Crawford’s faulty arguments -- in all their naked glory

[Commentary] Susan Crawford is talking again, this time in a long interview with Ezra Klein of Vox.

Klein pushes her more than most of her interlocutors, and, as a result, we see her arguments in all their naked glory. Crawford’s is not just a statist view of communications, but also a deeply pessimistic and nostalgic one. It must be. Otherwise, she would have to concede the success of a “private market… left to its own devices.”

Crawford selectively cites statistics that show US consumers getting poor service compared with Swedes, Slovenians, Singaporeans and the like. My colleagues Rosyln Layton and Bret Swanson dispose of such deceptive comparisons easily. For example, the current generation standard of 4G/LTE networks are available to 97% of Americans but just 26% of Europeans.

But where Crawford truly fails is her confusion between these selective inputs and America’s spectacular outputs. What the cable companies, the telecoms, and the satellites provide is an infrastructure, a platform. On top of that platform has been built a magnificent, rapidly changing edifice. Further, the Klein interview reveals Crawford’s fixation on delivery of Internet by wire.

But the growth and the future of broadband are mobile. Just ask Facebook. The mobile broadband market has ignited major capital spending by US companies -- six times more per subscriber than global counterparts.

[Glassman is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on Internet and communications policy in the new AEI Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy]