Sep 09, 2008
Press Release on New Broadband White Paper tell a friend >>article link >>
MCLEAN, Va. – Today, the President of Precursor, LLC, Scott Cleland, released a white paper that warns of the dangers and unintended consequences of a more government-centric broadband policy. In his white paper entitled, “Don’t be Fooled by the National Broadband Policy ‘Straw Man,’ Cleland spotlights glaring flaws in three pillar broadband assumptions, that bias the broadband debate away from America’s free market success and towards the OECD’s industrial policy orthodoxy, and that suggest proponents of a new policy need to go back to the drawing board to find a legitimate policy rationale.
"The free market Internet is the greatest deregulatory success of all time, and America’s free market broadband policy has produced more robust facilities-based broadband competition and deployment than any other country in the world,” said Scott Cleland. “The OECD’s broadband measurement framework hides waste and inefficiency and discourages ranking on market-relevant measures like network utilization, cost-effectiveness, reliability, redundancy, and return on investment.”
Cleland continued, “Proponents of a new broadband policy wrongly assume that the only goal for broadband should be speed. They seek to avoid any discussion of network utilization, cost, or who pays versus who benefits – because it would expose Silicon Valley’s ‘open checkbook’ scheme to get consumers, broadband providers, and taxpayers to subsidize the gluttonous bandwidth appetites of Silicon Valley billionaires and bandwidth hogs.”
This white paper is a must read for anyone seeking to better understand the heated debate over national broadband policy. The paper can be read and downloaded at http://netcompetition.org/ExposingBroadbandPolicyStrawMan.pdf.
