Connectivity equals productivity. Our rural communities are struggling and people are quite often underemployed. If we improved our technological infrastructure, primarily in the rural and urban areas, you would see the economic benefits in short order. There’s a great paper on this here:http://www.newmillenniumresearch.org/archive/Litan_FINAL_120805.pdf

these again are simply policies to transfer money to corporations.

How is a tax cut a transfer of money? Paying taxes is a transfer of money. Tax cuts are a non-transfer of wealth. Tax cuts are a step towards to the natural state, where you keep the money you earn.

Now, in a country where everyone except the very poor are burdened with high taxes, tax cuts can certainly be seen as an incentive. But the only reason that is in any way objectionable is because of the disincentive forced upon the people who are still paying copious amounts of taxes.

I’m with you: competition is good, and we don’t have much of it with broadband. But heavily taxing broadband companies doesn’t help competition. That’s no reason that tax cuts can’t work in concert with other things to allow for more competition. Honestly, the first part of the video just comes off as anti-business whinging.

http://googleearthdesign.blogspot.com/2008/08/graph-design-lessigs-video-chart-fails.html

Denial is a river that runs through the convoluted wrinkles in his brain.

Actually it’s also in the USA’s interest if Europe has better broadband since we can free ride on some of the added European products – such as European art films.

Given the geography of the USA, I have not seed a reason why the USA should be number 1 or 5, any more than Luxemburg should be number one in road miles.

In addition, the OECD lists penetration of broadband and population density in a single graph. The U.S. has a population density of 32/km2. Compare that to France at 115/km2, the U.K. at 247/km2, Korea at 484/km2 or the Netherlands at 400/km2. For a country with such a low population density, we do quite well in broadband.

“However, where private industry does not answer the call because of market failures or other obstacles, John McCain believes that people acting through their local governments should be able to invest in their own future by building out infrastructure to provide high-speed Internet services. For this reason, Senator McCain introduced the “Community Broadband Bill,” which would allow local governments to offer such services, particularly when private industry fails to do so.”

Not sure what else can be realistically done to get infrastructure modernized. That the US has gone from #5 to #22 in broadband penetration doesn’t really mean much. There are lots of rich small countries where it’s fairly easy to get the infrastructure updated. Aside from switching the US over to socialism, I don’t see how one can realistically expect the US to compete with much smaller more socialist countries when it comes to this.

You shouldn’t compare apples to oranges.