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If by "cherry-picking the metrics" you mean "citing actual research data instead of just spewing lame anecdotes," I'm guilty as charged, your honor. There are 144 footnotes in the Whole Picture report, so that's a lot of cherries.

It's interesting to see a discussion of my op-ed on Slashdot, it's been a while since I've had my work critiqued here. The last thread I remember on one of my pieces was the text of a speech I gave on net neutrality in 2008 that ended up being the second most read piece on CircleID for the year, http://www.circleid.com/posts/86147_net_neutrality_innovation_081/ Slashdot effect. . Many of the claims in the op-ed are controversial because they're contrary to conventional wisdom, but they're all based on empirical data. You can see the research here: http://www.itif.org/publications/whole-picture-where-america-s-broadband-networks-really-stand and view a panel discussion with members of the FCC's National Broadband Plan team. . The op-ed doesn't address the specific problems with rural broadband, of course. The approach that most policy analysts support is to re-purpose the Universal Service Fund that presently supports telephone service in rural areas for broadband, but the costs need to be brought under control. Subsidies can be as high as $50,000 per line per year, and that's obviously neither sustainable nor fair to the urban telephone users who pay for the subsidies. If it's any comfort, rural broadband is better in the US than it is in most countries, even if it's not as good as it is in the suburbs and cities where the market works. In general, 94% of Americans have some sort of wireline broadband option, 4G/LTE will be available to 98% by 2015, and satellite is available to the rest at ever-improving speeds; currently two carriers provide speeds > 10 Mbps by satellite, and it's much better than most people think. . Publicly financed broadband isn't really an option for competitive markets because the higher speed networks are not shareable in the same way that ADSL networks are. Cable, xPON, and even Vectored DSL require exclusive use of the wires at layer one, so the days of attaching your own DSLAM in a CO are in the past. . The US is installing more fiber every year than Europe, despite having less population, land mass, and population density, and more Americans use broadband per capita than Europeans, so the complaints about the U. S. market system don't seem to reflect any legitimate issues. . I notice that the usual critics have denounced ITIF here, as they usually do. So let me point out that the University of Pennsylvania's Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program ranks ITIF as the fifth most important science and technology think tank in the world: http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=think_tanks . Carry on.

If you have the time to read a ~70-page report, here's the report mentioned at the end of the op-ed.

Your attempted access to URL http://www.itif.org/publications/why-itif-rejects-your-do-not-track-request was blocked (Keyword Filter). Contact your network administrator for help.

That is my router after I added those crooks to its "Parental Control" rules. :)

Browsing http://www.itif.org/ with noscript installed or javascript disabled, I don't even see their rejection of my DNT header unless and until I enable javascript for the site.

Agreed. It is long past time that nations like America quit outsourcing everything, esp. when costs are higher in nations like Germany and France.
More importantly, it is time for America and other western nations to block access to their markets from nations that put up trade barriers, esp. illegal ones.
Page 10 and 11 of this is a good read on the issues.
The biggest one for America is that China requires that all computers and support be located within their border. As such, it is illegal per the agreement with USA and WTO.

Which do you want the UK to be in 20 years - South Korea or Portugal?

As Portugal is already ahead of the UK in any broadband ranking and is already deploying a nation-wide fiber optic network that will offer 100Mbit/s connectivity in any domestic connection then maybe, just maybe, you could not only get your facts straight but also avoid sounding like an idiot with all those racist remarks.

By the way, I'm Portuguese and I already pay 19 euros a month for an unlimited, 8Mbit/s connection.

That's specious reasoning. You only need to wire the places where people live, and Alaska and the Rocky Mountain states are comparatively empty. Let's take Wyoming, the least populous state, has 522,830 people in 253,348 sq km, at an ave density of 2.08 per sq km. Compare this to the city of San Francsico that is not only more populous (764,976 residents), and physically smaller at 600.7 sq km (only 121 of which are actually land), gives you a population density of 6,324.4 / sq km. In the SF Metro area is 7,264,887 people in 9,128.2 sq km at an ave density of 795.9 persons / sq km. Yet, SF doesn't have the pipes that the rest of the modern world has.

The United States is falling behind infrastructure because the companies with the municipal monopolies don't want to invest in it. Instead, they'd rather take the short view where infrastructure improvements are viewed as simply a loss rather than an investment.

We started the millennium fifth in the world in broadband penetration, and now we're 22nd. What happened? Well competition , actually decreased, and with less competition there's less incentive to improve.

Japan, and hell, Sweden not only have faster pipes, but they actually cost less too. Let me repeat that. Americans are paying more for less. Now why? Well at least in Japan, the monolopies like NTT, have to resell their pipes to competitors at wholesale prices. Luckily for Americans, this isn't the case.

So in conclusion: we suck.

US data is taken from speedmatters at 2.3Mbps

International data taken from theInformation Technology and
Innovation Foundation at http://www.itif.org/files/2008BBRankings.pdf

This report shows US at 4.9Mbps

A significant difference in findings between the two. Ill let you draw the conclusions

I did touch on competition in my post. As I said, I don't think it really shows a vast difference.This report from 2003 puts Swedish broadband provider shares as:

TeliaSonera: 37%
B2: 25%
Comhem: 11%
UPS: 8%
Others: 19%

In this report, the 2008 US broadband provider shares are broken down as such:

AT&T: 21%
Comcast: 22%
Verizon: 13%
Time Warner: 13%
Cox: 7%
Others: 24%

So I don't see a huge breakdown in the overall number of companies. The problem is that these numbers don't always tell the story of LOCAL monopolies.

Another report mentions that the Swedish government create a big infrastructure rollout programs where they gave grants and tax breaks. It goes on to say

Given that TeliaSonera, the incumbent telecommunications operator, owns the majority of Sweden's
telecommunications infrastructure, the company had the advantage of being able to bid low for these projects since
it could simply upgrade its existing network. Not surprisingly, it won 65 percent of the projects.

But that's just who owns the wire. It also appears from this same document that the Swedish government put in a lot of regulation to allow other ISPs access to TeliaSonera's infrastructure. This is a similar situation as in the US. And just like in the US, the incumbent telco fought it tooth and nail. They eventually lost. This is still an ongoing struggle in the US. Maybe this is a big point in the differences between Sweden and the US. Maybe if the US does get some strong regulation in that opens up the infrastructure, competition will flourish and bring services up and prices down.

Hard to say how this situation in Sweden is compared to France, Finland, etc.

That's not what he said at all if you actually read the article. In fact, at the end of it, he thanked the interest groups for bringing this to the FCC's attention and publically shaming Comcast. The result was that Comcast will stop using TCP resets and implement a protocol agnostic network management system by the end of this year and they're working with BitTorrent corporation and the P4P group to improve BitTorrent efficiency as well as a P2P users' bill of rights and responsibilities. So the process of the public and the FCC putting public pressure and humiliation on Comcast did the trick.

See http://www.itif.org/index.php?id=162 and http://www.formortals.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/88/Default.aspx

The problem with the FCC majority decision is that they're trying to enforce something that they said was never intended to be enforceable and they never went through any formal rule making process.

If so, here is the link.

http://www.itif.org/files/evoting.pdf

Just a quick browse of their "ITIF in the news" page and it looks like they are big fans of Real-ID and RFID tagging in general. On network neutrality they appear to be in favor of just leaving it up to the FCC to determine on a case-by-case basis what telecomm companies are abusive and which aren't - no legislation required, and their justification seems to be that some of the proposed legislation has been over-the-top (typical FUD about preventing telecomms from 'innovating').

Who funds these people?

Just a quick browse of their "ITIF in the news" page and it looks like they are big fans of Real-ID and RFID tagging in general. On network neutrality they appear to be in favor of just leaving it up to the FCC to determine on a case-by-case basis what telecomm companies are abusive and which aren't - no legislation required, and their justification seems to be that some of the proposed legislation has been over-the-top (typical FUD about preventing telecomms from 'innovating').

Who funds these people?