Turns out the United States is lagging badly behind many other industrialized nations in both percentage of people with broadband access and speed of broadband access. The problem? Telecoms having essentially a monopoly on wiring going into your house and thus having absolutely no motivation to improve their service, and an FCC that blabbers about the "free market" without having any fucking clue what they're talking about beyond a talking points memo from the Cato Institute...
*grumble*
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Can't read the article (subscription-only) but if it's based on that last OECD report, it's worth reading this column first (also subscription-only, so there).
One snippet worth quoting about their methodology:
"According to an analysis by the Phoenix Center, if all OECD countries including the U.S. enjoyed 100% broadband penetration -- with all homes and businesses being connected -- our rank would fall to 20th. The U.S. would be deemed a relative failure because the OECD methodology measures broadband connections per capita, putting countries with larger household sizes at a statistical disadvantage."
Also, we'd have to assume that wi-fi (outside the home) doesn't count as broadband.
My bad if Krugman already addresses these points.
He doesn't, but I still call bullshit. :)
1) From the Phoenix Center's web site: "Founded in 1998, the Phoenix Center’s mission is to maximize consumer welfare by promoting free markets, competition, and individual freedom and liberty."
Libertarian organization anyone?
2) Spiwak, Phoenix's founder, according to his own bio, was, "a Senior Attorney with the Competition Division in the FCC’s Office of General Counsel where he was responsible for, among other things, coauthoring the FCC’s original 1994 Cable Competition Report, providing the primary legal and economic analysis for the FCC’s landmark decision to de-regulate AT&T and − given his substantial previous experience in the electric utility industry − for drafting the FCC’s rules regarding public utility entry into telecommunications and information services markets."
So, basically, he was a fox put in charge of the hen house. Great. Fantastic. What a reliable source of data.
3. Okay, let's pretend he isn't suspect, and move on to our douchebag Bush appointee of the hour:
"Furthermore, the OECD does not weigh a country's geographic size relative to its population density, which matters because more consumers may live farther from the pipes. Only one country above the U.S. on the OECD list (Canada) stretches from one end of a continent to another like we do. Only one country above us on this list is at least 75% rural, like the U.S. In fact, 13 of the 14 countries that the OECD ranks higher are significantly smaller than the U.S."
Hi. Remember how most people live in cities, or at least on the coasts? Remember how 10% of the population lives in just one of the top ten most populous cities by themselves, let alone all the other cities? Remember how most of the country is a barren fucking wasteland? Remember how many states have _one_ (or just a few) representatives? Yes, it would take a lot of wire to run internet access out to Cletus. And Bubba, too. But everyone else lives in a city, so quit bitching.
4.
"Forty-three American states have a higher household broadband adoption rate than all but five EU countries. Even large rural western states such as Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and both Dakotas exhibit much stronger household broadband adoption rates than France or Britain."
Of course they do, jackass! If you only have one guy with broadband, and the only other guy in the state gets it, hey, your adoption rate is 100%!!
5.
"The OECD conclusions really unravel when we look at wireless services, especially Wi-Fi. One-third of the world's Wi-Fi hot spots are in the U.S., but Wi-Fi is not included in the OECD study unless it is used in a so-called "fixed wireless" setting. I can't recall ever seeing any fixed wireless users cemented into a coffee shop, airport or college campus."
You're really going to argue that the people using wireless in the airport don't have broadband at home? Really? Really??
6.
"Europe also suffers from a dearth of robust competition from cable modem and fiber. Cable penetration is only about 21% of households. In the U.S., cable is available to 94% of all households. Also, the U.S. is home to the world's fastest fiber-to-home market, with a 99% annual growth rate in subscribers compared with a relatively anemic 13% growth rate in Europe."
Really? You're going to go there too? 7% of the people in Korea have fiber connections. 6.4% in Japan. Hell, even Denmark has 2.6%, and fucking bumpkin Norway has 1.5% The US? 0.3%. Oh, and did I mention that cable is both slower and more expensive here than elsewhere?
7.
"Here in the U.S., the country that is allegedly "falling behind," broadband adoption is accelerating. Government studies confirm that America's broadband growth rate has jumped from 32% per year to 52%. With new numbers expected shortly, we anticipate a continued positive trend. Criticisms of our definition of "broadband" being too lax are already irrelevant as over 50 million subscribers are in the 1.5 to 3.0 megabits-per-second "fast lane."
I'm not sure, but I think this is one of the bogus statistics floating around. Telecoms have this backhanded way of estimating adoption where, if one guy in a town has a "fast" connection, they assume everyone does. Also, when's the last time you actually achieved 1.5 Mb on _your_ connection?...
8.
"Our flexible and deregulatory broadband policies provide opportunities for American entrepreneurs to construct new delivery platforms enabling them to pull ahead of our international competitors. For instance, newly auctioned spectrum for advanced wireless services will spark unparalleled growth and innovation."
What starry-eyed, unsubstantiated horseshit. Seriously, let's ignore the validity of the assertion. Has he provided any evidence that it was the lack of regulation that has promoted broadband growth (assuming such growth exists). Any? At all? Regardless of whether it's suspect or not?
Harumph.
*sigh* I was actually semi-trying to avoid a blog battle...
I'll respond, but then I'm done. At least for today. :-)
1) Yes. The Phoenix Center wants to maximize consumer welfare by promoting free markets. Krugman wants to maximize consumer welfare by promoting more government regulation. Why don't we just let bygones be bygones and pretend that both parties just care about consumer welfare above all?
2) Huh? Spiwak worked for the FCC, Reed Hundt's FCC that was majority Democrat and majority Clinton appointees, and that's a Bad Thing from where you stand? Or was it the fact that he held another job (any job that wasn't carrying Krugman's water bottles) that disqualifies him from ever taking an objective stance on....anything?
3) Bush appointee? See above comment where he was hired by a Democratic FCC in 1994, 2 years after and 6 years before there was a Bush in office.
That aside, I don't get this. Actually, I don't think get his argument or yours. So he's saying it's really hard to run wires across the whole country (sure) and you're saying most people live in cities (also sure). What does either have to do with how many US people and/or households are connected to broadband service?
4) Okay, this time it's just your beef I don't get. So you're saying now that it's actually _easier_ to get higher adoption rates in your aforementioned "barren wasteland"? 43 states have better adoption rates that the countries supposedly kicking our behinds. Even if it were just the 43 least populated states, that still leaves at least 3 of the 10 largest states as having better than average adoption rates. Presumably some of those states would even have cities where many people live. What exactly is your objection here? If it's that fewer people = higher adoption rates, then you're actually arguing the exact same point Spiwak is.
5) Okay, no...the people using airport wireless access probably have broadband at home (unless maybe they live in Queens and the airport is actually their workplace and not where they go to fly to their high-powered meetings, but I digress). But I will argue that the people paying $9.99 a month to be able to connect at their local coffee shop may not also be paying for a separate broadband connection at home. And students living outside their wireless-enabled campus where they spend most of their days and nights, also may not be shelling out additional DSL fees. Just a thought.
6) Okay, the US sucks at providing hi-speed fiber connections. I'll concede that point. Everyone else sucks at cable. We'll call it a draw.
7) Well, this whole argument is all about "bogus" ways of estimating connection statistics, isn't it? The OECD has a way of estimating that, if a household of 5 people have internet access, only the dad really does. At least Spiwak (or the "government studies") is measuring the growth rate in whatever measure is being used. However you're counting, it's getting better (Hey, 52% more towns have a guy with broadband! Hooray!)
As for achieving 1.5Mb, when have you ever gotten [insert rated speed here] on your connection in [insert random country where everything internet is rosier than in the US here]?
8) And you're right, we have no proof that today's policies will yield success in the future. Stay tuned to find out!
As for the Krugman column, it's actually not pathetically bad until he goes into his standard "Clinton is God, Bush is the devil and isn't it great how much better things are in France?" blather and then I throw up a little in my mouth again.
1)
"Yes. The Phoenix Center wants to maximize consumer welfare by promoting free markets. Krugman wants to maximize consumer welfare by promoting more government regulation. Why don't we just let bygones be bygones and pretend that both parties just care about consumer welfare above all?"
No, my point is that the statement following "Founded in 1998, the Phoenix Center’s mission is to maximize consumer welfare by promoting free markets, competition, and individual freedom and liberty" on their website is, "The Phoenix Center achieves this goal by providing an honest and credible new voice in the public dialectic by supporting objective, solutions-based academic research to the forefront that is unencumbered by political hyperbole or agendas and is instead well grounded in fact, law and economic theory."
First of all, they actually use the term dialectic. That should be a good sign they're full of shit right there. But I digress.
They're a partisan think tank. You don't simultaneously present "objective" research at the same time you say your mission is "promoting free markets, competition, and individual freedom and liberty." When you say that's your mission, that's called having an agenda. That's fine...Krugman clearly has an agenda too. But it means I question any "objective study" that they do.
2.
Spiwak worked as a legal advocate for public utilities and then went to work regulating them. Fox in henhouse. Not everything was peach y_even_ under Clinton...
3.
No, _McDowell_, the op-ed writer, is the partisan Bush appointee asshole (redundant). :)
4. Misinterpreted what adoption rate meant. My bad. Nonetheless, one would think it easier to achieve higher adoption rates in places with lower penetration rates a priori, and isn't the whole point here that the US has crappier penetration rates?
5. Neither the people paying $9.99 for HotSpot, nor even the students (and we don't know how they were counted by the OECD), constitute anywhere near a significant subset of any broadband number, and therefore bringing them up in support of a "we're doing awesome! They're just counting funny!" argument is stupid.
6. But the whole point is that you don't need cable if you have fiber (and that the reverse isn't true). So what if Europe (or anywhere else) sucks at cable if they have fiber?
7. I meant to look this up earlier, and my suspicion was confirmed: notice he never actually said our average household size was significantly different from any of those other countries? That's cause, well, it's not.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_ave_siz_of_hou-people-average-size-of-households
This issue is a big, huge, fat red herring. :)
Post a Comment