Congress Needs To Understand The Basics Of Broadband

Last week in a meeting with a highly respected colleague of mine in DC, I experienced one of the most eye-opening and disappointing moments of my time in the world of broadband policy.

The conversation revolved around my argument that if we keep trying to patch the holes in FCC regulations with band-aids that we'll never be able to realize truly effective reform. If we want real change we need to reframe the FCC's mission for the 21st century, namely to focus on the availability, affordability, adoption, and openness of bandwidth. (More on this argument here.)

What stopped me in my tracks is that while he agreed with the ideas in theory, the reason he couldn't get behind adopting these new principles was that he simply didn't believe that Congress understood the concept of bandwidth enough to fully comprehend the benefits of this converged approach.

Now, it's no surprise that Congress doesn't know as much about broadband and the Internet as we'd like. And for the most part I don't blame them. What people don't realize is that Congressional staffs have limited manpower, and therefore everyone pulls triple duty and beyond. Because of this, very rarely do you meet a staffer who's sole focus is on understanding the intricacies of broadband technology and policy.

I've met many staffers charged with handling telecom for their Representative or Senator that were thrust into the position with little to no prior knowledge of or experience with broadband-related issues. Layer on top of that the fact that they've got a ton of other areas they're working on, and I don't see how we can expect them to understand all the ins and outs of our intricately esoteric world at the nexus of technology, business, policy, and philosophy thoroughly enough so that they can craft policies that help rather than hinder it.

Quite frankly, it seems like an impossible task.

Yet at the same time, I can't see how we can consider limiting the scope of our ambitions because of our assumptions about what Congress has the capacity to understand.

The other thing I've learned about those Congressional staffers is that they're very bright, extremely hard working, and dedicated to trying their best to understand as much as they can.

I refuse to believe they can't understand something as basic as bandwidth. In fact, I'd say that if they still don't get it, then that's more our fault than theirs as we obviously haven't been doing a good enough job explaining it. And as a result of our failure, our policy ambitions are suffering, being limited by unnecessary ignorance.

I'm not trying to suggest that we should expect Congress to understand everything that's going on under the Internet's hood. Instead that they must have some understanding of the basics, of terms like bandwidth, of how in broad terms the Internet came to be. Otherwise, how can we expect them to be capable of creating broadband policy that goes beyond bumper sticker slogans?

Sure, it's easy to say, "Internet for all!" and "The Internet should be open!" But where the rubber of good intentions meets the road of making policy, we can't afford to have policymakers that don't know where they're supposed to be going or how they're supposed to get there.

And perhaps even worse: we can't afford to scale back the policies our country needs to move forward because of an assumption that Congress can't or won't understand the issues at stake.

I think Congress is ready to listen. But the onus is on us to reach out to them and figure out how to talk about these complex issues in terms that they and the public at large can understand.

Because I fear that without an understanding of the basics of broadband, that Congress will never be able to create the kinds of forward-thinking broadband policies that our country needs to make the rapid forward progress required to remain a leader in the global digital economy.