Steve Jobs designed great products. It’s very, very hard to make the case that he created large numbers of jobs in this country.

— Prof. Paul Krugman, New York Times, January 25, 2012

Turns out, not very hard at all.

The App Economy now is responsible for roughly 466,000 jobs in the United States, up from zero in 2007 when the iPhone was introduced.

— Dr. Michael Mandel, TechNet study, February 7, 2012

See our earlier rough estimate of Apple’s employment effects: “Jobs: Steve vs. the Stimulus.”

— Bret Swanson

On Tuesday afternoon, Apple said it earned $13 billion in the fourth quarter on $46 billion in revenue. Thirty-seven million iPhones and 15 million iPads sold in the quarter helped boost its market cap to $415 billion. A few hours later, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, in his State of the Union response message, contrasted the technology juggernaut with Washington’s impotent jobs efforts: “The late Steve Jobs – what a fitting name he had – created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew.”

First thing Wednesday morning, however, Paul Krugman countered with a devastating argument – “Mitch Daniels Doesn’t Read the New York Times.” Prof. Krugman referred to the first of the Times‘ multipart series on Apple’s Chinese manufacturing operations.

From Sunday’s Times:

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

…

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

Steve Jobs designed great products. It’s very, very hard to make the case that he created large numbers of jobs in this country. Obama’s auto bailout, just by itself, saved a lot more jobs than Apple’s US employment.

So the New York Times thinks all those Chinese Foxconn assembly workers are the primary employment effect of Apple. And Prof. Krugman sidesteps the argument by noting the “auto bailout” – not the stimulus – “saved” – not created, mind you – more jobs than Apple’s under-roof American workforce.

CNNMoney jumped in:

Daniels’ math just doesn’t add up, no matter how successful and valuable Apple has become.

Not even close.

This little episode exposes quite a lot about the fundamentally different ways people think about the economy.

The economy is dynamic and complex. It’s a cooperative, competitive, and evolutionary. In recent pre-Great Recession history, the U.S. lost around 15 millions jobs every year — holy depression! But we created some 17 million a year, netting two million. There’s no way to quantify Jobs’ jobs impact exactly, which is one of the great virtues of capitalism.

An attempt to estimate in a very rough way, however, might be useful:

Apple

Apple has 60,000 total employees, around 43,000 in U.S.

Multiply these numbers by the years these jobs have existed, decades in the case of many. That’s many hundreds of thousands of “job-years.”

Then consider the broad software industry, especially the world of “apps” being developed for iPhone and iPad, and now for Macs. More than 500,000 iOS apps now exist, and 1.2 billion were downloaded in the last week of December 2011. Lots of people are trying to quantify how many jobs this app ecosystem has created. Likely it will mean many tens of thousands of jobs for decades to come, meaning hundreds of thousands of job-years, though even the “app” won’t look this way forever or even for long. We’ll see.

Apple computers, iPhones, iPads, and multimedia software, like OSX, iOS, Quicktime, and WebKit, drive the Internet and wireless industries. (WebKit is an open software platform developed by Apple that most people have never heard of. But it’s crucial to Internet browsers and webpage development.) These devices allow people and companies to create content. They improve productivity and create new kinds of jobs. How many graphic designers would we have had over the years without the Mac?

Apple devices devour bandwidth and storage and drive new generations of broadband and mobile network build-outs, totaling about $65 billion per year in the U.S. So add some significant portion of networking equipment salesmen and telecom pole-climbers and Verizon and Comcast workers and data center technicians. The iPhone alone completely reinvigorated the U.S. mobile industry and ushered in a new paradigm of computing, moving from PC to mobile device. Apple jolted AT&T back to life when the two companies partnered on the first iPhone. How many jobs across the economy did the iPhone “save” by boosting our digital industries when the PC era had about run its course? A lot.

Jobs created a new digital music industry. It’s impossible to gauge how many jobs were created versus eliminated. But clearly the new jobs are higher value jobs.

Apple is now the largest buyer of microchips in the world. It buys 23% of all the world’s flash memory, for example. Much of that is South Korean. But Apple probably buys something like 20 million Intel microprocessors each year. That’s a huge part of Intel’s business. Intel employs 100,000 people (not all in the U.S.).

The notion that “almost none” of the “additional 700,000″ people who contribute to designing and building Apple products work in the U.S. is false. And silly.

Apple’s list of suppliers includes many of America’s leading-edge technology companies: Qualcomm, Intel, Corning, LSI, Broadcom, Seagate, Micron, Analog Devices, Linear, Maxim, Marvell, International Rectifier, Western Digital, ON Semi, Nvidia, AMD, Cypress, Texas Instruments, TriQuint, SanDisk, etc.

Lots of Apple’s foreign suppliers have substantial workforces in the U.S. Oft cited are the two Austin, Texas, Samsung fabs, which employ 3,500 workers who make NAND flash memory and Apple’s A5 chip. But many Asian and European Apple suppliers have sales, marketing, and support staff in America.

And of course no government or stimulus jobs are possible without private wealth creation. During the “stimulus” period — 2009-11 — Apple paid $16.5 billion in corporate income taxes, thus financing about 2% of the entire $821 billion stimulus package and thus 2% of the stimulus “jobs.” One might counter that stimulus was funded with debt, but money is fungible, and issuing debt depends on future claims on wealth. Moreover, because stimulus jobs were so extraordinarily expensive, a different accounting says that Apple’s $16.5 billion in taxes could have paid for 330,000 $50,000-a-year salaries.

Pixar

In 1986, Steve Jobs bought a tiny division of George Lucas’s LucasFilm and created what we know as Pixar, the leading movie animation studio. In 2006, Pixar merged with Walt Disney. Disney has 156,000 employees and $41 billion in sales, a growing portion of which directly or indirectly relate to Pixar properties, film development, characters, licensing, and distribution. Pixar really saved Hollywood during a dark time for film and spawned a whole new animation boom. Pixar developed and inspired many new technologies for film making, video games, and other interactive visual media.

An additional consideration: Over the 2009-11 period, Disney paid $7 billion in income taxes, thus financing just under 1% of the stimulus and 1% of the “jobs.” That $7 billion could have funded 140,000 $50,000-a-year salaries.

Macro

The economy-wide effects of Steve Jobs are of course impossible to measure with precision. But a new study from Robert Shapiro and Kevin Hassett estimates that advances in mobile Internet technologies boosted U.S. employment by around 400,000 per year from 2007 to 2011, or by a total of around 1.2 million over the 2009-11 stimulus period. The Phoenix Center found similar employment effects. What proportion of these can be attributed to Steve Jobs is, again, impossible to say. But it’s clear Apple was the primary innovator in mobile Internet technologies in this period, towering over a multitude of other important technologies. More than any other device, the iPhone exploited the new, larger-capacity 3G mobile networks of the period, and once it proved wildly popular it was the chief impetus for additional 3G mobile capacity.

Stimulus

CBO estimates ARRA (the Stimulus bill) yielded between 1.3 and 3.5 million job-years net, meaning created or saved. But as the stimulus wanes, many of these jobs go away, or at least are not attributable to the stimulus.

Robert Barro of Harvard questions whether ARRA created any jobs at all. He says the question isn’t whether the Keynesian multiplier is greater than 1 (meaning break even; spend $1, get $1 in GDP), let alone whether it’s 1.5 (spend a dollar, get $1.50), but whether the multiplier is greater than zero.

Stanford’s John Taylor also thinks ARRA had no positive effect.

And do stimulus-boosters really want to equate these two activities?

(1) the federal government pays a state worker’s salary for a year instead of the state paying the salary;

(2) a new job derived from an entrepreneur who’s created whole new industries with new kinds of higher value jobs that last for decades, spurring yet more growth and jobs.

In Keynesian macro world those two jobs are equivalent, I guess.

The CNNMoney report acknowledged the 43,000 U.S. employees of Apple and also the 850 employees of Pixar at the time it merged with Disney in 2006. It even allowed that perhaps Pixar could employ twice as many people now. It also grudgingly admitted that maybe some Americans are building apps for the App Store. That’s about it.

This imprecise exercise misses the deeper truths of entrepreneurial capitalism and short-changes the dynamic versus static view of the economy. In a new article today, which I just see as I’m finishing this post, Prof. Krugman quite rightly notes the importance of industrial clusters to growth. He cites the Chinese supply-chains highlighted in the NYT series. But he entirely ignores the most famous and successful cluster on earth — Silicon Valley. How many jobs in Silicon Valley do we think are dependent on or symbiotic with Apple. It’s incalculable, but its a lot.

I asked Gov. Daniels what he thought.

“I won’t be reading Herr Krugman,” Gov. Daniels replied, “but I did read the New York Times, and it changes nothing. Just means Dr. K doesn’t understand the dynamism of innovation, either.”

— Bret Swanson

Like their celestial counterparts, cyber clouds are unpredictable and ever-changing. The Motorola Xoom tablet arrived on Tuesday. The Apple iPad II arrives next week. Just as Verizon finally boasts its own iPhone, AT&T turns the tables with the Motorola Atrix running on the even faster growing Google Android platform. Meanwhile, Nokia declares its once-mighty Symbian platform ablaze and abandons ship for a new mobile partnership with Microsoft.

In the media world, Apple pushes the envelope with publishers who use iPhone and iPad apps to deliver content. Its new subscription service seeks 30% of the price of magazines, newspapers, and, it hopes, games and videos delivered through its App Store and iTunes.

Google quickly counters with OnePass, a program that charges content providers 10% for access to its Android mobile platform. But unlike Apple, said Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “We don’t prevent you from knowing, if you’re a publisher, who your customers are.” Game on.

Netflix, by the way, saw its Web traffic spike 38% in just one month between December 2010 and January 2011 and is, ho hum, upending movies, cable, and TV.

As the cloud wars roar, the cyber lawyers simmer. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. The technology law triad of Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain and Columbia’s Tim Wu had a vision. They saw an arts and crafts commune of cyber-togetherness. Homemade Web pages with flashing sirens and tacky text were more authentic. “Generativity” was Zittrain’s watchword, a vague aesthetic whose only definition came from its opposition to the ominous “perfect control” imposed by corporations dictating “code” and throwing the “master switch.”

In their straw world of “open” heros and “closed” monsters, AOL’s “walled garden” of the 1990s was the first sign of trouble. Microsoft was an obvious villain. The broadband service providers were of coursedangerous gatekeepers, the iPhone was too sleek and integrated, and now even Facebook threatens their ideal of uncurated chaos. These were just a few of the many companies that were supposed to kill the Internet. The triad’s perfect world would be mostly broke organic farmers and struggling artists. Instead, we got Apple’s beautifully beveled apps and Google’s intergalactic ubiquity. Worst of all, the Web started making money.

Read the full column here . . . .

And Nick Schulz’s video interview of Cowen:

Brink Lindsey of the Kauffman Foundation comments here.

UPDATE: Tyler Cowen lists more reviews of his essay here:

2. Scott Sumner buys a Kindle and reviews The Great Stagnation.

3. Forbes review of The Great Stagnation.

4. Ryan Avent review of The Great Stagnation.

5. David Brooks coverage of The Great Stagnation.

7. Japan reviews The Great Stagnation.

Arnold Kling comments here.

And Nick Schulz here.

Later this week the FCC will accept the first round of comments in its “Open Internet” rule making, commonly known as Net Neutrality. Never mind that the Internet is already open and it was never strictly neutral. Openness and neutrality are two appealing buzzwords that serve as the basis for potentially far reaching new regulation of our most dynamic economic and cultural sector — the Internet.

I’ll comment on Net Neutrality from several angles over the coming days. But a terrific essay by Berkeley’s Jaron Lanier impelled me to begin by summarizing some of the big meta-arguments that have been swirling the last few years and which now broadly define the opposing sides in the Net Neutrality debate. After surveying these broad categories, I’ll get into the weeds on technology, business, and policy.

The thrust behind Net Neutrality is a view that the Internet should conform to a narrow set of technology and business “ideals” — “open,” “neutral,” “non-discriminatory.” Wonderful words. Often virtuous. But these aren’t the only traits important to economic and cultural systems. In fact, Net Neutrality sets up a false dichotomy — a manufactured war — between open and closed, collaborative versus commercial, free versus paid, content versus conduit. I’ve made a long list of the supposed opposing forces. Net Neutrality favors only one side of the table below. It seeks to cement in place one model of business and technology. It is intensely focused on the left-hand column and is either oblivious or hostile to the right-hand column. It thinks the right-hand items are either bad (prices) or assumes they appear magically (bandwidth).

We skeptics of Net Neutrality, on the other hand, do not favor one side or the other. We understand that there are virtues all around. Here’s how I put it on my blog last autumn:

Suggesting we can enjoy Google’s software innovations without the network innovations of AT&T, Verizon, and hundreds of service providers and technology suppliers is like saying that once Microsoft came along we no longer needed Intel.

No, Microsoft and Intel built upon each other in a virtuous interplay. Intel’s microprocessor and memory inventions set the stage for software innovation. Bill Gates exploited Intel’s newly abundant transistors by creating radically new software that empowered average businesspeople and consumers to engage with computers. The vast new PC market, in turn, dramatically expanded Intel’s markets and volumes and thus allowed it to invest in new designs and multi-billion dollar chip factories across the globe, driving Moore’s law and with it the digital revolution in all its manifestations.

Software and hardware. Bits and bandwidth. Content and conduit. These things are complementary. And yes, like yin and yang, often in tension and flux, but ultimately interdependent.

Likewise, we need the ability to charge for products and set prices so that capital can be rationally allocated and the hundreds of billions of dollars in network investment can occur. It is thus these hard prices that yield so many of the “free” consumer surplus advantages we all enjoy on the Web. No company or industry can capture all the value of the Web. Most of it comes to us as consumers. But companies and content creators need at least the ability to pursue business models that capture some portion of this value so they can not only survive but continually reinvest in the future. With a market moving so fast, with so many network and content models so uncertain during this epochal shift in media and communications, these content and conduit companies must be allowed to define their own products and set their own prices. We need to know what works, and what doesn’t.

When the “network layers” regulatory model, as it was then known, was first proposed back in 2003-04, my colleague George Gilder and I prepared testimony for the U.S. Senate. Although the layers model was little more than an academic notion, we thought then this would become the next big battle in Internet policy. We were right. Even though the “layers” proposal was (and is!) an ill-defined concept, the model we used to analyze what Net Neutrality would mean for networks and Web business models still applies. As we wrote in April of 2004:

Layering proponents . . . make a fundamental error. They ignore ever changing trade-offs between integration and modularization that are among the most profound and strategic decisions any company in any industry makes. They disavow Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen’s theorems that dictate when modularization, or “layering,” is advisable, and when integration is far more likely to yield success. For example, the separation of content and conduit—the notion that bandwidth providers should focus on delivering robust, high-speed connections while allowing hundreds of millions of professionals and amateurs to supply the content—is often a sound strategy. We have supported it from the beginning. But leading edge undershoot products (ones that are not yet good enough for the demands of the marketplace) like video-conferencing often require integration.

Over time, the digital and photonic technologies at the heart of the Internet lead to massive integration — of transistors, features, applications, even wavelengths of light onto fiber optic strands. This integration of computing and communications power flings creative power to the edges of the network. It shifts bottlenecks. Crystalline silicon and flawless fiber form the low-entropy substrate that carry the world’s high-entropy messages — news, opinions, new products, new services. But these feats are not automatic. They cannot be legislated or mandated. And just as innovation in the core of the network unleashes innovation at the edges, so too more content and creativity at the edge create the need for ever more capacity and capability in the core. The bottlenecks shift again. More data centers, better optical transmission and switching, new content delivery optimization, the move from cell towers to femtocell wireless architectures. There is no final state of equilibrium where one side can assume that the other is a stagnant utility, at least not in the foreseeable future.

I’ll be back with more analysis of the Net Neutrality debate, but for now I’ll let Jaron Lanier (whose book You Are Not a Gadget was published today) sum up the argument:

Here’s one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn’t want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don’t get innovation.

If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries. Teams need some privacy from one another to develop unique approaches to any kind of competition. Scientists need some time in private before publication to get their results in order. Making everything open all the time creates what I call a global mush.

There’s a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn’t proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe’s Flash—always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth.

Actually, Silicon Valley is remarkably good at not making collectivization mistakes when our own fortunes are at stake. If you suggested that, say, Google, Apple and Microsoft should be merged so that all their engineers would be aggregated into a giant wiki-like project—well you’d be laughed out of Silicon Valley so fast you wouldn’t have time to tweet about it. Same would happen if you suggested to one of the big venture-capital firms that all the start-ups they are funding should be merged into a single collective operation.

But this is exactly the kind of mistake that’s happening with some of the most influential projects in our culture, and ultimately in our economy.

says many people underestimate America’s lead in post-graduate education. Intel has found, for example, that the skills of PhDs from Chinese universities that the company has hired do not yet match those of U.S. graduates, he says.

On the other hand, Rattner says, tougher immigration laws are weakening the U.S. advantage as a magnet for students from around the world. Many Silicon Valley companies were founded by foreign students after they got degrees from Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, Caltech and other U.S. institutions.

“Now we tell them to go home, and don’t come back anytime soon,” Rattner says. Such a policy could have made it impossible for people like Andy Grove, Intel’s Hungarian-born former CEO, to have risen to the top of the U.S. tech scene. “Nowadays we would have packed him up and sent him home,” Rattner says.

Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry costs or raise entrepreneurial returns, thereby increasing net returns and attracting entrepreneurs. A second class of theories hypothesizes that some places are endowed with a greater supply of entrepreneurship. Evidence on sales per worker does not support the higher returns for entrepreneurship rationale. Our evidence suggests that entrepreneurship is higher when Öxed costs are lower and when there are more entrepreneurial people.

Andy writes:

Some might say it is time to rethink our national communications policy. But even that’s obsolete. I’d start with a simple idea. There is no such thing as voice or text or music or TV shows or video. They are all just data.

Right, all these markets and business models in hardware, software, and content — core network, edge network, data center, storage, content delivery, operating system, browser, local software, software as a service (SAS), professional content, amateur content, advertising, subscriptions, etc. — are fusing via the Internet. Or at least they overlap in so many areas and at any moment are on the verge of converging in others, that any attempt to parse them into discreet sectors to be regulated is mostly futile. By the time you make up new categories, the categories change.

Which naturally applies to one of the most contentious topics in Net policy:

Competition brings de facto network neutrality and open access (if you don’t like one service blocking apps, use another), thus one less set of artificial rules to be gamed.

Exactly. Net Neutrality could be an unworkably complex and rigid intrusion into this highly dynamic space. Better to let companies compete and evolve.

Kessler concludes:

Data is toxic to old communications and media pipes. Instead, data gains value as it hops around in the packets that make up the Internet structure. New services like Twitter don’t need to file with the FCC.

And new features for apps like Google Voice are only limited by the imagination.

The Internet is disrupting communications companies. Although yesterday I defended the service providers, who are also the key investors in all-important Net infrastructure, it is true their legacy business models are under assault from the inexorable forces of quantum technologies. Web video assaults the cable companies’ discrete channel line-ups. Big bandwidth banished “long distance” voice and, as Kessler says, will continue disrupting voice calling plans. On the other hand, the robust latency and jitter requirements of voice and video, and the realities of cybersecurity will continue to modify the generalized principle that bits are bits.

Even if we can see where things are going — more openness, more modularity, more “bits are bits” — we can’t for the most part mandate these things by law. We have to let them happen. And in many cases, as with the Apple-AT&T iPhone, it was an integrated offering (the exclusive handset arrangement) that yielded an unprecedented unleashing of a new modular mobile phone arena. Those 100,000 new “apps” and a new, open Web-based mobile computing model. Integration and modularity are in constant tension and flux, building off one another, pulling and pushing on one another. Neither can claim ultimate virtue. We have to let them slug it out.

As I wrote yesterday, innovation yin and yang.

Call the first fallacy “innovation blindness.” In this case, policy makers can’t see the way new technologies or ideas might affect, say, the future cost of health care, or the environment. The result is a narrow focus on today’s problems rather than tomorrow’s opportunities. The orientation toward the problem often exacerbates it by closing off innovations that could transcend the issue altogether.

The second fallacy is “innovation assumption.” Here, the mistake is taking innovation for granted. Assume the new technology will come along even if we block experimentation. Assume the entrepreneur will start the new business, build the new facility, launch the new product, or hire new people even if we make it impossibly expensive or risky for her to do so. Assume the other guy’s business is a utility while you are the one innovating, so he should give you his product at cost — or for free — while you need profits to reinvest and grow.

Reversing these two mistakes yields the more fruitful path. We should base policy on the likely scenario of future innovation and growth. But then we have to actually allow and encourage the innovation to occur.

All this sprung to mind as I read Andy Kessler’s article, “Why AT&T Killed Google Voice.” For one thing, Google Voice isn’t dead . . . but let’s start at the beginning.

Kessler is a successful investor, an insightful author, and a witty columnist. I enjoy seeing him each year at the Gilder/Forbes Telecosm Conference, where he delights the crowd with fast-paced, humorous commentaries on finance and technology. Here, however, Kessler falls prey to the innovation assumption fallacy.

Kessler argues that Google Voice, a new unified messaging application that combines all your phone numbers into one and can do conference calls and call transcripts, is going to overturn the entire world of telecom. Then he argues that Apple and AT&T attempted to kill Google Voice by blocking it as an “app” on Apple’s iPhone App Store. Why? Because Google Voice, according to Kessler, can do everything the telecom companies and Apple can do — better, even. These big, slow, old companies felt threatened to their core and are attempting to stifle an innovation that could put them out of business. We need new regulations to level the playing field.

Whoa. Wait a minute.

Google Voice seems like a nice product, but it is largely a call-forwarding system. I’ve already had call forwarding, simultaneous ring, Web-based voice mail, and other unified messaging features for five years. Good stuff. Maybe Google Voice will be the best of its kind.

There are just all sorts of fun and productive things happening all across the space. It was the very AT&T-Apple-iPhone combo that created “visual voice mail,” which allowed you to see and choose individual messages instead of wading through long queues of unwanted recordings.

But let’s move on to think about much larger issues.

Suggesting we can enjoy Google’s software innovations without the network innovations of AT&T, Verizon, and hundreds of service providers and technology suppliers is like saying that once Microsoft came along we no longer needed Intel.

No, Microsoft and Intel built upon each other in a virtuous interplay. Intel’s microprocessor and memory inventions set the stage for software innovation. Bill Gates exploited Intel’s newly abundant transistors by creating radically new software that empowered average businesspeople and consumers to engage with computers. The vast new PC market, in turn, dramatically expanded Intel’s markets and volumes and thus allowed it to invest in new designs and multi-billion dollar chip factories across the globe, driving Moore’s law and with it the digital revolution in all its manifestations.

Software and hardware. Bits and bandwidth. Content and conduit. These things are complementary. And yes, like yin and yang, often in tension and flux, but ultimately interdependent.

The beauty of digital networks is the ability to create micro-custom applications for macro-scale markets. Bits are bits. Anyone can “plug in” to the network. But what if there were no network to plug into?

Kessler assumes the existence of the vast, expensive, powerful networks that Google uses to deliver its search, email, and video applications. How would all our terrific digital content work without the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of new broadband networks that have been deployed over the last several years?

Take away the long-haul fiber-optic networks that connect American cities and the globe. Take away new last-mile fiber-optic, DSL, and digital cable networks to homes and businesses. Take away fast 3G wireless, 240,000 cell phone sites – and hundreds of thousands of Wi-Fi nodes. (Kessler says Wi-Fi can replace mobile networks, which is very unlikely. But regardless, who does he think operates most of the public Wi-Fi hot-spots?) Take away Apple’s iPhone, which uses Google as its chief built-in search engine.

Take away the network, and how useful are Silicon Valley’s awesome Web-based applications? You might as well travel back to 1983, when you were loading five-inch floppy disks onto your Commodore 64.

Kessler says the telecom business is dying. (“For the latest quarter, AT&T reported local voice revenue down 12%, long distance down 15%.”) But the service providers are also charging too much and making too much money. (“Margins in AT&T’s Wireless segment are an embarrassingly high 25%.”) Which one is it?

Mobile phone subscribers in the U.S. use more minutes and pay lower prices than in any other OECD nation. The average price per minute in the U.S. is just 6 cents versus an international average of 16 cents. U.S. subscribers thus consume more than four times the wireless minutes (815 minutes per month) of their international counterparts (185). In the past dozen years, U.S. mobile phone voice prices have fallen by more than 87%.

It’s obvious for all to see: as old products like copper-based residential voice quickly erode, new markets like mobile data and fiber-optic video are ascendant. Are communications companies forbidden from adapting — and innovating — in this highly dynamic and unpredictable market? Can they not replace failing low- or negative margin products with successful high-margin products? Google has mastered a variant of this strategy: it subsidizes all its free products like Gmail and Voice with its super-high-margin search-and-advertising business. Good for them. Good for us.

Kessler wants to get rid of spectrum ownership, which has been a chief driver of massive investment in wireless networks. He says the  approximately $70 billion in spectrum auction payments from the big mobile carriers “all gets passed along to you and me in the form of higher fees and friendly oligopolies that don’t much compete on price.” But prices are low, falling fast, and show no signs of deterring our intense mobile phone culture. Just look around. It’s true that new technologies like smart antennas, software radios, and frequency sharing could yield a new model of spectrum management in the future. But we’re not there yet.

In place of mobile phones, Kessler writes that “Google Voice is the new competition.” But Google Voice doesn’t compete with service providers along most market axes. It’s a useful app that emulates a sliver of their product set while relying on their infrastructure.

Suggesting innovation is being stifled, Kessler asks, “How many productive apps beyond Google Voice are waiting in the wings?” Who knows all the great stuff in the pipeline? But in just 13 months, the Apple App Store has delivered an astounding 100,000 new applications. Before the iPhone, hardly any mobile apps existed. Phones were phones. Now they are true mobile computers. Zero to a hundred thousand apps in a year. With tens of new smartphone designs from a couple dozen handset makers all leapfrogging each other. Doesn’t sound remotely like a stagnant sector to me.

Oddly, Kessler wants to ban the practice that launched Apple into the mobile phone and App Store markets just two short years ago. He wants to prohibit exclusive handset deals like the AT&T-Apple iPhone or the Sprint-Palm Pre. So in the name of some abstract notion of openness, he would block the type of actual innovation represented by the iPhone phenomenon that has transformed not just the mobile phone world – but perhaps the entire computing and Internet landscape – more than any other.

Kessler’s last point is to “encourage faster and faster data connections to homes and phones.” Hear, hear! He says network speeds should roughly double each year, yielding residential broadband of 100 megabits per second by 2017. Wonderful. But does Andy think that prohibiting network providers from making any money will encourage this goal? This is a grand case of assuming magical innovation without supporting actual innovation.

It’s like insisting Google absolutely must find a way to read my mind by 2015 but capping its advertising rates such that it can’t invest in the research that would make such an amazing thing possible.

Silicon Valley innovation in digital applications is not dependent on the death of Internet service providers. Quite the opposite.

The health of the two are intimately intertwined. Innovation in the network spurs innovation in digital apps, and vice versa. Innovation yin and yang.

— Bret Swanson

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Related content:

• “Bandwidth Boom: Measuring U.S. Communications Capacity from 2000 to 2008”

• “Biting the handsets that connect the world”