George Gilder compares Korean broadband deployment in a pro-regulatory environment to the broadband deployment/regulatory mess we have in the US.
"…it’s important to really understand what happened over the last five years. A trip to Korea can give you an understanding. We didn’t have a fundamental bubble that consisted of Ponzi schemes and accounting frauds. That wasn’t the basic thing that happened. The basic thing that happened was that we launched a broadband revolution and didn’t consummate it because of regulatory mistakes. So it moved to Asia. Korea has 40 times the amount of bandwidth that we do. And they accomplished that in three years." Gilder continues, "When you have a true deployment of broadband in a country, including wireless broadband, the whole economy changes. In 2003, there was around $450 billion a year of commercial transactions on the Internet in Korea. A third of their economy was transacted on the Internet."