PAUL KRUGMAN: The French Connections

[kevinmc]

There was a time when everyone thought that the Europeans and the Japanese were better at business than we were. In the early 1990s airport bookstores were full of volumes with samurai warriors on their covers, promising to teach you the secrets of Japanese business success. Lester Thurow’s 1992 book, “Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe and America,” which spent more than six months on the Times best-seller list, predicted that Europe would win.

Then it all changed, and American despondency turned into triumphalism. Partly this was because the Clinton boom contrasted so sharply with Europe’s slow growth and Japan’s decade-long slump. Above all, however, our new confidence reflected the rise of the Internet. Jacques Chirac complained that the Internet was an “Anglo-Saxon network,” and he had a point — France, like most of Europe except Scandinavia, lagged far behind the U.S. when it came to getting online.

What most Americans probably don’t know is that over the last few years the situation has totally reversed. As the Internet has evolved — in particular, as dial-up has given way to broadband connections using DSL, cable and other high-speed links — it’s the United States that has fallen behind.

The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.

Even more striking is the fact that our “high speed” connections are painfully slow by other countries’ standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.......

http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/07/paul-krugman-french-connections.html

[tularetom]

1. You think we'd hear that anywhere else?

Most amurkins probably think we've got the best connections of any countrry in the world (just like we have the best health care system, make the best cars, etc etc). And most of those that think our connections are the best are probably on a dial up contract with AOL at $20+ per month.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. And the most broadband connected country in the world

is South Korea.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. That's because America has been looted

In the last 7 years, economic growth has been absent, and the value of the Dollar is off about 40%. This is a major depression, but by a new mechanism.

Meanwhile, business has become all about extracting the last dime from the customers while offering minimal improvements. The TV signal changeover that is about 18 months away will allow those same companies (cable and DSL providers) to reap a windfall while offering nothing of improved value.

We're still paying for 12/13/2000, and we are likely to keep paying for the next ten years.

--p!

[Raster]

4. We haven't just been looted, we've been strip-mined.

Parasites are assimilating ANYTHING of value.

[Uncle Joe]

5. Krugman nails it, and I believe this is what

the Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet Slander was all about. They didn't want him in charge because they knew, he would protect and champion the Internet. They wanted to retain their monopolies on information, making it all the easier to brain wash the American People, such as sending them off to a war based on lies.

"You see, the world may look flat once you’re in cyberspace — but to get there you need to go through a narrow passageway, down your phone line or down your TV cable. And if the companies controlling these passageways can behave like the robber barons of yore, levying whatever tolls they like on those who pass by, commerce suffers.

America’s Internet flourished in the dial-up era because federal regulators didn’t let that happen — they forced local phone companies to act as common carriers, allowing competing service providers to use their lines. Clinton administration officials, including Al Gore and Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, tried to ensure that this open competition would continue — but the telecommunications giants sabotaged their efforts, while The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page ridiculed them as people with the minds of French bureaucrats.

And when the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the F.C.C., the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there’s little competition in U.S. broadband — if you’re lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there’s nowhere else to go.

Meanwhile, as a recent article in Business Week explains, the real French bureaucrats used judicious regulation to promote competition. As a result, French consumers get to choose from a variety of service providers who offer reasonably priced Internet access that’s much faster than anything I can get, and comes with free voice calls, TV and Wi-Fi."