CWA Report Decries Internet Speed Gap Between U.S., Other Nations

For the second year in a row, the Communication Workers of America's "Speed Matters" campaign has released "A Report on Internet Speeds in All 50 States." The campaign surveyed almost 230,000 people in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico between May 2007 and May 2008 on their speedmatters.org website to gather the necessary data.

Their report addresses the fact that the median U.S. internet download speed of 2.35 mbps (mega bits per second) is far slower than 1st ranked Japan at a download speed of 63 mbps - almost 27 times as fast as the U.S.

It also adds fuel to the fire that numerous other organizations have been stoking in demanding a national broadband policy that would take us from 15th place among industrialized nations in average internet speed to the top ranks of that scale.

CWA maintains that U.S. economic growth depends on high-speed internet access for all, and stresses that millions of Americans - particularly people living in rural areas or making under $40,000 a year - don't have high-speed internet.

By way of solutions, the report calls for "8 Steps to Affordable High Speed Internet for All," including:

1) establish a national policy goal to construct an infrastructure with enough capacity to take America to 10 mbps by 2010,

2) develop state and national maps of broadband infrastructure - as we lack such maps today,

3) create public-private partnerships and broadband task forces to promote high-speed internet deployment and adoption,

4) reform universal service - which traditionally provided telephone service to poor and rural areas - to include internet connections,

5) "no child offline," provide free of low-cost computers and internet connections to poor families with kids,

6) ensure faster broadband speeds by direct subsidies, low-interest loans and tax incentives,

7) preserve an open internet - by which they mean that free speech should be preserved on the internet by holding telecoms to agreements that they will not degrade service or censor content,

8) safeguard consumers and workers by winning public policies that should support the growth of good, career jobs.

Overall a good platform from CWA ... but for a couple of important missteps.

First, the relationship between the CWA and certain telecoms they organize is well known in policy circles. To state the most relevant example to this discussion, CWA and Verizon may fight on bargaining points at contract time - as they just did a few days ago - but they see eye-to-eye regarding the propriety of handing our national telecommunications infrastructure over to corporations. Which might explain why a good deal of the platform language in the report amounts to backing free money and tax breaks for huge telecoms like Verizon.

More problematic in the context of current telecom policy debates is CWA's steadfast backing of Verizon's (and by default other corporations and conservative think tanks) fight against any network neutrality legislation that might come up for passage in Congress. This is evident in the above report where CWA calls for an "open internet" rather than calling for net neutrality. The two terms are not at all synonymous - as calling for a an open internet only addresses the free speech aspect of net neutrality but not structural reforms that would ensure that no corporation could act as a "traffic cop on the internet."

Net neutrality is the idea that the best internet is one built with "big fat dumb pipes" that any organization, institution or government entity can plug into at the top available speed. And that, critically, every government or business entity that runs a network must plug into all the other networks. In some enlightened countries, these big pipes are funded and overseen by the government in the public interest - not by corporations in the interest of making profit off of what should be a public service. There's good reason to think that allowing telecoms to take over management of the Internet - which was, after all, created by a massive public effort in the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. - has seriously slowed down the development of our national internet infrastructure.

In recent years, telecoms like Verizon - that was first a "Baby Bell" telephone company before it moved into the internet business -  have been trying to cherry pick rich communities in which to trot out premium internet service like the all-fiber-optic FIOS.* These services feature much higher internet speeds than the rest of the Verizon network, but Verizon would like to wall them off from the rest of their networks and deny most Americans access to the fastest possible internet speeds based on their ability to pay. They would also like be able to slow down internet speeds for homes or businesses that either "overused" certain bandwith-hogging services like BitTorrent, or simply put information out over the internet that Verizon didn't agree with.

Now that unions like SEIU, their national federation Change to Win and even conservatives like FCC Chairman Kevin Martin are all backing legislation to make net neutrality the law of the land. it's unfortunate that CWA feels it has to back Verizon's retrograde position on the subject.

CWA does this because it feels that with a national internet policy, Verizon will have great incentives to create new jobs and improve existing jobs. But there is little evidence to support this view. Recent American history is replete with examples of corporate giveaways by government resulting in no jobs or economic expansion at all. So helping Verizon get government money to do what the government could do better and cheaper might help preserve some unionized jobs and create some  jobs (that may or may not be unionized) in the short-to-medium term, but it is highly unlikely to help create significant numbers of new unionized jobs for the long-term. That's just not the way big corporations roll.

So while the report raises an important issue and proposes some decent solutions to the problem of slow internet connections, it also proposes some not-so-decent solutions better left to corporations to flog on their own behalf - and hopefully be defeated on. It would be a shame to mar the reputation of an otherwise progressive union with continued support for what amounts to a flawed corporate-centered job creation policy.

That's how it looks from this corner. Any thoughts from Communicate or Die viewers much appreciated. [And any inside dope on recent changes or potential changes to CWA's position on net neutrality would be especially appreciated.]

*Note: Verizon is also trying to claim that FIOS is not cable to get out from under the provisions of the 1984 Cable Franchise Policy and Telecommunications Act that funds local cable access channels (more correctly known as PEG access). Their lobbying has sparked cable giants like Comcast to say that if Verizon doesn't have to pay 3% of their gross FIOS revenue to each community it's sited in to support local PEG access, then they would want to stop paying as well. In most locales, that would result in the destruction of most PEG access channels - an outcome many pro-union advocates would find extremely dangerous in this age of corporate-dominated media. CWA's support for Verizon and their FIOS build-outs in wealthy communities (more FIOS=more jobs) has caused some bad blood between them and the generally progressive PEG access community.