Every school child learns about the importance of infrastructure for economic and social stability. Highways, rail and telephone lines, bridges, dams, aqueducts, power plants, sewer systems and the like played vital roles in industrial age prosperity.
Telecommunications networks constitute the critical infrastructure of the information age.
At the dawn of the United States, this meant sea lanes. Then came the railroads, and then transport over highways and by air. Today, business needs access to modern telecommunications facilities, and there is ample evidence that today's most competitive companies are those that make extensive use of telecommunications. The Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy and the Center for the New West have argued that, in terms of new science and technology, California is the most important intellectual and scientific center in the nation, if not the world. Today, the state leads in virtually every 21st century industry, from the Internet to bio-technology.