Paving the Digital Roads - Should Government be Responsible?

I'm going to broaden this "Digital Rights" topic from its original focus of Digital Rights Management to include human Digital Rights - the right of people any/everywhere to participate in the digital revolution in much the same manner that people can participate in the physical road systems of our planet.

There are a lot of parallels here - with one exception; the digital road system is evolving far faster than the physical road system ever did, so it is far more disruptive of the world's social and economic sphere than the evolution of the road system ever was with the possible exception of the expansion of the North American highway system after World War II at the expense of the railroads/streetcars (see the back-story to the cartoon film "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" as well as this article on the US Federal-Aid Highway Act (1954)) 

The point is that the digital highway is somewhat following the pattern of build-out of the road system in North America; first by the military, then by private enterprise, then local governments, then by the Federal government connecting all the dots in the national highway system.

In the 15+ years the internet has been a public facility (as opposed to the first few years prior to about 1992 when it was mostly military, research and education) private industry has expanded this "road" to a great extent, at least in and near the urban areas. The rural areas are not as well served and some local governments are stepping into the fray and doing the build-out themselves.

We're seeing a great amount of business/government rhetoric over who should ultimately be responsible for building out the digital infrastructure our increasingly digital world needs. The World Summit on the Information Society, held most recently in 2005 in Tunis, brings this most sharply into focus over the broad terms of mult-country concerns, with this paper from Harvard by Isabelle FALQUE-PIERROTIN summing it up fairly well.

The bottom line is that because the digital highway is so disruptive to so many aspects of our economy, simply having government take over building and fleshing it out to a similar extent that the road system has been done is not an option. There are too many hands in the old pies that will be completely disrupted if they don't get a chance to change their business model to include ownership of pieces of the digital infrastructure - or that have already done so and would be disruptively expensive to undo in favour of public/government ownership/control, at least in the developed countries.

So again, we end up with something that should be privately owned but regulated in some fashion. We can't just give private industry money and hope they build big pipes to every community on the planet, we have to put in place regulations of some sort that balances capital outlay with long-term profitability in somewhat the same fashion that the telephone companies were given in earlier times in North America.

The problem is that we need to do this world-wide. 

At this point I'm not sure what is going to happen in this globalization of communication technologies, the revolution is not over yet. I'll do more thinking and research and writing over the next while - in the mean time, let me know what you think is going to happen over the next 1, 5, 15 years in this area and we'll have a go at prognostication.