Practically every time I hear a politician talk about the Internet these days he or she is talking about the failure of broadband to take off and save the economy. The Washington Post has this analysis
Industry experts say business broadband hasn’t ripened to its potential because of basic capitalist tenets. The major providers haven’t found a financial incentive to speed up their deployment. A score of smaller corporate-sector providers couldn’t survive the technology bust. And cable companies, which preside over neighborhoods, have branded themselves more heavily to the bedroom surfer than to the business manager.
Business Week had an even more trenchant critique:
SIMPLE SELLS. What’s missing from this theory is a little analysis. Historically, communication has been far more prized than content. Annual movie-ticket sales in the U.S. are well under $10 billion, notes Andrew Odlyzko, director of the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota and author of a 2001 paper “Content Is Not King.” Phone companies collect that amount every two weeks.
Being curious, and a U of MN student, I followed the information to Andrew Odlyzko’s home page and paper.
