And at no point did I advocate that government should require only one telecom protocol. Where’d you pull that from?

Well, there goes another post of mine derailed by free market obfuscation.

As the article says itself:

“Most countries ranked above the U.S. in the OECD study are smaller with denser populations that are more easily networked.”

You are comparing countries like South Korea (Pop. ~50 Mil), Netherlands (Pop. ~41 Mil), and Denmark (Pop. ~5 Mil) with the United States (Pop. ~300 Mil). Not really Oranges and Oranges.

Also:

“Robert Litan, senior economic fellow at the Brookings Institution, expressed reservations about government programs like that in Korea. “I’m skeptical about subsidies,” said Litan. “Especially now that there’s increasing competition — the phone companies are really competing with the cable companies — markets are encouraging natural growth. And in a few years there will be wireless broadband, which will drive prices down.”"

So as I said in my last comment, having the government pick one technology over another is a bad idea. It would be a bad idea for the government to sink billions in to old tech like DSL, which would discourage the development of new tech like WiMAX and others.

In fact, you can look at the OECD’s June 2006 report, the most recent posted on their website, here: OECD Broadband Statistics to June 2006

You can look at the numbers and see several things.

1. You can see that the total number of subscribers, the only country to come close to the United States with 56.5 million is Japan with less than half as many, 24.2 million.
2. The report breaks down subscribers by service type (DSL/Cable/Other). You can see the distribution in the US much more even, whereas in the countries who top the list DSL dominates. I can only speculate this has to do with subsidies and regulation that discourage other broadband services. Does that really seem ideal to you? Ties to DSL, a very old technology?

Government has never, ever, anticipated the needs of the market (i.e. consumers) and it won’t start now. The same people who were unable to have FEMA get water to NOLA won’t be able to get broadband from your home.

Pretinda Generes, you may want to read up on “Negative liberty.”

No one is helpless Paulo. You demonstrated this when you chose not to buy an iPhone. If AT&T started doing these things (blocking Google, etc) people who cared would stop using AT&T.

I agree that buying a “locked” phone is a silly thing to do, but apparently a lot of people don’t think it is, or that it is worth it to have the iPhone.

But I disagree that regulation is needed. While more competition would be better, it is hyperbolic to say the industry is devoid of competition.

Just as iTunes started out as Mac only, Apple wanted to expand its sale of music and iPods so it came out with a version for Windows. It does not seems unlikely that a third or fourth generation iPhone will work with another network, as Apple will need more people to sell to if it wants to continue to grow.

Regulation stifles things. What if AT&T’s EDGE Network, which almost everyone agrees sucks, was the technology that was codified (that is to say made the standard) in to law? Instead Sprint, Version and AT&T all have their own data networks, and in the end which ever network is better will win.

If AT&T wished, they could block iPhone users from accessing Google in favor of AT&T search and mail only, and iPhone users would be helpless to do anything against it — they would not be able to change services owing to lock-in. If AT&T decided to start charging Google and Wikipedia extra bucks for use of bandwidth, where would that leave the internet? Internet users should actively oppose the telecoms attempting to moderate internet traffic in favor of their own profits when their users are already paying exorbitant rates for substandard service in comparison to the rest of the world. That’s why I pity the iPhone user who is locked in to AT&T’s service, and that’s why I favor regulation to make the telecoms to play fair in a field devoid of the competition which would encourage them to do so.

Is “net neutrality” a right now?

I’m confused.