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George Ou & Bret Swanson on Berkman Broadband Report

by on October 21, 2009 · 15 comments

Last night here on the TLF, Bret Swanson raised a number of objections with this FCC-commissioned report about international broadband comparisons, which was conducted by some folks at Harvard University’s Berkman Center. Meanwhile, over at the Digital Society blog, George Ou also offers a hard-nosed look at the Berkman broadband report and concludes “The underlying data cited by Berkman study is simply too flawed to be of any use.”  I recommend everyone check out both essays.  It will be interesting to hear how the Berkman folks respond.  Some of these international broadband comparisons are really fishy.  [Here’s a podcast we did on that issue two years ago.]

One quick point… Like Bret, I also found it shocking that–even though the report reads like an ode to forced access regulation–the Berkman folks didn’t spend much time discussing the result of America’s previous open-access regime. “The gaping, jaw-dropping irony of the report,” Bret argues, “was its failure even to mention the chief outcome of America’s previous open-access regime: the telecom/tech crash of 2000-02. We tried this before. And it didn’t work!”  Indeed, America’s regulatory experiment with forced access regulation involved a lot of well intentioned laws and regulation, and too many acronyms to count–CLECs, TELRIC, UNE-P, etc– but it did not result in serious, facilities-based competition.  Instead it offered us the fiction of competition through network-sharing, or what Peter Huber once referred to as building “networks out of paper.” The results were disastrous for investment during that period since regulatory uncertainly led to a lot of stunted innovation.

In sum, sharing is not competing.  You can socialize and commoditize old pipes for awhile and get decent results in the short-term, but you’ll sacrifice long-run investment and innovation if you do.  [For more background, see my recent essay on “The Fiction of Forced Access ‘Competition’ Revisited” and this old Cato piece on “UNE-P and the Future of Telecom “Competition” as well as Jeff Eisenach’s PFF white paper, “Broadband Policy: Does the U.S. Have It Right After All?”]

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Cyber-Libertarianism: The Case for Real Internet Freedom

by on August 12, 2009 · 186 comments

libertyby Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka — (Ver. 1.0 — Summer 2009)

We are attempting to articulate the core principles of cyber-libertarianism to provide the public and policymakers with a better understanding of this alternative vision for ordering the affairs of cyberspace. We invite comments and suggestions regarding how we should refine and build-out this outline. We hope this outline serves as the foundation of a book we eventually want to pen defending what we regard as “Real Internet Freedom.” [Note:  Here’s a printer-friendly version, which we also have embedded down below as a Scribd document.]

I. What is Cyber-Libertarianism?

Cyber-libertarianism refers to the belief that individuals—acting in whatever capacity they choose (as citizens, consumers, companies, or collectives)—should be at liberty to pursue their own tastes and interests online.

Generally speaking, the cyber-libertarian’s motto is “Live & Let Live” and “Hands Off the Internet!”  The cyber-libertarian aims to minimize the scope of state coercion in solving social and economic problems and looks instead to voluntary solutions and mutual consent-based arrangements.

Cyber-libertarians believe true “Internet freedom” is freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some amorphous “public interest”—an all-to convenient facade behind which unaccountable elites can impose their will on the rest of us.

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