Latta ascribes wrong cause to constrained investment in last mile infrastructure

Rep. Bob Latta Weighs in on STELA, Title II & E-Rate | USTelecom: On the topic of Title II, net neutrality and broadband legislation, Latta said, “First of all, I believe in an open Internet — a free Internet without government intervention. When you look at where the Internet has come and where it’s going in the future, this has all been done on the private sector. It’s not been done because of what the Federal government has done.” According to Latta, by putting broadband under Title II to make it more like telecommunications using a law from 1935, “What we will see happen then is that the innovation out there that’s spurred about a trillion dollars in private investment is all of a sudden going to be tied up like it would be with a telephone company. We don’t want that. Because once you start that up, then all of a sudden innovation is going to slow up — not only innovation — the dollars put in it and the tens of thousands of jobs being created. So we don’t want that to happen. We want to make sure that it remains free, it stays open and it stays away from government control.”

The problem with this position is regulation isn't the cause of what the Federal Communications Commission estimates as nearly 20 million Americans who are not offered landline Internet connections to their homes. In addition, much of the nation remains served by outdated twisted pair copper plant built many decades ago for analog telephone service and not fiber to the premise needed today and in the future as bandwidth demand grows dramatically.

If legacy telephone and cable companies had innovative solutions to build that necessary infrastructure, they would have pursued them over the past two decades. They haven't been able to do so not because of regulatory burdens but rather market failure on the sell side. It's because their business models are oriented to gaining a return on infrastructure capital investment over time frames far shorter than what's needed given the high costs -- mostly labor -- of deploying that infrastructure. It is this economic consideration that stifles investment in last mile Internet infrastructure in the United States, not regulation.