To make the most of technology’s future, the United States again needs a bold infrastructure plan that will create a springboard for new jobs, sustained competitiveness, and broader prosperity. While many details and the need for compromise lie ahead, we believe President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan, or AJP, points in the right direction. Broadband has become the electricity of the 21st century, providing the lifeblood for jobs, healthcare, and education. But like electricity in the 1930s, it hasn’t reached tens of millions of people. Public investment can close this gap and encourage long-term broadband adoption. We need both private ingenuity and public investment to ensure that technology’s benefits reach everyone.

[Brad Smith is the president of Microsoft.]

Elon Musk’s internet satellite venture has spawned an unlikely alliance of competitors, regulators, and experts who say the billionaire is building a near-monopoly that is threatening space safety and the environment. The Starlink project, owned by Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. or SpaceX, is authorized to send some 12,000 satellites into orbit to beam superfast internet to every corner of the Earth. It has sought permission for another 30,000. Now, rival companies such as Viasat, OneWeb Global Ltd., Hughes Network Systems, and Boeing Co. are challenging Starlink’s space race in front of regulators in the US and Europe. Some complain that Musk’s satellites are blocking their own devices’ signals and have physically endangered their fleets. Musk’s endeavor is still in beta testing but it has already disrupted the industry, and even spurred the European Union to develop a rival space-based internet project to be unveiled by the end of 2021.

California’s net neutrality law, which a federal district court upheld in February, is already wading into the regulatory morass that brought down past regulatory regimes charged with maintaining neutrality in rail transport and energy. Specifically, the California law is likely to generate an endless and costly series of regulatory rulemakings on how to define categories of service that can be zero-rated—that is, used without counting against a data cap—and which applications must be included in those categories, without any evidence that it would generate offsetting benefits. I do not dismiss outright the underlying concerns of some net neutrality proponents. In principle, an ISP with few competitors might be able use zero-rating to engage in anticompetitive practices, like foreclosing competing online services. For example, an ISP might try to benefit its own video streaming service over a competitors’. In practice, however, while ISPs have zero-rated their own services, those actions do not appear to have been particularly profitable or harmed competitors.