The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced the release of its National Broadband Plan a few weeks ago, accompanied by as much hullabaloo as could be spared from health care reform. Whatever else this plan is, or is supposed to be, the FCC had a clear Congressional mandate to get certain things done here. The agency was instructed to come up with a plan to ensure that every American had access to broadband capability, and to include “a detailed strategy for achieving affordability and maximizing use of broadband to advance ‘consumer welfare, civic participation, public safety and homeland security, community development, health care delivery, energy independence and efficiency, education, employee training, private sector investment, entrepreneurial activity, job creation and economic growth, and other national purposes.’”

The parts of the plan that most interest us, of course, are those that have to do with providing small businesses with access to high speed Internet connections and with competition in the marketplace. The FCC is concerned about ensuring more robust competition but there does not appear to be any kind of commitment, from the FCC or anybody else in the federal government, to exert themselves to keep the big boys from shutting the little upstart startups out of the market. As for the support for small and medium sized businesses that has been written into the plan, it is fair to say that the support will be more targeted toward medium-sized businesses and less toward smaller or microbusinesses because, as with everything else, it seems difficult for people who function within large institutions to fathom how microbusinesses use technology. In spite of all that, national broadband deployment would be a good thing for micros, even without any extras attached.