Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age Paperback – February 25, 2014

Captive Audience calls much-needed attention to telecom market consolidation, merging of carriage and content, and anticompetitive carrier tactics resulting in growing limitations on the relative speed, utility, and affordability of American consumer broadband Internet access. These issues have concerned me for some time. (For the record: I am a graduate-degreed scientist and a former network manager at a major university, but I am not employed by the telecom industry or its critics, directly or indirectly.) Ms. Crawford writes very well and makes a persuasive case which, to her credit, is accessible to a broad audience; any interested reader will find food for serious thought in her book. Still, Captive Audience is necessarily somewhat technical, part scholarly treatise and part case study, because the risks to the public interest and American global competitiveness which Crawford identifies are relatively simple, while minimizing them requires an understanding of technological, legal, and governmental regulatory history which is anything but.Ironically, the reaction to Captive Audience has been almost as enlightening as the book itself. It is sad but not surprising to see among many strongly positive reviews here a number of 1- and 2-star reviews from conservative pseudo-academics, political pundits, and would-be policy wonks who have tried to refute Crawford's conclusions with straw-man arguments, "evidence" frequently drawn from their own paid opinions rather than from original sources of independent data, and tired absolutist free-market philosophies which opponents of regulation in any form have flogged since the original Gilded Age in the 19th century. A quick Internet search reveals that the authors of every one of these negative reviews are transparently shilling for the American telecom industry as paid PR flacks, marketing consultants, or employees of telecom industry-funded think tanks.A newer spate of negative reviews takes what appears to be a more subtle but no less misleading tack: We are now supposed to believe that a range of everyday Americans who have never before reviewed any other book on Amazon.com have also given Captive Audience 1- or 2-star reviews, all in a one-week period, all because they deny its broadly-supported conclusions on the basis of homey personal anecdotes. One completely misses Crawford's fundamental point that in contrast to a growing number of other technologically advanced countries, the blazing fast fiber broadband which he apparently enjoys at work remains unavailable at any price to the vast majority of American homes. Another apparently travels between different cities--does he subscribe to residential broadband access anywhere?--and seems not to realize that the particular wireless applications he finds useful do not generally require high data throughput so they are poor measures of broadband Internet speed and cost for other users. Another uses high-bandwidth applications in an unspecified rural location and assures us that the broadband access speeds available to him are adequate for his needs, but offers no evidence that the same is true for other rural areas or that similar speeds will continue to be adequate for even higher-bandwidth applications of the near future. Yet another curiously mixes basic errors in grammar with rhetorical flourishes, as if he has been fed professionally-written sound bites to offer as his own opinions, wittingly or unwittingly.I do not find it plausible that these negative reviews represent truly independent opinions; it appears that most or all have been carefully guided by the unseen hand of the American telecom industry's pervasive and very well-funded lobbying machine. For that reason, they backfire: they ultimately fail to refute Crawford's thesis, but taken together, they are a ringing endorsement of the need for her timely book. The fact that the major telecom carriers appear to be so afraid of Captive Audience, are too craven to address Crawford's concerns directly and honestly, and instead feel they need to use third parties and straw-man tactics to try to discredit her conclusions and make other people afraid of them, is the most compelling reason for all concerned Americans to read Captive Audience and decide for themselves.

Susan Crawford provides an excellent description of the development of the telecommunications sector and the major players and events that have shaped it. She is critical of the high speed internet services now offered in the U.S., saying that they are not as good as those in other countries (e.g. Korea, Japan, parts of Europe) and blames the oligopoly power of the service providers (Comcast, AT&T and Verizon). She believes that the industry needs to be regulated. While much of her criticism is valid, it is clearly biased in favor of the user of the services and does not give much credence to the rights (or rather the obligations) of the providers to maximize their investment returns. Her arguments need to be revisited in light of coming technological advances (e.g. 5G). She also does not seem to consider the possibility of cooperation between the service providers and the communities that they serve. (For example, municipalities that want the highest quality high speed internet services could pay the service providers to upgrade their networks in exchange for a guaranteed (low) monthly user fee for a specified period of time.) Despite my disagreements with some of her conclusions, Prof. Crawford does provide a very good history and review of the telecommunications industry and raises many issues that are worth considering (and maybe acting upon). I learned a lot from reading her book.

As you drive from east to west across the US, there is a meridian in the breadbasket, somewhere in the eastern Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, where gelatin salads start to appear in the supermarket deli cases. In the prairies it is not only acceptable but fashionable to serve molded, multicolored Jell-O with grapes, pineapple, and heaven knows what else arranged inside it. Once you get over the Continental Divide the fashion fades out. It's not a thing on either coast.How did this get started? It's not an ethnic fashion. The folks who settled the Great Plains were Norwegians and Swedes and Germans, and gelatin is not an ethnic treat anywhere in Europe. Or anywhere else, as far as I know!No, it's because there was a time when only rich folks could make Jello on their farms in the summer. People who were rich enough to have their farms electrified. Once Jell-O got imprinted as a luxury item, it remained fashionable even when everybody could have it.You see, electricity itself was a luxury in the early 20th century, and gelatin salads were a proxy for being rich enough to have electric power delivered to your place. In her brilliantly troubling new book Captive Audience, she quotes this 1905 dismissal of government interference with the electricity market."The ownership and operation of municipal light plants stands upon a different basis from that of the ownership of water works, which it is so often compared. Water is a necessity to the health and life of every individual member of a community ... It must be supplied in order to preserve the public health, whether it can be done proitably or not, and must be furnished, not to a few individuals, but to every individual. Electric lights are different. Electricity is not in any sense a necessity, and under no conditions is it universally used by the people of a community. It is but a luxury enjoyed by a small proportion of the members of any municipality, and yet if the plant be owned and operated by the city, the burden of such ownership and operation must be borne by all the people through taxation."This is exactly the argument being used today against government involvement in broadband. It is why children even in such hardly remote locales as western Massachusetts have to go to public libraries to do their homework. Comcast and Verizon just don't find it profitable to run cables and fibers into rural locales.Those profits are maximized by managing scarcity. with the cooperation of a deregulatory-minded Congress, always hungry for campaign contributions from big corporations. As a result, what the FCC laughably calls its broadband plan of 2010 would have every American household getting 4 Mbps download, 1 Mbps upload by 2020 --- with 100 million households getting up to 100 Mbps download and 50 Mbps upload. The South Korean plan, by contrast, is for every household to get 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) right now!I recommend this book to everyone. It explains why my ophthalmologist can't send my retinal scans from his Boston to his Cambridge office electronically (that example explains why symmetric channels, with comparable upload and download speeds, are essential for economic development). Why the backup service Mozy will use postal mail to send you your backed up files on disk if your computer crashes -- the files were uploaded incrementally but to download them all at once would take a week or more.The US is going to be a second-rate economy if we don't wake up to the simple fact that some regulation in communication technologies is needed to create universal service, and ensuring that service is one of the functions of government. Broadband Internet service is like electricity really turned out to be, and not as the privately owned electric utilities wanted the public to see it at the turn of the 20th century.

NBCU/Comcastの判断に批判的な立場の代表的な議論に、深く触れられる良作。個々の表現の自由を厳格に確保することと、反トラスト法の適用とはとても適合的な訳ですが、それだけでは済まなくなって来たのか否か。そこを考えさせる本です。