Federal, state, and local policymakers are tasked with distributing billions of dollars of infrastructure funds for broadband connectivity. This Guidebook offers a roadmap through dozens of policy questions and lessons learned from federal and state broadband programs that have been funded and implemented over the last several decades.
Several core recommendations emerge from this history of broadband policymaking.
Recommendations:
- Rely on evidence from a long history of telecommunications policies and regulations, admitting what we know and what we do not yet know about the effects and effectiveness of subsidies.
- Acknowledge trade-offs. Some goals may be inconsistent with others.
- Create a coherent weighting system to compare proposals. Ideally, weights are based on how much consumers value various aspects of broadband.
- Rely on state procurement expertise. Like other state procurements, use competitive bidding for broadband services in order to require suppliers to compete against each other for contracts.
- Build evaluation into any program. The key to program evaluation is transparency, such as making all proposals public whether they are funded or not.
- Work together. Avoid duplicative efforts across states, and seek economies of scale from joint efforts with other states, federal agencies, and the private sector.
Sarah Oh Lam is a Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute. Oh completed her PhD in Economics from George Mason University, and holds a JD from GMU and a BS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. She was previously the Operations and Research Director for the Information Economy Project at George Mason School of Law. She has also presented research at the 39th Telecommunications Policy Research Conference and has co-authored work published in the Northwestern Journal of Technology & Intellectual Property among other research projects. Her research interests include law and economics, regulatory analysis, and technology policy.
Scott Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute and also a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. He is an economist with expertise in industrial organization and public policy, and his research focuses on competition, regulation, telecommunications, the economics of digitization, and technology policy. He was the economics director for the FCC's National Broadband Plan and has been a lecturer in Stanford University’s public policy program, director of communications policy studies and senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a senior fellow at the AEI – Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an economist at The World Bank, a scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a staff economist at the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University.
