Baloney Has a First Name: It’s R-O-B-E-R-T
July 25th, 2007 by caaronIn Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell served up the journalistic equivalent of expired lunch meat, a rancid op-ed on America’s digital decline aptly titled “Broadband Baloney.”
The article was designed to discredit a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which ranks the United States 15th in the world in broadband adoption — down from fourth place in 2001 and 12th just six months ago.
Something’s Rotten at the FCC |
But McDowell’s piece is a rotten mix of industry talking points, misdirection and outright falsehoods.
For instance, McDowell criticizes the OECD for counting broadband adoption per capita rather than per household. But he neglects to mention recent data from the U.K. firm Point-Topic and the International Telecommunications Union that ranks the United States 24th in the world in the percentage of homes subscribing to broadband.
McDowell then lays the blame for poor U.S. broadband performance on geography. He claims that the United States is “75 percent rural,” but according to the Census Bureau, only 21 percent of the U.S. population lives in rural areas. That’s almost exactly the same level as Canada — which has a far higher level of broadband adoption.
McDowell also indicates that the European markets aren’t competitive because cable modem deployment is not widespread. But the countries ahead of us in the rankings all have vigorous competition between providers operating on the same technology platform, as well as between broadband providers using different technologies.
Whereas U.S. consumers have at best two choices of home broadband providers – the local phone or cable companies — citizens of European and Asian countries often have more than a dozen.
As a result, Europeans and Asians pay less for much faster speeds than are available here. This competitive marketplace is made possible by the use of “open access” policy — something that was invented in the United States but later abandoned under intense pressure from phone and cable lobbyists.
McDowell’s willingness to uncritically accept industry spin and ignore all the signs of failure in the U.S. broadband market is deeply troubling. And his indifference has real-world consequences: the loss of millions of jobs to overseas workers ready and able to serve the needs of the 21st-century digital economy.
If you’re looking for a meaty analysis without all the baloney, download Shooting the Messenger – a new report from S. Derek Turner of Free Press that dispels industry myths about the sorry state of the U.S. broadband market.
July 25th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
Could one of you fine folks tell me how having the government control how a PRIVATE business markets its product a good thing? Are you going to tell ATT to provide hi speed internet service to every house in the country, and then let the ‘mom and pop’ isp sell it to their customers?