Will a Biden administration back publicly owned advanced telecommunications infrastructure as a means of attaining universal access and affordability?

Should former Vice President Joe Biden be deemed the winner of the presidency and a Biden administration installed early next year, the campaign’s policy positions on advanced telecommunications infrastructure reveal the outlines of how the new administration might proceed.

The overarching policy choice is between continuing the laisse faire policy of the past three decades of regarding Internet protocol-based telecommunications as a commercial market of “broadband” bandwidth. Or recognizing advanced telecommunications infrastructure as essential infrastructure like electric power and roads and highways.

Integral to the latter policy is recognizing the broad socio-economic benefits of advanced telecommunications infrastructure, known in economics as positive externalities. They are described as external because they lie outside the narrow interest of commercial investors to extract profits and rents from selling broadband bandwidth in a natural monopoly landline market. Those external benefits – and the lack thereof considering the nation’s substantial access and affordability challenges -- have become very apparent with the public health restrictions and social distancing accompanying the SARS-CoV-2 contagion that converted homes into offices, classrooms and clinics.

Key to attaining the broader external benefits of advanced telecommunications infrastructure is that it be universally accessible and affordable. As well as public ownership of advanced telecommunications infrastructure that eliminates the inherent conflict between the broader public interest and the narrow interest of investors to build it only where there’s a strong business case. What do the Biden campaign’s positions signal on these issues?

Biden’s campaign calls for “universal broadband access” as part of an initiative to modernize transportation and water infrastructure. Biden also recognizes the socio-economic benefit of universally accessible and affordable advanced telecommunications infrastructure:

“As the COVID-19 crisis has revealed, Americans everywhere need universal, reliable, affordable, and high-speed internet to do their jobs, participate equally in remote school learning and stay connected. This digital divide needs to be closed everywhere, from lower-income urban schools to rural America, to many older Americans as well as those living on tribal lands. Just like rural electrification several generations ago, universal broadband is long overdue and critical to broadly shared economic success.”

However, Biden does not explicitly call for publicly owned advanced telecommunications infrastructure as he has to improve access and affordability for non-group medical plans with a government operated “public option” plan. The Democratic Party campaign platform recommendations that Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders jointly authored after Biden emerged as the Democratic Party presidential nominee calls for preempting state laws that prohibit municipalities and rural co-ops from building publicly-owned broadband networks and for increased federal support for municipally owned networks.

Should a Biden administration take office in January, it bears watching to what extent it supports publicly owned advanced telecommunications infrastructure as a means of attaining universal access and affordability.