It's been a long day of gathering information about S. Korean and Japanese highspeed internet access policy.  

Culture makes a big difference, as does leadership.  If we here in the U.S. decided it was a priority to provide universal highspeed internet access, and we had someone leading us who understood the economic growth/diversity/access connection, we might make progress.  But our culture doesn't favor technology and education and getting ahead in life to the same extent that Japanese and Korean cultures do.

Factoids:  Japan alone has more fiber subscribers than the total number of highspeed subscribers in 22 of the 30 OECD countries.  Most of these Japanese fiber subscribers are signing up with NTT East/West (they control 64% of the fiber lines), which is serving to reconstitute that company's old monopoly on connectivity -- in the DSL arena, there is fierce competition.

And, boy, are social networking services popular in Japan.

In 1995 South Korea decided that highspeed internet access was important to that country’s economic growth.  They decided to ensure ubiquitous broadband access of 20Mbps by the end of 2006, and backed up the decision with a direct investment of $1.5 billion plus targeted loans and mixed public/private investment encouragement.  Universal highspeed internet access has been a central condition of Korean policy for the last seven years, and the government has carried out a plan of investing $30 billion in this access, through direct government investment and indirect, privately-funded initiatives.

In a recent speech, media mogul Rupert Murdoch decried the state of broadband infrastructure in Australia, and urged the government to get involved in investing in a fast network that would cover “every town in Australia.” He said:

They do it in Japan, they do it in South Korea. We should be able to do it here . .. We are being left behind and we will pay for it.. . When you have broadband - real broadband, not the type they're talking about here - where you get, say, 20Mbps of data into your home, it changes everything. . . Broadband certainly is going to become ubiquitous around the world, and if you don't have it, you're left behind.

Diverse new ideas whose development is made swifter by the advent of the internet and its special characteristics are likely to emerge at a greater pace once highspeed access is widely available in this country.  As Rupert Murdoch has got to understand, participating in this ecology is becoming more important to the economic and cultural success of Americans and the overall economic growth of this country. 

We should tie universal service programs to the principle that funding highspeed access to the internet for all should be a top social priority, to be funded out of general tax revenues. 

[Thanks to David Isenberg for many many useful pointers, including but not limited to the Murdoch speech]