Fabricating a Broadband Crisis? More Evidence on the Misleading Inferences from OECD Rankings
Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy
George S. Ford, PhD
July 7, 2010

Ford presents an article on the continued push for Internet regulation based on misleading data.  He believes that the mindset is that the U.S. is “falling behind” the rest of the world in broadband adoption.  So the only solution is one in which the government pushes ahead to solve the supposed problem.

Much of the information that is leading the Federal Communications Commission toward this position is the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development, also often referred to as “OECD numbers”.  Ford points out that the OECD numbers are an apples-to-oranges comparison because “per-capita connections are an invalid measure of broadband penetration [because] each country has its own unique maximum value for the measure.”  Which means that even if the U.S. and all other developed countries had almost total broadband penetration, the U.S. would still fall somewhere in the middle of the pack.

Ford provides several pieces of evidence as to why the OECD rankings should not be used in the process of considering a path toward regulation.  He also explains the problems inherent in the data and the OECD’s design.

You can read the full article here.