Infrastructure Commons in Economic Perspective

Abstract

This chapter briefly summarizes a theory (developed in substantial detail elsewhere)1 that explains why there are strong economic arguments for managing and sustaining infrastructure resources in an openly accessible manner. This theory facilitates a better understanding of two related issues: how society benefits from infrastructure resources and how decisions about how to manage or govern infrastructure resources affect a wide variety of public and private interests. The key insights from this analysis are that infrastructure resources generate value as inputs into a wide range of productive processes and that the outputs from these processes are often public goods and nonmarket goods that generate positive externalities that benefit society as a whole. Managing such resources in an openly accessible manner may be socially desirable from an economic perspective because doing so facilitates these downstream productive activities. For example, managing the Internet infrastructure in an openly accessible manner facilitates active citizen involvement in the production and sharing of many different public and nonmarket goods. Over the last decade, this has led to increased opportunities for a wide range of citizens to engage in entrepreneurship, political discourse, social network formation, and community building, among many other activities. The chapter applies these insights to the network neutrality debate and suggests how the debate might be reframed to better account for the wide range of private and public interests at stake.