VALUE THAT'S NOT CAPTURED IN THE STANDARD OF LIVING NUMBERS EITHER:

[T]he U.S.'s most recent experience with jump-starting infrastructure spending, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, suggests a third way to get the job done, one that both parties should be paying more attention to: encouraging more private investment in infrastructure. That's especially true for digital infrastructure, which both ties together the country and supports connections -- commercial, social, cultural -- with the rest of the world.

While much of our physical infrastructure has long been either government-owned or regulated as semi-governmental utilities, nearly all of today's digital networks, though still heavily regulated, have been privately built and privately funded. Since 1996, according to trade group USTelecom, investors have poured over $1.4 trillion into building and rebuilding the commercial internet.

Americans today stand on the brink of next-generation wired and wireless networks that will offer speeds as much as 20 times faster than today's best connections, making possible new applications and even new industries. We've only scratched the surface of ideas such as the internet of things; smart cities, homes, and energy grids; autonomous transportation; and much more that entrepreneurs will think up.

Much of that success can be credited to what Congress both did and did not do as part of the Recovery Act, and in particular to the National Broadband Plan (NBP), which the Federal Communications Commission published in early 2010.

The plan, written under the direction of former FCC chief of staff Blair Levin, was and remains a visionary document. It set aggressive goals for broadband evolution, including upgrading digital networks to provide 100 million homes with connection speeds of 100 Mbps (a goal already reached, according to the Department of Commerce). It called on the government to vastly accelerate release of radio spectrum for fast-growing mobile broadband services. And it called for radical reform of programs to close the digital divide, resulting in a complete overhaul of services that once subsidized telephone service for poor and rural Americans but which now support wired and wireless internet.

Perhaps most radical of all, however, is what the NBP didn't propose. With minor exceptions, the authors did not recommend that any of the NBP's goals be met through taxpayer spending. Rather, they called on Congress and the White House to "unleash private investment" by reinforcing a bipartisan decision, dating back to the mid-1990s, to leave the internet alone.

The results speak for themselves. Despite the lingering effects of the 2007 recession, which catalyzed the Recovery Act in the first place, private investment in the broadband ecosystem grew, particularly in mobile infrastructure and fiber connections, tying wired and wireless networks together for a coming 5G revolution. The U.S. has the most home broadband connections and the most high-speed mobile subscriptions in the world, leads in innovation for apps and new services, and is home to the vast majority of internet market leaders, creating trillions of dollars in new value in the last two decades. 

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