Economics and the Black Box

While looking for something on media convergence, I stumbled upon an article about the effects that America's current economic situation is having (or potentially could have) on the future of media and its products.  The author describes a recent study in which US broadband subscriber rates decreased by half in 2008 due to the recession.  While a steep decline in the broadband is made obvious through this study, the author also mentions how something like this will greatly affect sites like YouTube and Hula because using sites like these without broadband (mostly dial-up) will make you want to pull your hair out.  The speed at which dial-up operates simply cannot comply to sites like these, a slow in broadband sales is not good news.

Along with the fact that subscriptions to broadband have decreased dramatically, is that the US is already behind the rest of the world in broadband adoption (15th in the world according to the Phoenix Center).  This is a problem because broadband adoption is one of the best measurements of technological priorities, and a falling number indicates a falling priority for technology and the rest of the US.

According to this article congress has started to auction off part of the available spectrum for free broadband to try and steady the decline.

Here is the article link....