'From All My Teachers I Have Grown Wise, and from My Students More than Anyone Else': What Lessons Can the U.S. Learn from Broadband Policies in Europe?

Abstract

While this study describes the evolution of the policies that led to European supremacy in broadband deployment it compares European policy development to the policy development in the United States during the same period and concludes that this time around the Europeans may be on the way to taking a more innovative and effective approach to what was once considered a badge of pride of the U.S. telecommunications policy, universal service, by considering the adoption of a universal broadband goal, thus once more adopting an American concept and perfecting it to serve up-to-date policy goals. Highlighting the strengths of the European system – focus, simplicity, relative efficiency and willingness to change the course of policy as needed, an effective balance between centralization and delegation of power, and innovation – the study addresses the question of whether the new European attention to universal service and the apparent disregard of a need for reform by the United States may boost the trend of European leadership in broadband deployment. If so, the question that arises is whether the United States, in order to stay competitive with the European Union will learn from its mistakes past and adopt an approach that will identify universal service as a policy measure ensuring more rapid diffusion of broadband access, and in an ironic reversal of past trends, will learn from those who once learned from it.

Following a comparison of the development of European and American regulatory frameworks, that takes into account their philosophical roots, this study describes how the American coined “unbundling” terminology was adopted in Europe but evolved in different directions in both regimes to different outcomes. This analysis helps explain the emerging differences in the design of universal service in the current regulatory debate, and demonstrates how the United States may once again be heading on the wrong course by allowing the distortion and misinterpretation of American homegrown policies at the same time European policy makers are refining them to achieve their original social goals. En route to the liberalization of the European telecommunications infrastructure, policy ideas and vocabulary formulated in the United States, namely the idea of the open network architecture, helped European regulators arrive at a sound and focused policy to which the success in proliferation of broadband can be attributed. By reframing the policy debate in the United States this time around, using terminology developed in Europe, the United States may maintain or rather regain its competitive edge.