Japan's Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future - washingtonpost.com

I see three parts to this story: it is another clear reminder of the ways the United States is being superceded by the dynamic economies of Asia, it is a reminder of the death grip certain corporations have on innovation in the US, and finally, most obviously, the multiple and cascading failures of the Bush administration.

For all of its many inadequacies, the Clintonites did do a reasonably good job in facilitating the technology boom of the 1990s. The Bush administration, wedded to the oil-national security nexus, has disastrously allowed the US to both ship virtually its entire manufacturing economy to Asia and to lose the advantage in high technology.

Japan's
Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future - washingtonpost.com: "Americans invented
the Internet, but the Japanese are running away with it. Broadband service here
is eight to 30 times as fast as in the United States -- and considerably
cheaper. Japan has the world's fastest Internet connections, delivering more
data at a lower cost than anywhere else, recent studies show.

Accelerating broadband speed in this country -- as well as in South Korea and much of Europe -- is pushing open doors to Internet innovation that are
likely to remain closed for years to come in much of the United States."

this is interesting

...
The copper wire used to hook up Japanese homes is newer and runs in shorter
loops to telephone exchanges than in the United States. This is partly a matter
of geography and demographics: Japan is relatively small, highly urbanized and
densely populated. But better wire is also a legacy of American bombs, which
razed much of urban Japan during World War II and led to a wholesale rewiring of
the country.
...
Indeed, DSL in Japan is often five to 10 times as fast as what is widely
offered by U.S. cable providers, generally viewed as the fastest American
carriers. (Cable has not been much of a player in Japan.)

..."The Bush administration largely turned its back on the Internet, so we
have just drifted downwards," said Thomas Bleha, a former U.S. diplomat who
served in Japan and is writing a history of how that country trumped the United
States in broadband."