FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell marked his one-year anniversary at the commission last week. More than a symbolic milestone, the anniversary means the end of most of the conflict-of-interest restraints that — due to his prior tenure as a lobbyist — has kept him from voting on some key issues. Now that he’s freed, the commission will truly have, for the first time since Chester Arthur was president I believe, a full contingent of voting members.
McDowell marked the occasion by, appropriately enough, speaking his mind. He gave a barnstorm of a speech at the Broadband Policy Summit, taking a hefty swipe at the OECD and its recently-released stats on broadband. The OECD showed the U.S. lagging at 15th place interenationally in broadband penetration, leading to massive hangwringing from the media and from most policymakers. But McDowell, playing gloombuster, took issue with the OECD’s numbers in detail, pointing out its “fundamental flaws.” Among his criticisms:
— the OECD figures penetration rates on a per capita, rather than per household basis, putting the U.S. at a disadvantage;
— it doesn’t figure in actual adoption rates, where the U.S. leads the EU 42 percent to 23 percent;
— it doesn’t take into account geographic size and density (is it really meaningful that the Iceland, with a population of 300,000 ranks third?);
— Individually, many U.S. states do quite well. For example, New Jersey, says McDowell, has a higher penetration rate than broadband-obsessed South Korea.
He makes a good case. It’s not that the U.S. can’t do better. We can, probably a lot better. But we are doing a lot better than the OECD’s simple league-standings report seems to imply.
A good argument by a newly-unleashed commissioner.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.