Forget the Broadband Bogeyman

[Commentary] Just like the unfounded fears of Japan taking over America, a new bogeyman has been invented -- an argument that America is allegedly falling behind Japan and other regions in broadband.

This scare tactic has been employed opportunistically both by those who advocate government intervention in broadband and by companies with a regulatory objective. While certain critics love to conjure a European broadband utopia, as an American academic at a Danish university, I am hard-pressed to find a European who would subscribe to such a notion.

Indeed, European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes observes that Verizon LTE reaches more than 90 percent of Americans; no European carrier can claim the same for Europeans. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Japan’s richest man, who turned SoftBank into the country’s most profitable operator, who criticized American broadband when speaking the US Chamber of Commerce, knows that competition in the mobile industry comes from technology, not the number of competitors.

This fact is evident in Son’s jettisoning Sprint’s Kansas headquarters to set up command central in Silicon Valley -- next to Google and Apple, companies about which he grumbled at the 2011 Mobile World Congress, “take all the upside while the mobile providers become dumb pipes.” Complaining that the industry is not competitive is a frequent ploy by the third or fourth competitor to compensate in sympathy for what it lacks in business practice. But AT&T and Verizon are not to blame for their competitors’ mistakes. Son knows that at the end of the day he has to make results, not rely on an imaginary bogeyman that America is allegedly falling behind.

[Layton is a fellow at the Internet, Economics and Policy think-tank and PhD student at Aalborg University in Copenhagen]