The National Broadband Plan Is Bad. Period.
I’ve seen plenty of stories and gotten a fair number of calls from reporters about the national broadband plan. They generally want to get some insight from down in the weeds of the communications world. What do you think of this part? What do you think of that?
But I’m keeping my eye on the ball: This is another industrial-policy boondoggle. It’s a government spending program, created by the so-called “Recovery Act,” that will distort the communications marketplace, and it comes at the cost to taxpayers of having their resources taken from them and handed out to the firms that are best equipped to lobby for government succor.
I don’t care which community gets 1-gigabit connections. The money to pay for it should have been left with the American people to spend as they choose—on 1-gigabit connections if they choose. The debt overhang produced by all this spending makes us worse off, not better off, and the shiny bauble of hi-def, two-way video doesn’t change that.
The Federal Communications Commission should be shuttered. That’s the gist of what I have to say about the “National Broadband Plan.”
Consumer Protection for Intellectuals
Nate Anderson at Ars Technica has a good write-up of the New America Foundation’s interesting proposal for labeling of broadband services, something akin to the nutrition labels we have for food.
Labeling and disclosure are better than direct regulation of the terms on which goods and services can be sold, of course. Labeling does not presume to decide unalterably what factors are or will be the most salient to consumers. But it does seek to channel those interests, and it does presume that consumers discover information that is important to them via labels. (I dealt with some of these concepts in my recent post about privacy notices.)
What labeling is really about, I believe, is pushing consumers to focus on the terms that intellectuals believe are most interesting. Smart people’s interests often match up with everyone else’s, but not always. Anderson’s write-up wonders aloud “whether requiring disclosure of the ‘maximum round-trip latency to border router’ will do more than induce eye glaze among most broadband users.”
I want my ISP to give me a live tech-support person that can solve the problem with my wifi router, but that didn’t make it into New America’s labeling plan. Any labeling plan will likely be either overinclusive or underinclusive or both, obscuring and omitting the most relevant information.
Yes, labeling is “market-friendlier” than regulation dictating what broadband providers can and can’t offer. But if we believe that markets discover the dimensions of goods and services that are salient to consumers, we can also believe that markets discover what information consumers want, and how they best learn it.
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on YouTube
Cato Tweets