How Dynamic Is The Mobile Internet Marketplace? Good Question. No, It Really Is A Good Question.

[Commentary] The US has "God’s Most Perfect Broadband Infrastructure in The Greatest Best Country God Has Ever Given Man On The Face of the Earth" (GMPBIITGBCGHEGMOTFOTE), right? Lots of cool things happen in wireless and the fact that cool things happen proves we have GMPBIITGBCGHEGMOTFOTE. Since regulation is only warranted if we don't have GMPBIITGBCGHEGMOTFOTE, and since we obviously have GMPBIITGBCGHEGMOTFOTE, anyone who calls for regulation of anything is a moron.

When we regulate we should consider whether competition exists and whether that will do the job or not — for whatever we think the job ought to be. But whether we ought to take some sort of action, or deliberately refrain from some sort of action, needs to consider more than the number of competitors in a market or some bizarre set of utterly unrelated statistics. Real market analysis has to take into account the specifics of the actual market. We need to approach this like an actuarial table — what are the most likely outcomes and do we care. Granted, this approach is far more complex than “look how competitive this is, so all is perfect with GMPBIITGBCGHEGMOTFOTE — neener neener” or the alternative “look how awful and uncompetitive this segment is — neener neener.” But I like to think a more complex approach is more likely to yield better results in the real world where we actually live, rather than in the imaginary world of GMPBIITGBCGHEGMOTFOTE.