Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Internet and public investment in infrastructure

I've seen this graph in an interesting book by Jonathan Taplin (Move Fast and Break Things; highly recommend, btw) on how the big internet firms Google and Facebook essentially (but also Amazon) have become the new monopolies of our gilded age. He discusses mostly the effects on the entertainment business, but the implications are far-reaching of course. Below the share of fiber optics connections as a share of total broadband connections in OECD countries (Taplin uses this graph in the book).
Note that the US lags behind (I'm assuming things didn't change much since Dec. 2015). So here there would be a huge benefit from public investment in infrastructure. Not that I think this would happen any time soon.

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