The widespread imposition of stay-at-home orders has underscored the critical role that access to the internet plays in modern society. Some countries have done a better job than others in deploying high-quality and robust network infrastructure. In Europe, networks have struggled to meet bandwidth demand, leading officials to ask popular services such as Netflix and YouTube to degrade the quality of their streaming video from high definition to standard definition. U.S. networks have faced fewer problems adjusting to the increase in demand.

Public...