The United States invented the Internet, so it ranked number one
when the first file was transferred in 1969. Today it’s in 29th place.

A 1999 television commercial encapsulated the telephone industry’s promise of the future along the information superhighway. A grizzled salesman drops his bag in the sparse lobby of Roy’s Motel.

“You got room service?”

“Doughnuts and coffee,” replies the receptionist.

“Got entertainment?”

“All rooms have every movie in every language, anytime, day or night.”

Astonished, the man asks, “How is that possible?” As his words die away in voice-over, the actor Willem Dafoe answers the question. “Could your business use the bandwidth to change everything? Ride the light. Qwest.”

Qwest was just one of the telephone companies that shaped the promise of connecting us to the World Wide Web. To fulfill this promise, telephone companies said they needed money to upgrade the copper wires that had been used since the first commercial telephone call was placed in 1878. The best new technology now was fiber-optic cables. While the biggest copper cables carried 4,000 conversations, AT&T said its fiber-optic cables could handle more than a million calls simultaneously. Experts on telephone economics calculated that this new technology meant the cost of calls would fall by 99 percent or more.

There was just one problem: Who was going to pay for the creation of the new network? The obvious source of revenue was customers, and, in the two decades from 1992 to 2012, Bruce Kushnick, a former telephone industry consultant, estimates that $360 billion moved from the pockets of customers to AT&T, Verizon, and the runt of the Baby Bell family, Qwest, which in 2010 was acquired by CenturyLink.

When you do the long division, Kushnick’s estimate works out to a toll of $3,300 paid by every household in America to access the superfast electronic highway. Although that cash was enough to speed the development of two national cell telephone systems, owned by AT&T and Verizon, the industry now cautions journalists that the term “information superhighway” is best not used anymore. That they want us to regard the term as archaic is not surprising, because its use is a reminder of their unfulfilled promise. The high-speed data lanes in most of America are among the slowest electronic highways in the world; in many places in the United States, the promised highway has yet to materialize at all and, under current policies, never will.

The United States invented the Internet, so it ranked number one when the first file was transferred between distant computers in 1969. Taxpayers financed that project through DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense. But by 2011, America’s Internet leadership was strictly historical. Today, South Korea has taken the lead in average Internet speeds. In 2011 its average download rate was 18 megabits per second. Romania came in second at 15 Mbps, Bulgaria was next at 13 Mbps with Lithuania and Latvia tied at 11 Mbps. America has settled well back in the pack—in 29th place. And thanks to government policies that foster the status quo and discourage real competition we’re likely to be stuck in the slow lane for a very long time.

Instead of increased competition between the telephone and cable companies, a new cartel emerged in the first decade of this century. While telephone and cable companies posed in public as rivals, Verizon made a deal to sell its branded services over cable company Comcast’s lines, and vice versa. And Verizon said it anticipates similar deals with other cable providers to sell over their systems. This cross-marketing deal between Verizon and Comcast reinforces the economic interests of telephone and cable companies by not extending lines to rural areas or poor neighborhoods and not wiring apartment buildings where few people could afford the new services.

Cable companies jacked up prices, too. Since 1995, average cable prices have been rising 2.6 times faster than the cost of living, reaching an average of almost $53 a month for basic, no-frills service in 2009, Federal Communications Commission reports show. The strongest evidence that the cable companies exert monopoly power to raise prices comes from a survey of prices for basic service plus the most commonly purchased extra features such as handheld remotes and premium channels like HBO. In 2008, the worst economic year since the Great Depression, when the national economy shrank and millions lost their jobs, cable prices rose.

In the 21st century, economic growth requires the ability to move huge volumes of information instantly. The Internet is to economic growth in the digital age what highways and airports were to economic growth in the 20th century. America prospered in its first two centuries because of massive public investments in the common modes of transportation that business needed to carry its goods. As it proceeds into its third century, the United States suffers from massive overcharging for poor-quality telecommunications services that carry its information.

The average broadband download speed in the United States is just 5 Mbps. That means that a large file someone in Seoul could download in one minute would require closer to four minutes in the United States. For an extra fee, American companies like Time Warner do offer some urban and suburban customers souped-up service with speeds up to 50 Mbps. However, the qualifier “up to” remains a big caveat. When lots of people use the same connection point, speeds can slow to 15 Mbps.

So while the United States falls behind almost 30 other nations in service, we do consistently rank at or near the top in one category: price. The average American consumer pays 60 percent more than a South Korean user. Americans who buy a triple-play package (cable television, Internet, and telephone bundled together) typically pay four times what the French pay. The French get live television from around the world, not just domestic shows. The French Internet is 10 times faster downloading and 20 times faster uploading than what most Americans can buy. For all this the French pay a total of 29.99 euros (about $40) per month.

Millions of Americans pay $160 or more for a triple-play package. Taking into account the much more expansive and faster services the French get, Americans pay six to 10 times as much for triple-play packages. But more important is that in this digital age American jobs, and how well they pay, will be determined in good part by whether America climbs back from 29th place in Internet speed or continues to slip further behind countries with lower wage scales and superior Internet.

The few places in America where local government leaders recognized this years ago are now prospering because they are attracting digital businesses. Places like Chattanooga, Tennessee; Glasgow, Kentucky; Lafayette, Louisianna; and Scottsboro, Alabama, that have built their own municipal systems are attracting new industries and enjoying savings at the same time. But instead of emulating such successes, the cable monopolists seek rules that let them force their captive customers onto the slow digital lanes while charging heavy tolls.

So what has happened to that promise so brilliantly packaged in the Qwest ad from Roy’s Motel? Instead of universal service, we are getting a retrenchment made possible by companies selling the public on one idea and then getting laws written that let them serve only those customers who can afford high prices. Worse yet, the system as constructed is so behind the times that, while highly profitable for the telecommunications monopolists, it retards the growth of the American economy. It operates outside the reach of market forces that could discipline the market and punish companies that abuse customers.

In short, our Internet-telephone-cable cartel has left us with the worst possible outcome. The promise captured in that Qwest commercial of universal, high-speed Internet access has proved to be nothing more than a mirage.

Reprinted by arrangement with Portfolio, Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from The Fine Print © 2012 by David Cay Johnston; Photo: Shutterstock

Stuck in the Internet Slow Lane The Saturday Evening Post

As a 20-something myself, I thought it would be interesting to profile the ways in which Facebook is changing how my generation communicates with friends and family.

I am part of the first generation that will never long for a high school reunion; Facebook has made it more difficult for me to lose track of old acquaintances. Whenever I go on Facebook, I see a stream of all the things my friends are currently doing. Even if I don’t speak to them for three months at a time, there’s still a “connection.”

In the past, this type of passive communication on a mass scale was impossible. If I wanted to stay connected to a group of 15 friends from long ago, I might have sent letters, but it would have been far from efficient. I would have written the same things to each of them. The personal content of these letters would have been small compared to the informational pieces that would be the same in the other 14 letters. Facebook makes your information a kind of boilerplate. It becomes a given, so conversations with old friends can be a lot more productive when I do see those people. In a way, I never really lose my connection.

That feeling of social ties is the magic of a service like Facebook. My family, like a lot of other modern families, is spread out across the Unites States, from Florida to California. I also have family members overseas. I’m lucky if I see my entire family once a year. Yet, with the assistance of Facebook, I can apply the the same efficiency of staying connected with high school friends as with my family. My sister, for example, recently had her first child. I have met my niece only a handful of times since then, but she is constantly in my thoughts thanks to a stream of pictures and updates about how she’s doing. It’s a lot like the old family Christmas cards except it’s happening every single day of the year.

The Internet has come a long way in the last couple of decades, and we’re seeing some noticeable generational trends. For instance, one of my friend’s aunts “friended me” on Facebook, and I noticed that she had three times the number of Facebook friends as her nephew, despite the fact that she has only recently started to spend more time on the Internet. She spends more time on Facebook than he does. Yet he is part of the younger generation that grew up using the Internet.

The beauty of Facebook is in the packaging of the service. Almost every facet of Facebook is technology that existed from years before: e-mail, instant messaging, photo galleries, personal Web pages, RSS, etc. Facebook has taken these function, which young people have been able to do for the past decade, and made them more user-friendly, more accessible—for young and older generations alike.

Facebook is the second act in the people’s Internet Revolution; the first being America Online, which spurred the adoption of the Internet in the homes of ordinary Americans. In a similar fashion, Facebook is spurring the adoption of Internet use in demographics that have been dismissed as the non-Internet users. It gives people a reason to be online in a way that simply checking e-mail, the 1996 equivalent, did not. Facebook is active in a way that the general population may find more rewarding.

Instead of waiting for items to roll in addressed to you personally, as in the case of e-mail, you can take the initiative to find out about your friends without having to speak to them directly.

The ability to communicate (or not communicate) with your friends in different ways also heightens the ‘stickiness’ of the service. For example, it tells you who else is using Facebook right now. You can then exchange instant messages with any of them. There’s always one more thing to check, see, or do on Facebook. It’s like a never-ending dinner party and all your friends and family are invited.

Whether or not Facebook is a festive Christmas card or more of a raucous dinner party is up to the user (or non-user). Suffice to say, even if the Facebook service goes offline tomorrow, services like Facebook have changed the way we communicate in our society.

The Facebook Generation The Saturday Evening Post

Navigating the web for the first time is like visiting a new city, like Paris, for the first time. Everything is new and different, wonderful and amazing, and you’ll soon be asking yourself why you didn’t get here sooner.

I remember the first time my grandmother emailed me, back when I was in college. My father — computer engineer that he is — set her up with a laptop and email. A traditional woman who grew up in the “roaring ’20s,” she was skeptical and hesitant at first. Before long she was instant messaging my siblings, cousins, and me, trying to stay in touch with all of us scattered across the United States.

Whether this is your first time or the 1,000th on the Internet, here are some tips that will hopefully make it easier for you to navigate the web and use your computer more efficiently.

1. If unfamiliar with computers and the Internet, you can go to the library or borrow a friend’s computer. Today’s computers are so user-friendly that you’ll quickly discover how easy computers are to use and navigate. If you decide to purchase a computer, experts offer some simple advice before you buy. First, decide what you want to do on it. This can be challenging initially if you are new at it. Most computers are so advanced that you can do the basics on any model that starts at $500, says Matt Dworkin, a 32-year-old “Double Agent” for Best Buy’s Geek Squad who has installed and set up hundreds of customers in the Washington, D.C., metro area for more than four years. If unsure what you want, go to any of the various “big box” stores and test out several to figure out what you like best. Don’t hesitate to ask for help.

2. Once you have a computer, Dworkin recommends setting up bookmarks. You can hire someone for an hourly rate during your initial computer set-up, ask for help from a friend or relative, or do it yourself. Bookmarks (sometimes called favorites) are tabs, just like the name indicates, that “mark” places on the Internet that you frequently enjoy using. Depending on what type of computer you purchase (P.C., or personal computer, used more frequently by the business world, or an Apple brand Mac or Macintosh, used by “creative types” like graphic designers who enjoy editing lots of photos or creating home movies), you will have different web browsers that allow you to navigate the Internet. Most people use web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Netscape. How to save a bookmark depends on your web browser, but once you know how, it will be easy to do again and again.

3. Secure your network. It’s very important to have several security features while on the Internet, including a firewall, says Jean Westcott, who coauthored with her husband, Sean, the book Digitally Daunted: The Consumer’s Guide to Taking Control of the Technology in Your Life. Buy, install, and use an antivirus program like McAfee and Symantec’s Norton AntiVirus. Just make sure that you don’t use both because the programs will cancel each other out, and you won’t be protected. Make sure you have the automatic updates turned on so your computer will automatically install the latest upgrades. Also install a Spyware program, such as Spybot, that will help prevent advertisers from tracking your movements on the web. Make sure you save all installation CDs and booklets, says Westcott, because you may need them in the future if you ever have trouble with your computer and need to re-install programs. If you need help, I strongly suggest using an A+ certified computer technician.

4. Set up an email account. An email is an electronic message sent from one computer to another that allows you to communicate extremely quickly with people around the world at any time. There are several email services. My favorite is gmail.com, which is Google’s version of email. Just be leery of anyone asking for money. Banks, the IRS, and other legitimate institutions won’t contact you over email or request your personal information or password. If you aren’t sure, don’t open the email. Again, a healthy dose of skepticism is important because, unfortunately, there are many “phishing” emails from people who are looking to get rich quick from the ignorance of others. Even if an email comes in from a friend, if the email doesn’t sound or look right, don’t believe it. Sometimes a virus can automatically send out emails from people you know.

5. Having trouble reading the Internet computer screen? Find the magnifying glass on your computer. On a PC, go to the start button, click on the control panel, and look for accessibility options. You can also enlarge text size. For more information on how to set it up on your PC or Mac, visit the website: www.aging.state.pa.us and click on “Enlarge Text.”

6. Struggle with typing? Both Macs and PCs with Microsoft Windows Vista programs have a text-to-speech program. This tool can work as a secretary and type what you say, read to you information from websites or simple word documents. You usually can change the automated voice to fit your comfort level. A speech recognition program will allow you to say things such as “open Internet Explorer,” or write down what you are speaking. This program helped a retired Navy man that Dworkin was assisting. “He stormed the beaches of Normandy and wanted to write a memoir but couldn’t because of his arthritis,” Dworkin says. “So he’d sit there and dictate to the computer. He had a friend edit it afterwards to make sure the word ‘meet’ wasn’t written as ‘meat’ or ‘mate.’ The program’s not flawless, but it can really help to minimize the amount of typing.”

7. Consider using Skype. Make calls from your computer to another computer for free, anywhere in the world. Even Oprah uses this now to interview some of her guests. You buy a special headset that typically costs $20 to $50 at any electronics store. You dial the phone number by pressing buttons on your computer and the other person picks up, so it’s just like a normal phone call. You can also call, unlimitedly, a landline or cell phone anywhere in the United States for $3 a month if you sign up for the service.

8. What is instant messaging (IM)? Imagine writing notes back and forth to someone — that’s what IM is like. It’s like writing one or two sentences or phrases on a Post-It type note that is instantly sent to someone else. There are a variety of free programs that do this, including: Google, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo

9. What’s a blog? Blog is short for web log. Most are free. People use them for various reasons — from keeping a public diary to writing about niche topics, such as politics, celebrities, sports, traveling, or dieting. Many people prefer WordPress.com or typepad.com.

10. Social networking. This buzzword became big in the past five to seven years. There are dozens of sites that fit various needs. Think of it as water cooler talk for the Internet. Linked-In.com is a business website where you can post your resume, credentials, and give or receive recommendations. It’s a great networking tool. Facebook.com can also be used for business networking or personal use. Many people use both, keeping one personal and one professional. MySpace.com is also used by many and was originally started as a way to promote bands on the Internet.

A Buyer’s Guide – Consider buying a laptop.

If you have problems, you can take a portable computer to someone else to have it fixed or call for home service. Plus, you can also go to places such as the library, many restaurants, and coffee shops that offer free Internet hookup. Most computers now come with Wi-Fi access that allows for a wireless connection to the Internet — I recommend it. Also, consider a built-in webcam that will allow you to see and talk to your children or grandchildren in real time. When buying a computer, ask yourself: do you enjoy music; want to edit photos; build a social network; create photo albums or home movies?

Noteworthy websites

Bookmark the following sites to make your Web use easier.

• saturdayeveningpost.com – Find fun features, health stories, favorite Rockwell art, blogs, humor, recipes, news that you can use, and much more.
• familysearch.org – Doing genealogy research? Start here.
• flickr.com – View some of the most interesting photographs from around the world.
• youtube.com – Watch Gene Kelly perform “Singing in the Rain” or Bono and Pavarotti perform Ave Maria on this video website.
• cnn.com – Just one of many great news sites. Google your favorite magazine or newspaper (New York Times is nytimes.com or try washingtonpost.com) and get even more information.
• bloomberg.com – Get financial news here.
• weather.com – Want the essentials? This site has been around for 12 years and frequently updates.
• mapquest.com – Type in an address and print out a map. Get driving directions, too.
• sidestep.com – This travel website, along with orbitz.com, travelocity.com and kayak.com will help you comparison-shop for flights and hotels.
• yelp.com – Find information on a restaurant, shop or business.
• overstock.com , eBay.com and amazon.com – Great places to shop.
• stubhub.com – Find tickets for concerts and sporting events.
• earth.google.com – View satellite images of anywhere in the world, even your home.
• craigslist.com – It’s the online version of the classified ad, only it’s free. Find everything from jobs to dating personals. Use it to sell or buy anything.
• freecycle.org – Trying to get rid of something or want something for free? Sign up for your neighborhood and add your request.
• espn.com – By far the most comprehensive sports website.
• charitynavigator.org – An independent charity evaluator.

10 Tips for Navigating the Web The Saturday Evening Post