Anatomy of a deceptive broadband chart

[Commentary] The debate over international broadband comparisons goes on. There’s lots of evidence the US is doing well.

Those who want more government control of the Internet, however, aren’t always happy about this success. Good news makes a big change in policy -- from a relatively unregulated market to one of their preferred big government models -- less likely. Thus the increasingly creative attempts to characterize the US as a broadband backwater.

The unmistakable takeaway from a glance at a chart, “Countries with high-speed broadband,” which recently appeared on Twitter is that the US trails the world. Except the chart doesn’t say that at all. It took a lot of work to create such a misleading chart.

[Swanson is president of Entropy Economics LLC]