The editorial writers at the Washington Post have built their Monday back-pager on a foundation of sand. In 800 words, they level an argument against Net Neutrality that uses meaningless data to paint a picture of robust competition in America’s broadband market.

Nothing could be less true. 

The broadband ISP owners at the Washington Post (the Washinton Post Company owns Cable One, which provides internet, and cable modem services in midwestern, western, and southern states) want you to believe that consumers will simply take their business elsewhere when an existing provider blocks or slows content. The Post’s editors write:

“The market for Internet connections, unlike that for cable television, is competitive: More than 60 percent of Zip codes in the United States are served by four or more broadband providers that compete to give consumers what they want — fast access to the full range of Web sites . . . If one broadband provider slowed access to fringe bloggers, the blogosphere would rise up in protest — and the provider would lose customers.”

They claim that competition in the broadband market will deter bad behavior by the likes of AT&T and Cable One. If these ISPs fiddled with content, customers would decamp in droves to a competing service. 

If only this were true.

For customers to leave, they have to have somewhere else to go. But such choice doesn’t exist and won’t anytime in the foreseeable future.

The Post cites Federal Communications Commission data that “more than 60 percent of Zip codes in the United States are served by four or more broadband providers.” But the FCC itself warns that Zip-code information is not meant to be a measure of broadband deployment. The statistic quoted by the Post simply indicates that at least one broadband subscriber resides in a given Zip code, meaning that in 60 percent of the nations’ Zip codes, there are four broadband providers with at least one customer. The Post is implying that this statistic means that the broadband market is competitive, when in fact it is not.

A recent study by the Government Accountability Office confirms that the Zip-code metric is useless when measuring broadband deployment and competition. The GAO found that the median number of providers available to a given household is just two.

That’s right. Most Americans have access to two or less broadband providers. That’s all. Cable and DSL systems dominate, holding more than 98 percent of the broadband market. A significant chunk of the country has only one broadband provider available, and around 10 percent of households have none at all. (For more, read the Free Press, Consumers Union and Consumer Federation of America report “Broadband Reality Check“)

Ours is hardly a competitive market. In fact, the share of the U.S. market held by all the other broadband technologies combined — satellite, fixed wireless, mobile wireless, and broadband over power lines — actually decreased over the past few years, according the FCC.

There simply is not enough competition between different technologies to produce any kind of deterrent to discrimination. Without Net Neutrality, the telephone and cable duopoly will leverage its market power over the network to gain control over the content and application markets, establishing a handful of giant companies as the gatekeepers of the Internet.

The consumer is trapped when both local cable and telephone companies use their networks to discriminate. And the executives of the largest of these firms have stated their intentions to do so.

So, where else is there to go?

The Post editors got it wrong. Coincidentally, it’s an error that serves their parent company well.

– ALSO: David Isenberg’s dismantling of the Post and Jeffrey Chester’s at the Center for Digital Democracy.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.-->