Alliance promotes U.S. national broadband policy

“Broadband is the policy equivalent of a positive ad – it’s important but it moves less numbers in getting elected,” Mehlman said. “As for what has worked overseas, we need to be informed by foreign experiences but we are a different country, with a different installed base, a different landscape and a different user base that uses the Internet differently. There’s a reason leading edge things continue to get invented here.”

The IIA’s strategy is to bring all stakeholders together to create a national policy which then becomes a White House initiative, not a legislative or agency push.

“We believe the most constructive thing to do is to call for a national strategy to be created by bringing relative stakeholders together,” he said. “You start with a process that everyone can agree on, and then review what our assets are, what our goals are, what our challenges are. We will probably find a long list of things we agree on, some things we need to understand better and some things we disagree on. So we can enact the things we agree on immediately, work on the things you can fix and work towards one side prevailing over the other on the things you disagree on.”

Congressional leaders such as Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass) need to be part of the process as do the service providers themselves, and investors as well, Mehlman said.

“We want to get leaders talking about the fact that this really is important stuff,” Mehlman said. “We hope this will give us the momentum we need over a cross section of people with different ideology.”

As part of that process, the IIA has posted an on-line petition at www.internetinnovation.org to encourage people who want to support a national broadband policy to sign.