Broadband Access and Innovation

My partner Brad has a post up this morning on the USV blog detailing our view why Internet Access Should be Application Agnostic.  This is an important topic as it is central to continued innovation by startups on the Internet (see for instance my post titled Net Neutrality is Critical for Innnovation).  Because some people will immediately go off saying things like “don’t regulate the Internet” or “regulation is bad for innovation,” I want to emphasize three critical points.  First, this is not about regulating “the Internet” but broadband access to it.  That’s an important distinction, because broadband access is not a competitive market.  In many parts of the country there is a single provider of broadband and in some parts there is a duopoly.  This is very different from bandwidth in the core of the Internet, which is highly competitive.  Second, because of the non-competitive nature of last mile communications infrastructure this is already a regulated industry. So it’s not a question about whether or not to have regulation but rather having regulation that is good for innovation (and as such for consumers). Third, we would all prefer a market solution because that would be even better than regulation.  That is unlikely to happen any time soon but freeing up spectrum is an important step in that direction so that maybe some day in the future we can have meaningful broadband wireless for Internet access from home.