Handset marketing exclusives are a pro-competitive wellspring of wireless growth and broadband adoption. Marketing exclusives are also a legitimate, proven and widespread marketing practice that marshals maximum marketing resources for selected, potentially-hot-new-products in order to drive maximum sales and adoption.

Comcast-Clearwire's 4G WiMax rollout starting in Portland today, as part of broader national launch this year, is powerful evidence of the vibrancy and dynamism of the facilities-based broadband competition trajectory in the U.S.

• This latest announcement provides an excellent opportunity to take stock of both the current state of broadband competition in the U.S. and the competitive trajectory of how the U.S. broadband market is getting increasingly more competitive.

Contrary to the parade of imperfection horribles claimed by anti-competition groups to try and justify a wide variety of new net neutrality-related regulations, the U.S. has more real and growing facilities-based broadband competition than any nation in the world.

The Comcast announcement provides powerful proof points of all the good aspects of vibrant facilities-based competition.

A new coalition of some struggling broadband competitors, NoChokePoints.org, is making claims that the "special access" market is being "choked" by lack of competition and is urging the FCC to reverse course and regulate lower prices for these competitors.

• "Special access" is basically the business-to-business leasing market of the copper wire connections that link many buildings and cell towers to the Internet backbone at DS1 (1.5 Mbs) and DS3 (44.7 Mbs) speeds.

To solve this controversy and determine who is actually "choking," or holding up whom, I thought it would be instructive and interesting to consider how the beloved TV detective Columbo would apply his common sense questioning to get to the bottom of this whodunit.

Kudos to Bret Swanson's excellent new research: "Bandwidth Boom: Measuring U.S. Communications Capacity from 2000-2008."

• For the first time, it measures and puts into perspective the incredibly explosive growth in American bandwidth capacity since the U.S. began strongly promoting facilities-based broadband competition and Internet infrastructure investment.
  • This research is new and interesting because it focuses on measuring supply-side bandwidth capacity, i.e. the fruit of tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure investment, rather than just the traditional demand-side measure of data traffic or usage.   

This research also helps refute the constant whining and pessimism by the tech elites' that the U.S. is in the "digital dark ages," is falling behind the world in broadband, and in need of massive U.S. Government intervention in the Internet infrastructure market in order to make any progress.  

• The one page report summary is here.
• The full report is here.

In summary, Bret Swanson's Entropy Economics report found:

"One click away from competition" is Google's ever-present, antitrust defense slogan that Google does not have any market power to anti-competitively exercise. 

In today's New York Times, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt ratcheted up the centrality of that slogan to Google's antitrust defense by claiming it applied to Google's user "customers." CEO Schmidt said:

• “We are one click away from losing you as a customer, so it is very difficult for us to lock you in as a customer in a way that traditional companies have.”

The problem with Google's "one click away" slogan is that it is untrue and deceptive; it simply does not withstand close scrutiny of the facts or logic.

I. It is untrue -- a false claim.

A. The claim fails the dictionary test.

The dictionary definition of a "customer" is "one that buys goods or services."

Today I testified before a Joint House Subcommittee hearing of the Energy & Commerce Committee on "The Potential Privacy Implications of Behavioral Advertising."

• A one-page summary is below and the full testimony is here.

Summary Testimony of Scott Cleland, President, Precursor LLC

“Why A Consumer-Driven, Technology/Competition-Neutral, Privacy Framework Is Superior to a Default ‘Finders Keepers Losers Weepers’ Privacy Framework”

Before the Joint House Energy & Commerce Hearing on Behavioral Advertising, June 18, 2009

Kudos to Verizon's Link Hoewing for an excellent post highlighting the recently released Pew Research Report, which shows the U.S. continues to make steady, broad, and impressive progress in broadband adoption.

This Pew research is another independent evidence point that undermines the manufactured dogma that the U.S. is failing in broadband -- dogma artificially designed to provide a cover story for abandoning successful bipartisan facilities-based competition policies in favor of a "retro" common carrier broadband/Internet regulation regime.

In some of the worst sophistry I have seen in a long time, several pro-regulation groups, who obviously oppose competition policy for communications, petitioned the FCC with a classic straw man argument that essentially asserts that because wireless competition is imperfect, its "demonstrably uncompetitive" "and "produces active and ongoing consumer harms."   

• Any open, transparent, balanced and fair-minded review of the real competitive facts in the U.S. wireless industry will expose these assertions as un-true and un-supported by the balance of available evidence. 
• The sophistic comments, which can be found at the bottom of this Media Access Project press release are an obvious "stalking horse" for those who advocate abandoning private enterprise competition policy in favor of common carrier regulated public infrastructure policy.

The comments consistently present fallacious "black or white" arguments that if a competitive imperfection can be asserted, however thin, unsupported, irrelevant or out-of-context, one must  conclude that the market is anti-competitive requiring ongoing government regulation of prices, terms, conditions, operations and network management. 

With all due respect to Mr. John Bogle, legendary founder of Vanguard and de facto leader of the American index fund movement that now manages ~$1.5 trillion, I must respectfully challenge, on the merits, Mr. Bogle's, and others, ongoing mischaracterization of indexing as "investing."