A recent post on Slate.com again raises the issue of international broadband rankings, and where the United States stands compared to other countries around the world.

At NextGenWeb, we have made clear our position on broadband rankings, in particular with regards to the OECD rankings and how they’re compiled. And we aren’t the only ones who are taking issue with the recent post by Slate. Rob Atkinson of ITIF recently released a webmemo titled, “The Truth, and Nothing But the Truth about U.S. International Broadband Rankings” where he describes the issue of broadband rankings as “wonkery” and states that Sascha Meinrath and James Losey, authors of the Slate post, play fast and loose with the OECD broadband rankings to claim the sky is falling and therefore that more regulation is needed.” Atkinson concluded by questioning the rankings methodology by stating, “How we measure Broadband access, the fact that Americans tend live in single family homes rather than apartments and the digital divide are among factors that Broadband policy critics fail to take into account.”

Last year, the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Policy Studies released their own answer to the OECD rankings with the Broadband Adoption Index (BAI). The BAI takes into consideration both public and private value that broadband generates, in contrast to the OECD numbers that simply count connections. The Phoenix Center describes the BAI as such: “The value-driven approach allows one to legitimately compare whether, say, Turkey is closer to maximizing the social value from broadband than, say, Japan. Merely comparing the raw, per-capita adoption rates of Turkey and Japan—two countries with markedly different population demographics, economies, and population density—provides little information relevant to broadband policy.”

The Slate post is untimely and misleading. With the recent release of the National Broadband Plan by the FCC, policy makers are beginning to constructively look at real issues such as how broadband can positively impact other industries (including healthcare, education, the economy, the environment, public safety, and government efficiency), the need to increase digital literacy, and how to deal with the fact that with all the innovations occurring on America’s broadband networks, there are still millions of Americans who deem the Internet as “irrelevant” to their everyday lives.

So say what you will, but defending our broadband status against countries like Estonia and Latvia does nothing to advance the important solutions-based conversations we should be having around broadband.

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