| FCC: Yochai Will Test the Evidence |
| Tuesday, 14 July 2009 23:22 |
 Yochai Benkler and Harvard/Berkman have been commissioned by Jules and Blair to review all the broadband “studies” and decide which are B_______ and which evidence-based. Suggestions welcome. My pick as the worst: the $134B/year return from a very small effort to promote broadband by an outfit that wants $hundreds of millions to do that. But the respected “public interest” outfit that demands $50B for fiber because DOCSIS 3.0 will not come close to the promised 50 meg is almost as bad. Or the many claims that the “exaflood” would crash the Internet by about now, when actually speeds and reliability are rising. There's new data that the broadband benefits are closer to $30B/year than to the promised $300-500B.Deborah Grady and colleagues didn't realize the HERS study was going to save many thousands of lives by proving hormone re[lacement therapy was a mistake for most women. They knew the common belief that HRT protects women's heart had poor evidence, so they looked further. Not merely did HRT not help the heart, they found “hormone therapy increases the risk of blood clots in the legs and in the lungs about 2 to 3-fold.” Five years later, breast cancer rates dropped 7%, possibly because fewer women took HRT. Informed by the medical analysis, I've been working for a year on “e  vidence-based policy.”
Bad telecom policy doesn't generally cost lives, fortunately, although the financial stakes are high. Perhaps 10-20% of ICT spending is inappropriate due to wasted subsidies, monopoly profits, and inferior services. 10-20% of a $600B industry remains a great deal of money. Blair Levin was inundated with false demands planning the broadband stimulus in December, and the transition team put out a call for “data,data,data.” One of the best ways to test claims is to compare them with facts on the ground. Two Australian groups think the National Broadband Network will cost so much consumer bills will have to be higher than $160/month, but Verizon has 13M homes passed and charges much less. Which are your favorite examples? Blair's now at the FCC in charge of the broadband plan and is doing something about the problem. He's turned to a “scholar's scholar,” Yochai Benkler at Harvard/Berkman, to determine what's B______. Yochai is a mentor to all the best scholars of the net, including Susan Crawford, Larry Lessig, and Tim Wu. The same day Mark Dutz and Peter Orszag released an estimate the consumer surplus of U.S. broadband is $32 billion/year, much less than Bob Crandall's 2001 estimate direct broadband benefits of “$300 billion or more.” With ten years' data, Crandall sees things differently as well and has spoken publicly. Broadband is a good thing, but doesn't transform most people's lives.$1B of the stimulus is going to evidence-based medicine. 2% of that would transform our understanding of broadband policy.
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