Reed Hundt on "big broadband"
In this essay, Reed Hundt talks about building a 10 to 100 Mbps network for every household in the U.S. He makes a great case for why it should be done and how we can pay for it.
What's interesting about this piece is that Hundt advocates a new approach to universal service. Instead of giving away broadcast spectrum (for HDTV) and maintaining (ancient, inflexible) phone lines, we should spend money on building out a next generation fiber network to every household, and run both HDTV and phone over that network. Then we can stop funding the phone network (which is pretty much maxed out anyway) and sell off the HDTV spectrum for 10s of billions of dollars.
I think it's a great vision, because a single, public network is a huge win for the same reasons that cities decided to only keep a single set of electric lines or a single set of gas lines. After all, you know something's wrong when Verizon is able to actively screw its competitors because it owns the phone lines. Last I checked, Verizon was selling DSL to end-users for $35 per month while it was selling DSL wholesale to its competitors for $40 per month. A publicly-owned network could fix that.