In February, Congress gave the FCC a big homework assignment – create a national broadband plan that the government can use as a diagram to turn the country into a paradise of universal, cheap and productive broadband. This week, telecoms, interest groups, internet companies and citizens (Wired.com readers included) filed thousands of pages of comments in an attempt to help the FCC write its report.

The deluge is understandable. Big money is at stake. So too might be the future of the economy.

The Obama administration is hungry for a change. So are net-neutrality groups whose members were influential supporters of Obama. And Google is finally exercising its muscle in D.C., an area where telecoms are used to getting their way, thanks to tens of millions annually in contributions and lobbying efforts.

A desk-thumping, but largely conservative broadband plan would suit the current crop of telecom companies well – ensuring that they'd get some grants for laying new cable to areas they've decided are currently not worth the effort, while keeping the comfortable cable and telephone duopoly in place – ensuring continued high profits for all – even in the midst of a crippling recession.

Others would like to see a much bigger change, where federal regulators hound the incumbents – holding them to speed and access promises – as well as allowing citizens to use whatever devices or services they like, regardless of whether they are using a wireless or a wired net connection. They also want the government to encourage and fund cooperatives, municipal operations and non-profit networks. Google, which ISPs resent for making huge profits over their networks, is one of these.

Congress and President Obama have already authorized $7 billion in grants for rural and inner-city broadband expansion, but that could amount to just a down payment on a broader project that could rival the scope of the Rural Electrification project from the New Deal, which eventually led to programs to bring phone service to all Americans.

Until now, the feds have largely left the building of the nation's broadband infrastructure to private companies – namely the nation's cable companies, incumbent phone companies and satellite providers. Despite the promise of cheap, fast, city-owned fiber networks and free wireless projects in the nation's metropolises, such projects are rare – in no little part, thanks to lawsuits and lobbying by the nation's largest ISPs. Despite the 1996 telecom de-regulation attempt to force big providers to rent access to their lines for a fair fee, the FCC essentially killed off small competition by freeing cable and DSL providers from those obligations. Now, when citizens have a choice of providers, it's usually a choice between a cable provider and a telephone company.

But while the internet's backbone started in the United States and still carries a huge chunk of the world's IP traffic, consumers are stuck with expensive and slow connections to that backbone, at least when compared to other developed countries like Japan, Sweden and Korea. In other words, U.S. net users are riding Amtrak, while across the ocean, they are zipping around the net on 300 mph bullet trains that cost less than a ticket on a diesel-powered train in the States. The United States is now 15th in the world when it comes to broadband (.pdf), according to ITIF, taking into account speed, price and the percentage of citizens subscribing.

Other models exist. Australia just announced that it would build a comprehensive fiber optic and wireless network that would reach every Australian, with service provided by companies that rent access to the public and privately owned network. Japan works closely with its dominant telecom to set policies. Other countries require phone and cable companies to lease their lines at fair prices to competitors – a trade-off for being able to run wires through public right-of-ways.

The question now becomes what factions will have the most influence with the Obama-appointed FCC. The Senate is just finally getting around to processing four nominations, two Democrat and two Republicans, to the five-member committee that will be 3-2 in the Dems' favor. Julius Genachowski, an Obama-campaign tech advisor, is set to head the FCC, while the well-regarded but not-appointed Blair Levin, known as the brains behind the 1996 Telecom Act, will be in charge of the Broadband Plan.

There are a lot of voices to be heard.

For instance, the American Farm Bureau Federation wants price supports for internet service (.pdf), calling broadband "beyond the financial means of many residents of their communities." While it might seem silly for this group to weigh in on fiber optics, rural areas are likely to receive the bulk of dollars – in no small part since nearly everyone agrees the boonies needs better access and the telecoms think they can get government money to subsidize it.

Comcast, one of the nation's largest ISPs, explicitly called for subsidies for the poor in its filing this week, and went on to add that the government should add more digital services in order to convince Luddite citizens that they need broadband. In fact, Comcast says the Luddite problem is four times as big a problem as meager, expensive or non-existent broadband and deserves as much attention from the feds.

Presumably, "promoting use of broadband Internet service by addressing barriers to adoption, including government policies that have failed to encourage all Americans to use broadband services," means telling people to subscribe to broadband (hopefully Comcast's) or they can't get their tax refund.

Comcast also announced this week it was rolling out a speed upgrade to its cable service in Washington, D.C. We take it the timing was purely coincidental.

Not surprisingly, the Fiber-to-the-Home Council sees in the National Broadband Plan, an opportunity (.pdf) to, well, "set forth a grand plan." Namely, laying fiber optic cable to citizens' homes with a combination of federal dollars and private enterprise.

AT&T, another fan of the government subsidizing its customers, sees the national broadband plan as a way to create a new smart network that isn't just a set of dumb pipes connecting users to users and web services. That's every telecom executive's worst nightmare – though utility companies do seem to make fine profits from useful, but unglamorous services.

"As broadband becomes more ingrained in our everyday lives — from web surfing to video conferencing to smart grids to e-commerce and e-government to telemedicine and beyond — networks will need to dynamically provide the performance capabilities required by the increasingly diverse array of services, applications, and content traveling over them," the company wrote.

Also, AT&T advises that "proposals ... intended to address theoretical concerns about potential behavior that may never occur, should have no place in the Plan." That means no net neutrality, openness or non-discrimination rules should be attached to federal money — for those of you not accustomed to telecom speak.

Google's interests are far different from the carriers, and the search and online advertising giant suggests that the government should lay fiber optic cable as it works on any road project, connect the nation's libraries and public schools with fiber, and encourage companies to lay more fiber than they need to rent or sell to others.

But more importantly, they want the feds to think of broadband as infrastructure, not the internet.

"Broadband constitutes the lower layer network activities provided by carriers, while 'the Internet' is the upper layer activities supplied by users such as applications and content providers," Google notes. "In other words, broadband is the physical connective pathway that allows consumers to reach the Internet and utilize its capabilities."

In other words, force the carriers to build an open set of pipes, and Google, not the ISPs, will figure out the best way to use them.

By contrast, the Free Press — a net neutrality advocacy group — in a 307-page filing, sees the broadband plan as an opportunity for the FCC to radically "shift from viewing broadband as a commercial service to a critical infrastructure." That means oversight to make sure the nation's ISPs don't collapse like the banks did, rules to make sure there are cheap rates for the poor (like with phones) and regulations to make sure the pipe owners don't mess with the content flowing through the pipe.

In short, the broadband plan is an opportunity for the FCC to reject its last decade and embrace a new activist, watchdog role, according to the Free Press's filing. That suspiciously sounds like making the Free Press into the FCC, or vice versa.

Verizon — one of the nation's top ISPs — touted the usefulness of broadband and explained how much money it had invested in capital expenditures (more than $80 billion in the last four years). It also emphasized its view that a light regulatory regime has led to great advances in broadband in the United States, despite the country's dismal standings in world connectivity rankings.

"Policymakers should ensure this continued positive evolution by continuing to support the stimulative, pro-growth regulatory policies that have unleashed this torrent of private innovation and investment and created millions of jobs," Verizon wrote, all but saying a national broadband plan was unnecessary.

Time Warner Cable, still reeling from the PR nightmare of its ham-handed attempt to charge users per GB of use, says the National Broadband Plan should not create "additional barriers to investment, such as [...] additional privacy regulations. That's because "providers of such services do not track usage or bill customers based on individual 'calls' (or Internet sessions), and therefore do not even possess the types of information that the Commission has focused on safeguarding."

That's odd to hear because Time Warner Cable will need to track usage to bill by usage and two ISPs wouldn't tell Wired.com if they did keep logs of where users travel on the net. Oh, and TWC thinks free laptops for the poor would be good, too.

The wireless industry's trade group, the CTIA (.pdf), sees the national broadband plan as needing to be technology-neutral — meaning that wireless counts too and is eligible for federal dollars. But, the CTIA argues, broadband rules should not be applied to wireless. For instance, the rules that consumers can use any device or service they like? That's fine for DSL and cable, but not for wireless companies' tender networks. Or as the CTIA writes, the FCC "should neither extend application of its Broadband Policy Statement to wireless networks, nor should it adopt a non-discrimination principle...."

The Onion once published an article entitled "All of Family's Neuroses Projected Onto Dog." Reading the submissions from the nation's telecoms, interest groups and ISPs to the FCC about its upcoming, first-ever national broadband plan, one sympathizes with the Tobin family dog, Woofers.

The Onion concluded its article noting that Woofers must be an amazing specimen, noting that a "lesser dog would have cracked under the strain of so many mutually contradictory projections long ago."

One can only hope the FCC's national broadband plan will do as well with the country's broadband dreams. But we're guessing the FCC's mutt won't please nearly so many as Woofers did.

Photo: A worker tightens a nut on a guide-vane-operating seromotor in TVA's hydroelectric plant, Watts Bar Dam, Tennessee, in 1942. Palmer, Alfred T./Library of Congress via Flickr

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