ReasonedResponse.com

The OECD has again released a ranking of broadband penetration worldwide, and once again the United States is ranked 15th in the world, somewhere slighly below the Grandy Duchy of Luxembourg. 

You can already hear the gears grinding.  Disreputable blog sites are gearing up to use this factoid to again attack America's broadband industry.  Pundits are pontificating, politicians are blustering, and the lunatics on the left are again DEMANDING that the government seize control of broadband -- or at least tie it up in 19th Century-style regulations.  Woe is U.S., again.

But before this nonsense goes to far, will someone please actually read what the report says, instead of simply swallowing the OECD press release?  Because even the most cursory glance at the data would make any rational person ask, "Are they just making this stuff up?"  And the answer, sadly, is "Yes."

Here's what's interesting about the OECD data:

• It measures broadband adoption, not deployment.  The data presented isn't about where broadband reaches, but rather how many people are subscribing to the services.  Even then...
• The U.S. data is not from December of 2007, as advertised, but from 2003.  Strangely, when it comes to the data for household subscriptions to broadband, the figure is frozen at the 2003 levels of fewer than 20 million.  But it gets even worse...
• It's not even data.  The U.S. figures were, according to the authors, an "OECD estimation based on company reporting."  You have to wonder what company data they used, since current US estimates are that some 60 percent of the 105 million US households now have broadband.  But then...
• They fudge the figures.  The OECD numbers allow Korea to include people whose broadband access is via cell phone, but the US numbers don't include that.  Nor do they include the nearly 12 percent of the U.S. online population -- that would be another 7-million plus Americans -- who use Wi-Fi connections.  Include some things, don't include others, and voila!  The next thing you know, lower Botswana will have better broadband penetration than the U.S.

The rest of the so-called data is equally bad.  When they compare prices from country to country, they allow some countries to use figures that include long-term discounts that don't generally apply in the U.S.  And they fail to note where countries heavily subsidize the cost of broadband to artificially make their numbers look better.

The OECD itself -- feeling bee-stung by the tidal wave of criticism for its bogus "reports," has coyly noted in the report that the information should not be used to make conclusions about public policy, and that the report may contain some inaccuracies.  But you won't find any such statements in press release touting the report, or in the "conclusions" it presents that urge governments to push for "competition" and "open access." Those latter recommendations, it may be noted, are based entirely on the political prejudices of whoever wrote the news release -- the recommendations are neither mentioned nor supported in the data.

The OECD study is junk science, but it does provide an opportunity to remind those of us working in broadband public policy of three key rules:

1. Some people just plain hate America, and will use any bogus data or flimsy excuse to humiliate this country on the world stage -- or worse, encourage us to adopt really, really bad policies -- in order to gain some advantage over us on the world stage.  I would hate to think this applies to the OECD, but one has to wonder why, year after year, they continue to flaunt phony studies with bad conclusions that make the U.S. appear to be something other than a world leader in broadband.
2. News releases announcing studies almost never match the data.  The Wall Street Journal concluded this in an article last fall, noting that in nearly 90 percent of cases they studied the data did not support the conclusions reached in the news releases. 
3. It's about adoption, not deployment.  The United States clearly has some work to do to bring the rest of our population online.  But we won't achieve that by focusing on broadband deployment, or by continuing to attack broadband infrastructure companies.  We can only do that by addressing the reasons why some people aren't using the Internet -- primarily lack of education, lack of computing skills and a lifestyle in which Internet access is not relevant.

The knee-jerk pundits and politicians who can't be bothered to actually read the studies, or who base their positions on press releases and bluster, will eventually look as silly as they truly are.  We can only hope that happens before they adopt needless, destructive and badly-written legislation that may actually make our national broadband as bad as the OECD studies try to make us appear.