According to this morning’s New York Times, the United States is lagging pretty badly when it comes to broadband penetration. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Belgium and even Britain now have levels of broadband penetration greater than both the United States and Japan. The European Commission says that the European Union added 19 million broadband lines in 2007, which works out to about 50, 000 households per day! If the commission succeeds in diminishing the influence of the state-run telecommunications monopolies in some Eastern European countries, we will likely see the US fall even further behind as it would result in nearly half of EU countries at least on par with the US in broadband usage.
It’ll be interesting to see what effect this will ultimately have on the dynamic of the world economy. If the US lags too far behind in broadband usage, the new media economy could be centralized on another continent altogether, and be the first time the US didn’t dominate a particular industry since the Industrial Revolution.
