I remember a feeling of great happiness the day after Clinton was first elected President.  It was a beautiful fall day in Washington, and I truly believed that the world had changed.  I even remember walking out of the building I lived in (the remarkable and much-missed Kennedy-Warren, where I and everyone I knew at the time went to an inaugural ball for Clinton)

have to pause for a picture of the K-W lobby

and thinking on that bright fall day, "Boy, this is great! Just imagine what his election will mean for gay rights in America!" 

And, of course, within a month or so we had Don't Ask, Don't Tell and it was all a disaster and there was much disappointment ahead on scores of issues.

So I'm trying not to get too excited about all the Democrats running things on Capitol Hill right now.  I know that things may not work out. On the net neutrality front, the punditry is that there won't be a big telecom bill for a long time because the Bells have gotten the video franchise rules they wanted from the states.  Some people think net neutrality isn't really a standalone issue, so it can't fill up an entire bill on its own.

But there is an angle that might work.  Democrats should be, if they think about it, the party of long-range social planning.  They should be the party that worries about investment in fundamentals that will support society into the future.  Education! Stem cell research! National parks! Basic science of all kinds! And -- universal access to broadband.

If Congress takes a hard look at the state of universal service today they'll be horrified.  Graft, bloat, corruption -- paying for services that haven't been provided, paying more to more recipients by raising assessments, funding old stagnant service providers. . . lots of material here for dramatic camera-covered hearings.  Lots of good Perry Mason moments. And, at the end, we'll have to decide that what the US should really be funding is broadband access, not access to traditional telephone services.

Traditional voice telephone services are quickly being taken over by much less expensive internet services, so it makes little sense to continue funding the former as a national policy matter.  Improved broadband connectivity has been a national priority for some time (did you know we were supposed to get there by 2007? just a few weeks to go!), and it would make sense to implement this important goal more coherently as a matter of universal service policy.  The goal of universal service, after all, is to make communications technologies available to every citizen, and the relevant technology at the moment is broadband access.

The question of who should pay for universal service has dogged the policy discussion for years.  Finding a common fund method for paying for universal service seems essential.  Although difficult as a matter of political priorities,  it may be more appropriate to fund these universal service programs through general tax revenue rather than through imposing fees on nascent VoIP services. 

And once we start paying for broadband as a nation, we'll want to make sure that it's being provided on an open, neutral basis.  Why? Because that's essential to the overall economic growth of this country.

We have begun to understand that the growth in social wealth per capita over the last millennia is deeply related to the increase in the diversity of new nonrival ideas that has occurred over the same time. Specialization, or new ideas, and the increasing returns that come with specialization, is the key to rising output.  In the words of my new hero Paul Romer, “Economic growth arises from the discovery of new recipes [ideas] and the transformation of things from low to high-value configurations.”   Even small increases in economic growth can lead to dramatic effects on the standard of living of human beings.

An open internet is a world of new ideas. New ideas lead to economic growth.  If we pay for broadband access as a matter of social policy (and we should) we need to make sure that access is neutral.

But, again, trying to stay calm here.