Paul Kapustka's Blog

[editor's note: I'm not in D.C., but thanks to the excellent live audio link, I was able to "participate" as a guest during the proceedings. If others who were present have corrections/clarifications, please leave 'em in the comments.]

It's not just that Hundt is a good showman, as my colleague Dana Blankenhorn observes (he is); it is the combination of effective presentation with the soundness and completeness of his arguments that makes you stand up and take notice.

While Dana and others may think that Hundt has been hiding somewhere in seclusion, trying to deny his involvement in the now widely attacked 1996 Telecom Act, nothing is further from the truth. Behind the scenes at times, in front at others, Hundt remains engaged in the debate and more up-to-speed on its intracacies than others who should be, like Congressmen who blather on, searching for some easy definition of network neutrality and why it's important.

If nothing else, the evidence that line-sharing and some government regulation can indeed foster competition -- see, Japan, Korea, Great Britain and now France (France!), as heralded by the recent Wall Street Journal article -- has certainly given new life to the ideas of the '96 Act and its champions, of which Hundt is one.

For one, Hundt is not going to stand silently by while others try to paint network neutrality as "new regulations on the Internet." Without the common-carrier guidance of the 96 Act, Hundt noted Tuesday, the "petri dish for the creation of new companies" and economic wealth might not have occurred. "I don't forgive you if you believe that the [regulatory] paradigms didn't exist," Hundt said.

"It's not an accident" that Japan, Korea and France are following pretty much the same line-sharing ideas advanced by the 96 Act, Hundt said, since a WTO treaty from 1997 followed the 96 Act's script. What has happened is that real competition and real broadband has surfaced in those countries, like symmetrical 100 Mbps connections -- "so much throughput that it's trivial" to argue about the need for things like VPNs, Hundt said.

Like Bob Kahn, Hundt thinks that it's time for the government to step in and "create a public thoroughfare to the Internet -- and it ought to be fast, and every year faster. It should constantly improve, like roads."

Unlike others who just call for such things, Hundt has the cost parsed out: Estimating a cost of $1,000 per household (the actual cost of laying fiber, minus the amount people have demonstrably been willing to pay for such services) to build a nationwide fiber network would cost between $20 and $25 billion, Hundt said -- "less than one-tenth of the money budgeted for a missile defense system that doesn't work."

Far from excluding the telcos, Hundt said to let everyone and anyone bid on the contracts -- lowest bidder wins, and whoever builds the fiber can keep "half of it for their VPN," and let the other half be the public conduit.

While acknowledging that calling for huge domestic expenditures might seem "crazy" in Washington today, Hundt noted that building national broadband systems "only happens to be the dominant paradigm in every developing country in the world."

Why not ours, as well? You can call him a dreamer or a radical, but if you truly want to oppose Hundt's views, you better have some facts to back it up.

So how's that markup going, anyway?