See our commentary at Forbes.com, responding to Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback’s calls for Internet regulation.

What we have here is “mission creep.” First, Net Neutrality was about an “open Internet” where no websites were blocked or degraded. But as soon as the whole industry agreed to these perfectly reasonable Open Web principles, Net Neutrality became an exercise in micromanagement of network technologies and broadband business plans. Now, Louderback wants to go even further and regulate prices. But there’s still more! He also wants to regulate the products that broadband providers can offer.

After yesterday’s federal court ruling against the FCC’s overreaching net neutrality regulations, which we have dedicated considerable time and effort combatting for the last seven years, Holman Jenkins says it well:

Hooray. We live in a nation of laws and elected leaders, not a nation of unelected leaders making up rules for the rest of us as they go along, whether in response to besieging lobbyists or the latest bandwagon circling the block hauled by Washington’s permanent “public interest” community.

This was the reassuring message yesterday from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals aimed at the Federal Communications Commission. Bottom line: The FCC can abandon its ideological pursuit of the “net neutrality” bogeyman, and get on with making the world safe for the iPad.

The court ruled in considerable detail that there’s no statutory basis for the FCC’s ambition to annex the Internet, which has grown and thrived under nobody’s control.

. . .

So rather than focusing on new excuses to mess with network providers, the FCC should tackle two duties unambiguously before it: Figure out how to liberate the nation’s wireless spectrum (over which it has clear statutory authority) to flow to more market-oriented uses, whether broadband or broadcast, while also making sure taxpayers get adequately paid as the current system of licensed TV and radio spectrum inevitably evolves into something else.

Second: Under its media ownership hat, admit that such regulation, which inhibits the merger of TV stations with each other and with newspapers, is disastrously hindering our nation’s news-reporting resources and brands from reshaping themselves to meet the opportunities and challenges of the digital age. (Willy nilly, this would also help solve the spectrum problem as broadcasters voluntarily redeployed theirs to more profitable uses.)

For years we’ve been talking about the need for more wireless bandwidth, more spectrum, and a host of creative new strategies to complement our mobile phone networks — from familiar Wi-Fi to more exotic femtocells and satellites. The continuing explosion of mobile data traffic means we need these things now more than ever. In the graph below, Cisco projects 120% compound annual growth in North American mobile data from 2009 through 2013.

The Federal Communications Commission recognized these trends and needs in its new National Broadband Plan. It set the bold goal of unleashing 500 MHz of mostly dormant wireless spectrum for more productive use in new broadband Internet and media applications.

On March 29, the FCC had a chance to begin putting its Plan into action when it approved the acquisition of SkyTerra by Harbinger Capital. The result of the merger is a new wireless company that will use both MSS satellite spectrum and so-called ATC terrestrial spectrum to deliver a new hybrid mobile service. Harbinger announced it would build a nationwide, wholesale, “open access” 4G broadband wireless network at the cost of $6 billion. Although not part of the FCC’s 500 MHz push, the new Harbinger strategy aligns nicely with the goal of more, better, and broader wireless access and options throughout the country (in this case, Canada, too).

But the FCC order, which was not voted by the full commission but issued by the bureau chiefs, contains two curious provisions. The provisions restrict Harbinger’s cooperation with two important mobile service providers and could hinder the very goal of extending more wireless coverage to more Americans. (more…)

“Architects of the legislation that binds the nation’s communications infrastructure in the year 2010 were born in the 1870s and 1880s. There is talk today in Washington about categorizing technologies and platforms developed in the 21st century under different Titles of legislation written by people born in the 19th century. We don’t need to jettison all the wisdom of the ancients, but perhaps there’s a better way?”

— Nick Shulz, at the Enterprise Blog, March 25, 2010

With the release of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, we continue to hear all sorts of depressing stories about the sorry state of American broadband Internet access. But is it true?

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?

Our new article at RealClearMarkets:

As Washington and the states pile up mountainous liabilities — $3 trillion for unfunded state pensions, $10 trillion in new federal deficits through 2019, and $38 trillion (or is it $50 trillion?) in unfunded Medicare promises — the U.S. needs once again to call on its chief strategic asset: radical innovation.

One laboratory of growth will continue to be the Internet. The U.S. began the 2000’s with fewer than five million residential broadband lines and zero mobile broadband. We begin the new decade with 71 million residential lines and 300 million portable and mobile broadband devices. In all, consumer bandwidth grew almost 15,000%.

Even a thriving Internet, however, cannot escape Washington’s eager eye. As the Federal Communications Commission contemplates new “network neutrality” regulation and even a return to “Title II” telephone regulation, we have to wonder where growth will come from in the 2010’s . . . .

That’s the question I ask in this Huffington Post article today.

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.

The 231-page report was an ode to foreign broadband success and especially to the regulatory model of “open access,” a euphemism for mandated sharing of network assets at government-set prices. Although U.S. Internet innovation is flourishing, the Berkman Center found the U.S. tragically lagging other nations in consumer broadband penetration, prices, and network speeds. In a perfect set-up for a dramatic re-regulation of U.S. communications networks, Berkman concluded that open access mandates have “a positive and significant effect” on broadband penetration and that the effect is “somewhat larger . . . and more robust than previously thought.”

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.

As you’ve no doubt heard, Washington D.C. is angling for a takeover of the . . . U.S. telecom industry?!

That’s right: broadband, routers, switches, data centers, software apps, Web video, mobile phones, the Internet. As if its agenda weren’t full enough, the government is preparing a dramatic centralization of authority over our healthiest, most dynamic, high-growth industry.

Two weeks ago, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski proposed new “net neutrality” regulations, which he will detail on October 22. Then on Friday, Yochai Benkler of Harvard’s Berkman Center published an FCC-commissioned report on international broadband comparisons. The voluminous survey serves up data from around the world on broadband penetration rates, speeds, and prices. But the real purpose of the report is to make a single point: foreign “open access” broadband regulation, good; American broadband competition, bad. These two tracks — “net neutrality” and “open access,” combined with a review of the U.S. wireless industry and other investigations — lead straight to an unprecedented government intrusion of America’s vibrant Internet industry.

Benkler and his team of investigators can be commended for the effort that went into what was no doubt a substantial undertaking. The report, however,

• misses all kinds of important distinctions among national broadband markets, histories, and evolutions;
• uses lots of suspect data;
• underplays caveats and ignores some important statistical problems;
• focuses too much on some metrics, not enough on others;
• completely bungles America’s own broadband policy history; and
• draws broad and overly-certain policy conclusions about a still-young, dynamic, complex Internet ecosystem.

The gaping, jaw-dropping irony of the report was its failure even to mention the chief outcome of America’s previous open-access regime: the telecom/tech crash of 2000-02. We tried this before. And it didn’t work! The Great Telecom Crash of 2000-02 was the equivalent for that industry what the Great Panic of 2008 was to the financial industry. A deeply painful and historic plunge. In the case of the Great Telecom Crash, U.S. tech and telecom companies lost some $3 trillion in market value and one million jobs. The harsh open access policies (mandated network sharing, price controls) that Benkler lauds in his new report were a main culprit. But in Benkler’s 231-page report on open access policies, there is no mention of the Great Crash. (more…)