Over at Certain Silence, my friend Tim Schneider and fellow Public Knowledge alum raises an interesting question: Is the Free Press policy message stronger by linking the disparate broadband questions into one policy push?

Tim raises this point in the context of FP’s twin Broadband Reality Check reports (Part I, pdf; Part II, pdf). Here, I seek to ask it on a larger scale. (Read: here’s how I think the divergent areas of broadband policymaking fit together.)

To be fair to Tim, I agree that the “Reality Check” papers may try to do too much in one shot, if we evaluate them as raw research papers. The editor of a scholarly journal would probably suggest disentangling the problems of universal service (tens of millions of Americans have no meaningful access to broadband) and America’s falling standing in the broadband race (other countries are whizzing past us with higher broadband growth, faster lines, and much cheaper per-MB prices).

All the same, bundling the issues produces an important big picture: As broadband customers, Americans are all hosed. Nobody has an enviable list of choices for service providers, we all pay too much for what we get, and it only gets worse once you get out of the cities and wealthy suburbs. In short, the broadband policy of the recent past has been a spectacular failure.

The Internet Freedom Declaration adds a third issue: the need for “an open, neutral network.” The need for network neutrality finds support in the Broadband Reality Check research, which finds that there is no meaningful competition in the broadband sector.

Without competition, anticompetitive behavior can and generally will fester. The service providers already generally deliver poor service at high prices; now, they’d like to engage in economically motivated broadband discrimination.

The overall message is thus pretty clear: Don’t let the broadband providers pretend that the status quo is good for our country. Without some regulatory intervention, consumers will never pay reasonable prices for high-quality access to the internet content of their choosing.

Of course, Tim is still right about this being a multifaceted problem requiring many policy solutions. All the same, I think it’s important to link them together in one broader policy push. Legislatures and (all but the most hardcore, issue-specific) activists are like terrible waiters: once you have their attention, you’d better be ready to ask for everything you want.