Genachowski, however, wants overarching control of the new spectrum and, by extension, the mobile broadband ecosystem. The FCC wants the authority to micromanage the newly available radio waves — who can buy it, how much they can buy, how they can use it, what content flows over it, what business models can be employed with it. But this is an arena that is growing wildly fast, where new technologies appear every day, and where experimentation is paramount to see which business models work. Auctions are supposed to be a way to get more spectrum into the marketplace, where lots of companies and entrepreneurs can find the best ways to use it to deliver new communications services. ”Any restrictions” by Congress on the FCC “would be a real mistake,” said Genachowski. In other words, he doesn’t want Congress to restrict his ability to restrict the mobile business. It seems the liberty of regulators to act without restraint is a higher virtue than the liberty of private actors.

At the end of 2011, the FCC and Justice Department vetoed AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile, a deal that would have immediately expanded 3G mobile capacity across the nation and accelerated AT&T’s next generation 4G rollout by several years. That deal was all about a more effective use of spectrum, more cell towers, more capacity to better serve insatiable smart-phone and tablet equipped consumers. Now the FCC is holding hostage the spectrum auction bill with its my-way-or-the-highway approach. And one has to ask: Is the FCC really serious about spectrum, mobile capacity, and a healthy broadband Internet?

— Bret Swanson

On Thanksgiving Eve, the FCC surprised everyone. It hadn’t yet completed its investigation into the proposed AT&T-T-Mobile wireless merger, and the parties had not had a chance to discuss or rebut the agency’s initial findings. Yet the FCC preempted the normal process by announcing it would send the case to an administrative law judge — essentially a vote of no-confidence in the deal. I say “vote,” but  the FCC commissioners hadn’t actually voted on the order.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called AT&T CEO Randall Stevenson, who, on Thanksgiving Day, had to tell investors he was setting aside $4 billion in case Washington blocked the deal.

The deal is already being scrutinized by the Department of Justice, which sued to block the merger last summer. The fact that telecom mergers and acquisitions must negotiate two levels of federal scrutiny, at DoJ and FCC, is already an extra burden on the Internet industry. But when one agency on this dual-track games the system by trying to influence the other track — maybe because the FCC felt AT&T had a good chance of winning its antitrust case — the obstacles to promising economic activity multiply.

After the FCC’s surprise move, AT&T and T-Mobile withdrew their merger application at the FCC. No sense in preparing for an additional hearing before an administrative law judge when they are already deep in preparation for the antitrust trial early next year. Moreover, the terms of the merger agreement are likely to have changed after the companies (perhaps) negotiate conditions with the DoJ. They’d have to refile an updated application anyway. Not so fast, said the FCC. We’re not going to allow AT&T and T-Mobile to withdraw their application. Or we if we do allow it, we will do so “with prejudice,” meaning the parties can’t refile a revised application at a later date. On Tuesday the FCC relented — the law is clear: an applicant has the right to withdraw an application without consent from the FCC. But the very fact the FCC initially sought to deny the withdrawal is itself highly unusual. Again, more procedural gamesmanship.

If that weren’t enough, the FCC then said it would release its “findings” in the case — another highly unusual (maybe unprecedented) action. The agency hadn’t completed its process, and there had been no vote on the matter. So the FCC instead released what it calls a “staff report” — a highly critical internal opinion that hadn’t been reviewed by the parties nor approved by the commissioners. We’re eager to analyze the substance of this “staff report,” but the fact the FCC felt the need to shove it out the door was itself remarkable.

It appears the FCC is twisting legal procedure any which way to fit its desired outcome, rather than letting the normal merger process play out. Indeed, “twisting legal procedure” may be too kind. It has now thrown law and procedure out the window and is in full public relations mode. These extralegal PR games tilt the playing field against the companies, against investment and innovation, and against the health of the U.S. economy.

— Bret Swanson

In 1960, only three countries — Canada, Sweden and the United States — had more than one phone for every four inhabitants. For most of what would become OECD countries a year later, the figure was less than 1 for every 10 inhabitants, and less than 1 in 100 in a couple of cases. At that time, the 84 million telephones in OECD countries represented 93% of the global total. Half a century later there are 1.7 billion telephones in OECD countries and a further 4.1 billion around the world. More than two in every three people on Earth now have a mobile phone.

Very useful stuff. But in recent times the report has also served as a chance for some to misrepresent the relative health of international broadband markets. The common refrain the past several years was that the U.S. had fallen way behind many European and Asian nations in broadband. The mantra that the U.S. is “15th in the world in broadband” — or 16th, 21st, 24th, take your pick — became a sort of common lament. Except it wasn’t true.

As we showed here, the second half of the two-thousand-aughts saw an American broadband boom. The Phoenix Center and others showed that the most cited stat in those previous OECD reports — broadband connections per 100 inhabitants — actually told you more about household size than broadband. And we developed metrics to better capture the overall health of a nation’s Internet market — IP traffic per Internet user and per capita.

Below you’ll see an update of the IP traffic per Internet user chart, built upon Cisco’s most recent (June 1, 2011) Visual Networking Index report. The numbers, as they did last year, show the U.S. leads every region of the world in the amount of IP traffic we generate and consume both in per user and per capita terms. Among nations, only South Korea tops the U.S., and only Canada matches the U.S.

Although Asia contains broadband stalwarts like Korea, Japan, and Singapore, it also has many laggards. If we compare the U.S. to the most uniformly advanced region, Western Europe, we find the U.S. generates 62% more traffic per user. (These figures are based on Cisco’s 2010 traffic estimates and the ITU’s 2010 Internet user numbers.)

As we noted last year, it’s not possible for the U.S. to both lead the world by a large margin in Internet usage and lag so far behind in broadband. We think these traffic per user and per capita figures show that our residential, mobile, and business broadband networks are among the world’s most advanced and ubiquitous.

Lots of other quantitative and qualitative evidence — from our smart-phone adoption rates to the breakthrough products and services of world-leading device (Apple), software (Google, Apple), and content companies (Netflix) — reaffirms the fairly obvious fact that the U.S. Internet ecosystem is in fact healthy, vibrant, and growing. Far from lagging, it leads the world in most of the important digital innovation indicators.

— Bret Swanson

Over the past few weeks it looked like the Administration had acknowledged economic reality (and bipartisan Capitol Hill criticism) and turned its focus to investment and jobs. Outgoing NEC Director Larry Summers and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced a vast expansion of available wireless spectrum, and FCC chairman Julius Genachowski used his speech to the NARUC state regulators to encourage innovation and employment. Gone were mentions of the old priorities — intrusive new regulations such as Net Neutrality and Title II reclassification of modern broadband as an old telecom service. Finally, it appeared, an already healthy and vibrant Internet sector could stop worrying about these big new government impositions — and years of likely litigation — and get on with building the 21st century digital infrastructure.

But then came word at the end of last week that the FCC would indeed go ahead with its new Net Neutrality regs. Perhaps even issuing them on December 22, just as Congress and the nation take off for Christmas vacation [the FCC now says it will hold its meeting on December 15]. When even a rare  economic sunbeam is quickly clouded by yet more heavy-handedness from Washington, is it any wonder unemployment remains so high and growth so low?

Any number of people sympathetic to the economy’s and the Administration’s plight are trying to help. Last week David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed the way, at least in a broad strategic sense: “One Way to Trim the Deficit: Cultivate Growth.” Yes, economic growth! Remember that old concept? Economist and innovation expert Michael Mandel has suggested a new concept of “countercyclical regulatory policy.” The idea is to lighten regulatory burdens to boost growth in slow times and then, later, when the economy is moving full-steam ahead, apply more oversight to curb excesses. Right now, we should be lightening burdens, Mandel says, not imposing new ones:

it’s really a dumb move to monkey with the vibrant and growing communications sector when the rest of the economy is so weak. It’s as if you have two cars — one running, one in the repair shop — and you decide it’s a good time to rebuild the transmission of the car that actually works because you hear a few squeaks.

Apparently, FCC honchos met with interested parties this morning to discuss what comes next. Unfortunately, at a time when we need real growth, strong growth, exuberant growth! (as Mandel would say), the Administration appears to be saddling an economy-lifting reform (wireless spectrum expansion) with leaden regulation. What’s the point of new wireless spectrum if you massively devalue it with Net Neutrality, open access, and/or Title II?

One step forward, two steps back (ten steps back?) is not an exuberant growth and jobs strategy.

What the per capita metric really measures is household size. And because the U.S. has more people in each household than many other nations, we appear worse in those rankings. But as the Phoenix Center has noted, if each OECD nation reached 100% broadband nirvana — i.e., every household in every nation connected — the U.S. would actually fall from 15th to 20th. Residential connections per capita is thus not a very illuminating measure.

But look at the actual Internet traffic generated and consumed in the U.S.

The U.S. far outpaces every other region of the world. In the second chart, you can see that in fact only one nation, South Korea, generates significantly more Internet traffic per user than the U.S. This is no surprise. South Korea was the first nation to widely deploy fiber-to-the-x and was also the first to deploy 3G mobile, leading to not only robust infrastructure but also a vibrant Internet culture. The U.S. dwarfs most others.

If the U.S. was so far behind in broadband, we could not generate around twice as much network traffic per user compared to nations we are told far exceed our broadband capacity and connectivity. The U.S. has far to go in a never-ending buildout of its communications infrastructure. But we invest more than other nations, we’ve got better broadband infrastructure overall, and we use broadband more — and more effectively (see the Connectivity Scorecard and The Economist’s Digital Economy rankings) — than almost any other nation.

The conventional wisdom on this one is just plain wrong.

International comparisons in such a fast-moving arena as tech and communications are tough. I don’t pretend it is easy to boil down a hugely complex topic to one right answer, but I did have some critical things to say about a major recent report that got way too many things wrong. A new article by that report’s author singled out France as especially more advanced than the U.S. To cut through all the clutter of conflicting data and competing interpretations on broadband deployment, access, adoption, prices, and speeds, however, maybe a simple chart will help.

Here we compare network usage. Not advertised speeds, which are suspect. Not prices which can be distorted by the use of purchasing power parity (PPP). Not “penetration,” which is largely a function of income, urbanization, and geography. No, just simply, how much data traffic do various regions create and consume.

If U.S. networks were so backward — too sparse, too slow, too expensive — would Americans be generating 65% more network traffic per capita than their Western European counterparts?

Professors at a leading research unit put suspect data into a bad model, fail to include crucial variables, and even manufacture the most central variable to deliver the hoped-for outcome.

Climate-gate? No, call it Berkman’s broadband bungle.

In October, Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society delivered a report, commissioned by the Federal Communications Commission, comparing international broadband markets and policies. The report was to be a central component of the Administration’s new national broadband Internet policy, arriving in February 2010.

Just one problem. Actually many problems. The report botched its chief statistical model in half a dozen ways. It used loads of questionable data. It didn’t account for the unique market structure of U.S. broadband. It reversed the arrow of time in its country case studies. It ignored the high-profile history of open access regulation in the U.S. It didn’t conduct the literature review the FCC asked for. It excommunicated Switzerland . . . .

See my critique of this big report on international broadband at RealClearMarkets.

To the extent that lower-income and middle-income consumers are required to pay a greater share of network costs, we should expect a substantial delay in achieving universal broadband access. Our simulations suggest that spreading the costs equally among all consumers — the minority who use large amounts of bandwidth and the majority who use very little — will significantly slow the rate of adoption at the lower end of the income scale and extend the life of the digital divide.

If costs are shifted more heavily to those who use the most bandwidth and, therefore, are most responsible for driving up the cost of expanding network capabilities, the digital divergence among the races and among income groups can be eliminated much sooner.

Maybe the 101-megabit product is a good experiment. Maybe it will be successful. Maybe not. One hundred megabits per second is a lot, given today’s applications (and especially given cable’s broadcast tree-and-branch shared network topology). A hundred megabits, for example, could accommodate more than five fully uncompressed high-definition TV channels, or 10+ compressed HD streams. It’s difficult to imagine too many households finding a way today to consume that much bandwidth. Tomorrow is another question. The bottom line is that in addition to making a statement, Cablevision is probably mostly targeting the small business market with this product.

Far more perplexing than Cablevision’s strategy, however, was the reaction from groups like the reflexively critical Free Press:

We are encouraged by Cablevision’s plan to set a new high-speed bar of service for the cable industry. . . . this is a long overdue step in the right direction.

Free Press usually blasts any decision whatever by any network or media company. But by praising the 101-megabit experiment, Free Press is acknowledging the perfect legitimacy of charging variable prices for variable products. Pay more, get more. Pay less, get more affordably the type of service that will meet your needs the vast majority of the time.

Free Press has recently been criticizing other bandwidth caps, like Time Warner’s 250 gigabyte per month limit for standard users. But offering tiers of service — again, pay more, get more; pay less, get broadband more affordably — is just another type of bandwidth cap. You can’t pay $40 a month and demand the same bandwidth for which an Internet company pays tens of thousands of dollars per month. Tiers based on peak bandwidth (speed) or tiers based on total data consumed over some period of time are just different ways to divide capacity and differentiate products. Far from being anti-consumer, these varied rational pricing strategies, which charge more for more usage, axiomatically make getting basic broadband more affordable. More broadband products means more choice and higher consumer welfare.

The 101-megabit product is in itself a “cap.” Fast though it is, 101 megabits is not “unlimited,” which is what Free Press seems to want. Moreover, the new offering creates new “caps” at the 15 and 30 megabit levels, which are its existing products. Go to the last line in Free Press’s statement, and you begin to see through all the recent feigned outrage:

We also encourage companies like Cablevision to think about the other part of the value equation — price. These days, lower prices are just as important as faster speeds.

So. Unlimited service for ever lower prices. They want not just something for nothing. But, seemingly, everything for nothing.

In fact, if I remember, Free Press used to favor per-usage data metering and oppose tiered speed offerings. Just the opposite of today’s apparent position. 

And can anyone tell me what this paragraph means?

It does, however, beg the question why Cablevision can offer fast access with reportedly no caps or overage fees, when others claim such a plan would cause the sky to fall and an exaflood to break the Internet. We hope this new announcement will put an end to the bandwidth bogeyman.

Backwards, again. We’ve always said companies would need to offer higher-end services — and charge more for them — to both drive and accommodate new bandwidth-intensive applications. It’s the type of inflexibility in prices, products, technologies, applications, and business plans that could squelch the crucial wired and wireless bandwidth investments that we need to deliver an exaflood of exciting new applications and services to an ever greater portion of the population. 

When you come right down to it, Free Press’s “position” is inconsistent to the point of just not making much sense at all.