What do you do when you’re a telecom industry trade group that wants the FCC to ignore the fact that U.S. consumers pay more money, for slower bandwidth, in fewer locations than more than a dozen other countries? You pick out a largely meaningless metric we actually are good at and blow it out of proportion. If you’re a lobbying organization like the USTelecom Association, for example, you can send a letter to the FCC (warning: pdf link) highlighting how all those critics of expensive U.S. broadband who say we lack competition are ignoring the fact that we’re a world leader in – consuming broadband:

To date, international broadband comparisons seem to have largely ignored actual usage in favor of more theoretical measurements based on capacity. We believe that the amount that Internet consumers are actually making use of their broadband connections to pull value from the Internet – whether education, government services, or entertainment – provides a more real-world, practical measure of how successfully a country’s broadband networks and regulatory environment are providing consumers with what they want. By this more consumer-focused measure U.S. Internet users and our broadband networks are among the world leaders.

In other words, USTelecom would prefer the FCC avoid looking at data that shows we are mediocre in most every metric – and instead operate from the belief that we’re doing great – because Americans like bandwidth. That certainly sounds almost like science, and it does put us at the top of something. Even after using the lobbying firm’s data (which is just culled from Cisco’s latest study) we’re still only in fourth place – American’s consuming about 14.24 gigabytes per month. As long as you ignore price, speed, competition, predatory practices, connection quality and every other meaningful metric – we’re world beaters.

Yeah. I’m convinced.

Link to the original article…