Today’s telecom policy debates rely on faulty premises...

Today’s telecom policy debates rely on faulty premises repeatedly used to make flawed arguments, Free State Foundation’s Justin Hurwitz said in a paper released Thursday (http://bit.ly/1fgsYpD). “The five faulty premises are: that everyone needs low-cost access to high speed broadband service; that high-speed broadband is necessary for education, health, government, and other social services; that wireless can’t compete with cable; that an open Internet is necessary for innovation and benefits consumers; and that the grass is greener in other countries,” wrote Hurwitz, a law professor at the University of Nebraska. Little reason exists for many Internet services to require such rich multimedia; the push for a “resource-intensive user experience” is often driven by the existence of the technology, not by the needs of the users, Hurwitz said. High-speed broadband is not necessary for education, healthcare and other various social services, Hurwitz said; “the focus should be on ensuring access to sufficiently high-performance Internet services to realize basic social commitments.” The idea that innovation requires open access is a “beautiful premise” whose “beauty is skin deep,” Hurwitz said. Although open access can facilitate some innovation, it makes some forms of innovation more expensive or difficult to implement, he said. “Hopefully, identifying these faulty premises here will help us move beyond them in the debates to occur over the next year."