you wanna have higher speed, you got to pay a lot of money for it. And then suddenly, something that's $500 a year becomes $1,000. And that's a serious amount of money for most households. Or you have to try to figure out how to use what you've got more efficiently, and that's not very satisfying either.

NNAMDI800-433-8850 is the number to call. Ross, I know that does not answer your question specifically...

GREENSTEINI could add one thing. As a country, we made a choice.

NNAMDIHere's...

GREENSTEINI will react Brandon.

NNAMDIThis is Brandon Greeley.

GREENSTEINYeah. But to react to Brandon, as a country, we made a policy choice quite different from the rest of the world. We decided as a country to allow private firms to build whatever they wanted to build because as a country, we thought for policy that would get things done more quickly. And of course, 10 years ago, when those policies were being made -- eight years ago, particularly under Michael Powell when they're being reinforced, it was recognized that there was a certain myopia to that policy because it was gonna come back to haunt us later because that policy necessarily led to a concentration in supply. That's the world we're in now.

NNAMDICare to comment, Brendan?

GREELEYYeah. So I think -- I mostly agree. I think that there's a certain waste inherent in deciding that there's going to be a huge federal program in rolling broadband out everywhere. So Japan, you know, as part of its stimulus program for sort of the decade and a half that it's been trying to revive its economy has laid optic fiber cable everywhere. But, you know, just like if you have a huge stimulus program, there are gonna be bridges to nowhere just for the sake of building them, you're gonna lay optic fiber cable to nowhere just for the sake of laying it down. So you can create a lot of expense in places where you can sort of spend a lot of money in places where there isn’t necessarily approved need. That said, what I would like to see is real open functioning markets for the provision of broadband, and that I don’t see in America. So we bring lip service...

NNAMDIWhen you say real open functioning markets, when we have a place like Washington, D.C. where there are basically two providers of broadband and that seems to be common in most cities, there doesn't seem to you to be a great deal of price competition.

GREENSTEINYeah, that's true.

GREELEYNo, there isn't. And this is a real problem in America is that when we -- we tend, in broadband policy right now, when -- we tend to focus on what's good for telecom businesses instead of what is good for a healthy functioning telecoms market. And what telecoms businesses -- telecoms operators do not want a healthy market because what healthy markets do is they drive prices down. And so -- they know this. And so, AT&T and Verizon, what they want to avoid more than anything is a whole lot of competition. So we all sort of generally know, the public knows that monopolies drive prices up and service down. But what is also true is that duopolies do the same thing, and this was something that was recognized in the broadband plan, is that even in places where there are two providers of high-speed Internet access, its access is considerably more expensive even when they're competing with each other than it is elsewhere in the world.

GREELEYSo in America, what we've done is we have decided that we believe in something called facilities-based competition. This means that if there is a local provider of cable, they have a monopoly in the cable provision of Internet access. So in order to compete with them, you as another company have to lay down optic fiber cable so that you can be the sole provider of optic fiber cable in that area. So the idea was that this would get a lot of companies to roll out infrastructure without making government pay for it. So that kind of worked. There were a lot of upgrades in the cable system. Verizon has laid some optic fiber cable. But as Shane has pointed out, we've reached the end of that process. We've reached the end point were Verizon is halting its rollout of FiOS. Kojo, I'm sorry you may never get it.

GREELEYI don’t know what to tell you. I mean, I have it and I'm not crazy about it for lots of reasons.

NNAMDIWell, thank you.

NNAMDIThen I don't feel that badly about maybe not getting.

GREELEYBut I mean – but the point is, I mean, we've reached the end of that rush of capitalization. So the whole point of saying that facilities-based competition was important was so that Verizon had a reason -- had a real reason to roll a lot of optic fiber cable. Now, what's happening is they're done. Baltimore is pleading as well. They're sort of begging Verizon, please bring us optic fiber and optic fiber is saying -- and Verizon is saying, well, I'm not sure if that's really what we wanna do right now or whether that fits in to our cost structure. So I don't -- as with Shane, you know, we -- as Shane said, we sort of reached this point where the approach that we have right now, facilities-based competition, is not giving us any more broadband and it's not bringing the price down. So what to do next? I have sort of extensive provisions. (laugh)

NNAMDIWe got to take a short break though, so hold on to your extensive provisions for one second. We're talking with Brendan Greeley. He is a reporter for The Economist. It's a Tech Tuesday conversation on broadband in the U.S. Also with Shane Greenstein, he is a professor of management and strategy at the School of Management at Northwestern University. We're gonna take a short break to take care of some business. You may have heard us discuss broadband speed in terms of megabytes. What we meant to say was megabits per second. We're gonna take a short break and when we come back, we'll be asking for your support and then back to Tech Tuesday. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back to our Tech Tuesday conversation on broadband in the U.S. with Shane Greenstein. He is a professor of management and strategy at the School of Management at Northwestern University, a leading researcher in the business economics of computing, communications and Internet infrastructure. And Brendan Greeley who is a reporter with The Economist. We take your calls at 800-433-8850. Have you traveled to any countries that have really good broadband service? Are there any lessons that you think we could be learning from them? 800-433-8850, or send as a tweet, @kojoshow.

NNAMDIBrendan, there are a lot of questions about who should be in charge of providing broadband service right now. Municipalities aren't officially in charge now. But in many ways, they're sort of the secret broadband providers, are they not?

GREELEYWell, I think one of the things to keep in mind in this conversation about whether government should be in the business of providing broadband is that government already is in the business of providing broadband. So I just returned from a trip to Albuquerque where the libraries are incredibly overburdened by the need to provide broadband Internet access. So the American Library Association did a study last year -- they do this every year -- and they discovered that in the last year, three-quarters of library branches report that they are providing more broadband access than they did last year. And even worse, three-quarters of them report that they cannot keep up with the demands.

GREELEYSo what's happening in America is in a recession, one the things that we end up cutting is broadband access, which, remember, is a much more expensive than it is elsewhere in the world. But we need it. It is a part of economically functioning in America to have broadband access. You need to get a job. You need it in many states to get government benefits. So the people most likely to need to use the Internet to function are the people most likely to not be able to pay for it. They are going to libraries. Libraries are strapped right now. So we have the same problem that we do with health care, although I do not want to get into an extended metaphor with health care.

GREELEYBut we, you know, we provide medical coverage in America. We provide it when people go to the emergency room. There's a guarantee. So -- excuse me, there's a phone going off in my office. I'm going to hang it up.

NNAMDIWell, in that case, I'll go to the phone that's ringing right here. Here is David in Washington, D.C. David, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

DAVIDHi. Since you were just talking about, you know, trying to keep the cost down and all of that, I will admit that I'm one of those people clinging to my DSL service. And one of the things that's really frustrating to me about that is how erratic the download speeds can be, download and upload. I wondered, first of all, whether that is the case when you start going with the higher dollar services. But, you know, my download and upload speeds can just very wildly, and so the whole talk about, you know, having upload and download speeds of a certain bench mark, I wonder if those are even consistent with the higher dollar programs. And that would be, you know, source of great frustration to me if they were not.

NNAMDIDavid, you have explained my problem better than I possibly could have myself. Here is Shane Greenstein.

GREENSTEINYeah, well, you know, think about the way the Internet is designed. We almost have no other product like this in our country. Multiple suppliers are involved in getting the data from the original source all the way to your house. And the provider, the broadband provider, is just the last piece of a long chain of providers. There's probably also a mirror site of cache as it's called that's keeping the popular sites just near where you're access provider is going into the backbone. There's also a backbone provider. Then there is gonna be an access provider for the provider of the data as well. And so when you're getting erratic service, that could be partially because you're far away from the switch. It could be because there are a lot of other traffic for the mirror and cache site. It could be because the thing you're trying to get isn't very popular, and so it isn't necessarily on the cache. There's a lot of different reasons why you could get that kind of variance.

GREENSTEINIf you are in a cable architecture, you might also still experience variance. Part of the reason for that is cable architecture shares the capacity with your neighbors. So if you happen to live next door to a teenager who likes to download a lot of, let's say, mildly illegal videos, your telephone service, your voice over IP would be slower as well because the loops in the cable architecture are sharing the capacity with all the households in the neighborhood. So it actually -- there is a quite a lot of variance depending on where you are. And if you think about it for a minute, we don't have any other good quite like this. if you bought a car and then they told you, well, it'll go from zero to 60 except when it's raining, or, you know, you wouldn't find that acceptable. But that's the way it is at the moment.

NNAMDISo, David, what are you gonna do?

DAVIDWell, I mean, what you've just described is exactly the sort of thing that I'm hearing from all of my neighbors. And it's exactly the sort of reason that I am likely never to jump to cable or FiOS or any of that because, frankly, I just don't believe what they're telling me. And...

GREELEYYou shouldn't, David.

DAVIDAnd there is no freaking way I'm gonna start dropping the kind of money that they want me to drop on this service for something that's not going to dramatically improve my upload and download. So...

GREENSTEINWell, so -- actually, you know, part of the problem is we're actually talking about a technology where we don't know how to measure quality perfectly yet. So the, you know, people -- the engineers in this business are still debating which is the best way to measure quality so you can write it into a contract with a user so that you could have, you know, consumer protection over guarantees for supplying that quality. Right now, we don't have, you know, something that's reliable, that allows us to measure speed consistently. And we're just -- we're approaching it, but we're not there yet.

GREELEYYeah. David, you're -- I mean, you're not wrong to worry about whether this would change or not. When you move to a higher bandwidth, then I'll put higher in scare quotes because the -- your original question, the answer is yes. There are wild fluctuations even when you pay for the more expensive stuff. So anecdotally, I pay for Verizon. Ha-ha, Kojo, I have it and you don't. And...

NNAMDIFiOS, I have Verizon DSL.

GREELEYFiOS. And it's -- it fluctuates wildly, too. And sometimes -- there are times at my house, even though I'm paying for very high bandwidth broadband when it's crawling. And this turns out to be the experience nationally as well. So one of the very good things that came out of the broadband plan earlier this year was an attempt by the FCC for truth in advertising.

GREENSTEINYeah.

GREELEYSo we have stickers on cars that say EPA has certified that this is what this car gets to the gallon. So you can actually -- so the market can function. So you have enough information to actually compare products. We don't have that level of information about broadband providers. Now Shane pointed out there's a technical problem in providing that. But in addition to that, the broadband providers are very reluctant to collect and advertise and make this kind of information known because they benefit from your lack of market information to make market choices.

NNAMDIDavid, thank you very much for your call. Good luck to you. You can take some comfort in the fact that my mother used to say misery loves company. (laugh) David, thank you for your call. Hopefully, we'll all get better service. Here's Hank in White Plains, Md. Hank, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

HANKYes. My question was, you talked earlier about Comcast and Verizon, and, you know, it seems like there's not a lot of broadband companies, not a lot of options for a consumer. And I was wondering, is this a very difficult business to get into, get started up and support?

NNAMDIShane Greenstein?

GREENSTEINYeah. At this point now, it's quite difficult to get a, say, a loan from a bank to start the business to begin with. And even if you had the money to start the -- you know, you were -- say you were somebody with -- had a lot of money. There's a lot of regulatory barriers to being in the business. We do not have access obligations at the switch. We have some at some places in the Internet. But generally, at the access side, we don't have obligations to a provider. And so it would be quite substantial -- quite difficult to start a wireline broadband company. On the wireless side, it's not quite the same. We haven't talked about wireless broadband. It's a little bit futuristic, but it is on the horizon. And that's a different story. There are entrance into the wireless broadband world. I don't know if Clearwire has reached the Washington area -- it's in the -- Chicago area.

NNAMDINot yet.

GREENSTEINI have some friends who've played with it. And, you know, that's the -- many of you probably use at least something like an iPhone or a Droid. And that's giving you a hint of what the wireless broadband will look like. That's a different story. In rural areas, in particular, you have lots of entrance, things called WISPs, wireless ISPs. And that's still a bit of a wildcatter kind of territory. You can have anybody get into that business and they put their antennas up on the grain elevators and get on. (laugh) It's up in that type -- that part of territory. It's actually kind of fun. It still feels like the Wild West there.

NNAMDIBut, Brendan Greeley, this brings me back to you and municipalities because common sense and what we're hearing might suggest to at least some people that municipalities should have more of a role in providing broadband. What do you think?

GREELEYI think they should. I'm very skeptical of sort of huge federal plans to roll everything out because there's lot of inefficiency there. But I like the idea of giving municipalities the right to make their own choices about whether they wanna, for example, float a bond in order to pay for optic fiber cable in their local area because I really like the idea that sort of a thousand experiments would bloom across America and we would slowly figure out how to do it well. And there are lots of existing structures in rural America, particularly, that are very culturally -- that are culturally very well designed to do that. So the electricity co-ops that were created in the '30s, FDR called them the whip hand to force the larger electricity providers to behave because, basically, communities got together and said, we're going to create a company which has a public service obligation to both make money but also provide electricity to this rural area.

GREELEYSo there are many electricity co-ops that are now because they have this corporate structure. They have the public service obligation. They know how to charge for things and build infrastructure. Are actually also providing optic fiber Internet access as well. So the problem is, this is something that various incumbent telecoms realized a long time ago. And there are laws on the books in 18 states right now that are preventing municipalities from entering this business at all. And the logic is, government should not get in the business of competing with private industry. And I just think that concept, when you apply it to broadband, is hogwash.

NNAMDIShane Greenstein, the broader philosophical question raised earlier, of course, is whether broadband should be treated as a consumer good or a public good, kind of like highways or our water and sewer systems. What do you think?

GREENSTEINOh, well, I think Brendan hit it right on the -- he hit it right, exactly right. The 18 states that are preventing public experimentation, actually, I don't think that's a good thing at all. I think it would be wonderful to have municipal experimentation. And as long as this -- as long as the question remains open about whether it's a public or a private good, we should get the experimentation. We actually don't know, really, what's the best way to provide this. It's -- I think broadband is something, like, it's quasi-public, quasi-private. It's in this funny middle area. For example, if wireless broadband turns out to be something that's very popular due to its mobility, it's, by definition, quasi-public because the spectrum is a public good, and no firm can be in that business without government cooperation. Similarly, if you think about the wire line world, no firm can really be in that business without permission to get the right of ways to move their wires across the neighborhoods. And, again, that makes it quasi-public in some level anyway. So it's in this funny middle ground between public and private, and there's always got to be a public say in how it gets deployed.

NNAMDIBrendan?

GREELEYThis is -- I completely agree. I mean, so, you know, I would not have gotten hired by The Economist if I weren't a capitalist red in tooth and claw. But I have very little patience for telecom saying let the free market function because, as Shane just pointed out, it's not a free market. They're getting all sorts of subsidies, you know? They are given the right of way to, sort of, string their cables down roads. Lots of cable companies which now provide it are the only providers of Internet access in a lot of America. We're given local monopolies by the county or by the state.

NNAMDIYeah, right.

GREELEYSo that's -- I mean, it's already not a free market. So it's very convenient for them to say, well, we got here first. We, sort of, have a government -- we have a unique allowance from the government to provide this service. So now at the free market function, the -- now that nobody else can enter the free market, let's let the free market function.

GREELEYSo that's, I mean, so Blair Levin was the head of the National Broadband Plan for the FCC. He's no longer there. But he said something really interesting as he rolled it out, which was -- that I was at a press conference and somebody asked him, you know, are we going to see common carriage laws applied to Internet access. And he said, "I'm going to quote you from Shakespeare." And he went to "Henry IV," where Glendower says, "Well, I can summon the monsters from the vasty deep." And Hotspur says, "Well, so can I and so can any man. But if you call them, will they come?" So we have a unique situation in America, which I think is probably good in some reasons but is pretty destructive here, which is that you can tell the telecoms to do something but that doesn't mean they're gonna do it. So we have very strong telecoms that, sort of, feel the right to, sort of, conveniently ignore what regulators say or dispute it all the way up to the Supreme Court, and they do it very often which makes it very difficult to do anything that infringes on any aspect of their power. We've talked about a lot of different things that might improve the market. They're pushing back on every single one of them. So remember, when you read AT&T and Verizon, remember their companies? They provide a valuable service. I'm all for capitalism. When you read their materials that say, let's let the free market function in the Internet, it is not a free market. It is a market that heavily favors them where they want to stay.

NNAMDIBrendan Greeley is a reporter for The Economist newspaper. Brendan, thank you very much for joining us.

GREELEYThank you for having me.

NNAMDIShane Greenstein is a professor of management and strategy at the School of Management at Northwestern University, a leading researcher in the business economics of computing, communications and Internet infrastructure. Shane, I'm afraid we're out of time but thank you very much for joining us.

GREENSTEINWell, thank you for having me.

NNAMDIThank you all for listening to this edition of Tech Tuesday. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.