Sharing fiber would be the best policy and probably the most expensive to set. Wireless is nice, but at this time cannot compare to the bandwidth and latency of a wired connection. Satellite has horrible latency, I would not even consider it in the same class as cable and telco broadband services.

Nationalizing the Internet was not intended as a serious proposition but I do wonder about providing a different set of incentives for the private sector to assure widespread and fair access to broadband Internet services in rural and urban settings. The call for more facilities-based competition has not, in my opinion, yielded very good results. Synchronous satellite has very high propagation delays compared to fiber or DSL or cable modems. The cable system is highly asymmetric. So is DSL although that technology along with optical DWDM can be more easily made symmetric. WiMax has not been demonstrated widely and raises questions about the actual amount of capacity available to individual subscribers. There is also a question about easy of propagation into homes and the potential need for exterior antennas as in satellite television. The result of all this is that even when there is facilities-based competition, the offerings are not necessarily comparable. Consequently, the services are not quite substitutable and may not have the competitive effect one looks for to suppress anti-competitive behaviors. In other countries where there appears to be a stronger regulatory regime, separation of underlying broadband transport provided at wholesale and the provision of retail value-added services has worked fairly effectively. The UK and Japan are examples, I believe. The "more facilities-based competition" response to the issue is simplistic and I think a more refined answer is needed, especially where economics makes it unlikely to find multiple competitors willing to make investments to share thin markets. vint cerf

The net won't be nationalized, but I'll bet that you will see a consolidation of services offered as package plans by the phone and cable providers in conjunction with Yahoo and Google. Those huge data centers aren't just for faster searches.

It is clear after reading Mr. Cerfs' comments that his goal is to spurn some creative thinking rather than actually proposing a government takeover. That said, if we look back to nearly any time when "big business" decides to play the "good guy" and look out for the public, it is generally as a result of legislation. Legislation effectively forces big business to respond for the greater good while keeping the free market competitiveness and creativity in place. Why do we have HD over the air? It is because legislation forced it - not because it is economically feasible. Why do real estate developers set aside units for section 8 low-income housing? Because legislation makes it attractive, not because they are just really good people at heart. Corporate America wants to look the best it can while reaping the greatest profits possible. It is legislation that is most effective in delivering improvements to the public. Why? Because that is the only way that keeps the playing field level - everyone must comply.

In response to the article; I would like to see a lot more security on the data packets that cross our national and territorial borders. Primarily blocking known ip addresses that spawn spam and scumware. Other than than they should not interfere.

Linda; Rural areas can afford to run fiber to the home. All they have to do is refuse to sell food crops for a couple years. When a loaf of bread is $50 they can easily make enough to pay for the installation. All it takes is organizing just like OPEC did with oil.

But Vint was right about the government part. Anyone remember Rural Electrification?

When we go live in a small town or village, we expect to have electricity. That wasn't always the case, and it took the government to make it so.

The biggest problem is that the government tends to award monopolies, and the solution has to be to build limits into the power of that monopoly. We have a gas company in my town to provide gas to all the houses, and its monopoly status stems from a contractual agreement with the government to provide gas service to all the houses. The alternative might have been no gas at all, or many gas companies each tearing up the streets in their efforts to lay lines to the most affluent customer bases. In return, we have governmental oversight to assure that the gas company doesn't try to gouge the people. It's imperfect in many ways, but when I turn on the stove, the burner lights, almost anywhere I might want to live.

The Internet has to be viewed as a utility, just as electricity or telephone or gas is now.

How Australia is dealing with this is instructive. Their government wants all of Australia to have "fiber to the node" and ultimately "fiber to the computer", and they are toying with awarding a monopoly to build the necessary infrastructure over the entire country. As part of the monopoly limiting features, the infrastructure would be the property of the government, and would be administered by the company holding the monopoly. That company would perform infrastructure service support only, and would be prohibited from competing as an ISP -- to allow consumers total freedom to choose who does value added services such as DNS, VOIP, email, and personal webspace, and to allow all of those ISPs equal access to the infrastructure.

Our current Internet companies (e.g., Bell and Verizon) only build out infrastructure to places they think are affluent enough to provide a good short-term profit. It's the identical issue that the proponents of Rural Electrification faced from the existing power companies of the era -- it was short-term profitable to those companies not to provide electricity to farmers or small villages, but long term unprofitable to the people as a whole.