The truth is: The United States blew this broadband thing decades ago, probably back in the late 1980s. That’s when some bright people, who didn’t know what the Internet was going to become, said it would be smart to break up the local phone companies into component parts — a wholesale division that would operate the network and sell capacity and services to all comers, and a retail division that would sell services, in competition with what would hopefully be many others.

It’s an idea that has taken hold overseas. BT, for example, has a wholesale division that operates the network and sells it to multiple broadband service providers, one of which is also its own retail operation. BT is now best known for its 21st Century Network, the first announced attempt by a major operator to go all-IP. That’s an example of what can happen if an organization’s focus is on providing the best possible network facility.

In France, this approach has fueled a hotly competitive IPTV market, with multiple content providers using France Telecom’s network to reach consumers, who have many different choices. In China, the government-owned telecom companies are forbidden from owning the content and are instead building the broadband infrastructure in a way that lets services be offered much more cheaply than they are here.

In the United States, however, we decided that broadband networks would be privately owned facilities. Anyone who wanted to build one could. But as it has turned out, few companies beyond the existing telephone and cable operators have chosen to do that, because the upfront investment is daunting. To recoup that investment, cable and telephone companies are selling their own service packages, including video.

Now that we realize how important broadband access is, how it can fuel an economy, stimulate innovation, create jobs, improve quality of life and even help protect the environment, there are many who look at the cable-telco duopoly with suspicion. They would like the U.S. government to step in and impose regulations that force these giant ISPs to offer the same quality of service to all comers at the same price. They want to forbid premium service offerings, as inherently discriminatory, and disallow efforts to give priority to some traffic over others.

These same people bemoan the lack of broadband penetration in the United States and the relatively lower speeds of access that we have here, compared with other nations.

The problem is that this kind of regulation would dry up the investment dollars cable and telephone companies need to keep investing to extend the reach of their networks. The United States chose, decades ago, to make broadband a privately funded affair, and we are stuck with that decision. It may have been the wrong decision, in retrospect, but it’s the choice we made.