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1 Internet traffic as a basic measure of broadband health By Bret Swanson November 2014 Is American broadband healthy or not? For the last decade, numerous debates about US technology policy have centered on this basic question. Broadband communications networks are in many ways the foundation of the digital economy, and policymakers and regulators have not failed to notice. Although digital technologies are spreading across every industry and will thus attract attention from many agencies, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is especially active. Its proceedings on net neutrality, network interconnection, and wireless spectrum auctions, for example, have provoked some of the fiercest debates, and a key point of contention is the state of American broadband. Over the last several decades, the US Internet industry has grown in an environment that is largely free from government interference. Rules proposed by the FCC and the president, Key Points x Internet traffic volume is an important indicator of broadband health, as it encapsulates and distills the most important broadband factors, such as access, coverage, speed, price, and content availability. x US Internet traffic is two to three times higher than that of most advanced nations, and the United States generates more Internet traffic per capita and per Internet user than any major nation except for South Korea. x The US model of broadband investment and innovationwhich operates in an environment that is largely free from government interferencehas been a dramatic success. x Overturning this successful policy by imposing heavy regulation on the Internet puts one of America’s most vital industries at risk.

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Suggests Internet traffic is a good measure of the health of a broadband networks and content markets. Compares nations based on 2014 traffic measures. Finds U.S. generates 2-3 times more traffic than most advanced nations. Suggests U.S. policy of Internet freedom has worked.

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Internet traffic as a basic measure of broadband health By Bret Swanson November 2014

Is American broadband healthy or not? For the last decade, numerous debates about US

technology policy have centered on this basic question.

Broadband communications networks are in many ways the foundation of the digital economy,

and policymakers and regulators have not failed to notice. Although digital technologies are

spreading across every industry and will thus attract attention from many agencies, the Federal

Communications Commission (FCC) is especially active. Its proceedings on net neutrality,

network interconnection, and wireless spectrum auctions, for example, have provoked some of

the fiercest debates, and a key point of contention is the state of American broadband.

Over the last several decades, the US Internet industry has grown in an environment that is

largely free from government interference. Rules proposed by the FCC and the president,

Key Points

x Internet traffic volume is an important indicator of broadband health, as it encapsulates and distills the most important broadband factors, such as access, coverage, speed, price, and content availability.

x US Internet traffic is two to three times higher than that of most advanced nations, and the United States generates more Internet traffic per capita and per Internet user than any major nation except for South Korea.

x The US model of broadband investment and innovation—which operates in an environment that is largely free from government interference—has been a dramatic success.

x Overturning this successful policy by imposing heavy regulation on the Internet puts one of America’s most vital industries at risk.

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however, would dramatically change the degree and nature of broadband regulation. Whether

current policy has been a success or failure is thus an important question to answer.

A Little History

For the past decade, advocates of government intervention in broadband and mobile markets

asserted that the United States had fallen “dangerously behind” the rest of the developed world.

Major studies, articles, and books argued that other nations and regions had catapulted ahead of

American broadband.1 Many of these analyses further argued that the supposed American

decline was the result of too little government regulation of, or taxpayer support for, broadband

networks.

Early on, this theme depended heavily on the metric of national broadband penetration, or the

number of residential broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. Depending on the latest

release of broadband-penetration data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and

Development and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), newspaper and opinion

headlines would report, often with alarm, that US broadband ranked somewhere between 16th

and 25th in the world. American broadband was also, as one advocate put it, “pitifully slow” and

“expensive.”2 Just recently, the New York Times echoed this refrain in an article assertively

titled, “Why the U.S. Has Fallen Behind in Internet Speed and Affordability.”3 But did the data

support the broad conclusions being drawn? Do the facts confirm the narrative?

In short, the data did not support the conclusions, nor did the facts confirm the narrative. For

example, in a series of papers, George Ford and Lawrence Spiwak showed that the ubiquitous

broadband-penetration metric was better at measuring household size than broadband health.4

Furthermore, three economists found profound statistical and methodological errors in one of the

era’s most prominent reports, which the FCC commissioned and which attempted to show that

lack of “open access” regulation in the United States had led to American broadband decline.5 So

central were the errors that the report had to be rewritten, and without its central argument.

More often than not, critiques of American broadband performance have been amalgams of

cherry-picked data points. One example is a widely circulated chart called “Countries with High-

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Speed Broadband,” which attempts to show that among the 10 “high-speed” nations, US

consumers pay the most and get the least.6

The graphic, however, makes at least six different types of errors. For example, it cites

advertised, not actual, speeds; it includes the best-offered plans for some nations but not others;

and 7 of the 10 “high-speed” nations are not, in fact, in the top 10 of actual speed as measured by

Akamai. Yet the chart shows that they have faster broadband than the United States, which is in

the top 10 for actual speeds. A new report from the New America Foundation commits many of

these same errors of cherry-picking a relatively small number of (questionable) data points and

drawing overly broad conclusions from unsystematic analysis.7

Many scholars successfully rebutted the substance of these arguments, the data on which they

were based, and the general thrust of the theme of relative broadband decline in America.8

Broadband penetration can be a useful concept, but the metric as historically constructed was

misleading. Because each household usually had only one broadband subscription, nations with

larger households appeared to have less broadband. This is wrong. Penetration alone does not

measure the number of people with access to or the quality of broadband. And “broadband” is

often arbitrarily defined and, in any case, is reaching saturation levels in many developed

nations.

Furthermore, broadband speed (or network capacity10) is an important factor. But its presentation

in much of the literature is simplistic and improperly interpreted. For example, many

examinations of speed looked at advertised speeds, not actual download and upload performance.

Many critiques also cited anecdotes: typical was the impressive but elusive claim that French

citizens enjoy 100 megabits per second for $30 per month. Ookla Speedtest data are also

interesting, but because Ookla uses a self-selected data set, it does not necessarily provide a good

sample. Finally, the widely cited Netflix ISP Speed Index does not provide a useful performance

measure of last-mile broadband network speed.11

Network “speed” is a complex equation that depends not only on the capacity of the final

connection to a home or mobile device but also, crucially, on the capacity and quality of the

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components that serve up, transport, and render content from the start of a bit’s journey to the

end: content servers, intermediate networks, access networks, browsers, and devices.12

Price is of course important, but it is difficult to compare across countries, and few studies have

succeeded. Many questions must be answered merely to approach a useful price comparison,

including: Does either the exchange rate or purchasing-power parity capture true value in

disparate markets? Does it make apples-to-apples comparisons of like product packages? Does it

include taxes and fees that only some nations charge? If the study excludes subsidies, is its price

comparison legitimate? If few consumers purchase a product, does its price matter very much?

Despite the lack of solid evidence to back it up, the idea that US broadband is widely

inaccessible and of low quality achieved a sort of conventional wisdom. Policy initiatives,

especially net-neutrality rules, are still rooted in this common notion of paltry broadband, and

this belief permeates the general debate over governance of the Internet. But what if this idea is

not just wrong but also the opposite of the truth? In other words, what if US broadband is not

only not a laggard but is also in fact a great success? And is there any way to get to the bottom of

this?

A Better Metric

I believe there is another metric that, while imperfect, better encapsulates most of the important

broadband factors: Internet traffic per capita and per user.13 Traffic represents all the bits flowing

over our networks—email, websites, texts, chats, photos, digital books and movies, video clips,

social feeds, searches, transactions, cloud interactions, phone and video calls, interactive maps,

software downloads, and much more. It is a general measure of network output and can thus

reflect the relative health of the value chain. If we want networks that are widely deployed,

generally accessible, broadly affordable, and fast, then traffic is probably the best single metric

by which to measure these characteristics.

The broadband marketplace is complex. Simply put, it is composed of the supply of and demand

for network connectivity (which includes broadband, mobile, and interconnection) and the

supply of and demand for content and services (which includes websites, email, applications,

phone calls, and cloud services).

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We build networks to move bits, and we create bits to send over networks. The cost to create and

move bits and the price to consume bits is a complex and shifting equation. The value chain is

made up of multiple multisided markets. Moreover, these markets are constantly changing with

the introduction of new products, services, devices, networks, and content. For all this

complexity, network traffic—how many bits we generate, move, and consume—is a central

measure of output and of the effective coordination of the ecosystem.

Reported broadband penetration rates and advertised speeds and prices do not necessarily

demonstrate realized consumer value. Traffic, at least to a first approximation, does. If an

inexpensive gigabit-per-second connection is not widely available, not widely purchased, not

heavily utilized, or does not deliver on its promise, is that a true measure of broadband health?

Might not a 20-megabit-per-second product that is widely available, affordable, consumed, and

intensively utilized better demonstrate value?

Building capacious networks may drive the creation and consumption of rich content. I think

there is a lot to this supply-side point of view. Some argue, on the other hand, that consumer

demand for rich content drives network upgrades.14 It is an interesting interplay, and there is

probably a lot to say for both perspectives. For our purposes, however, we do not need to know

whether supply (building faster networks) or demand (buying more content and connectivity) is

the key driver. Traffic figures tend to show whether both sides of the market—connectivity and

content—are succeeding in delivering value.

Although the enormous traffic volumes make traffic difficult to measure with precision,

magnitudes are discernible. And although all traffic is not equally valuable, its quantity is still a

key indicator of the scope and quality of our networks. Traffic measures can distill the impurities

found in the data and broadband debates. They can help simplify the complex equation of

coverage, capacity, access, pricing, content, and the general value being generated by the digital

ecosystem.

To compare and contrast among nations and regions, I used Internet traffic estimates from the

June 2014 edition of the widely cited Cisco Visual Networking Index,15 population data from the

July 2014 update of the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook,16 and Internet user data

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from Internet Live Stats,17 which compiles its estimates using data from the ITU and national and

regional authorities.

Other network scientists, such as Craig Labovitz of Deepfield Networks and Andrew Odlyzko of

the University of Minnesota, have offered detailed and useful traffic data and analysis, but their

latest information is either proprietary or not up to date.18 The Cisco data, however, is the most

current, publicly available series.

Total US Traffic

The perception that American broadband is lagging behind other nations and regions seems to be

contradicted by experiences from the frontlines of the American digital economy. How could

most of the world’s biggest and most successful websites, applications, devices, operating

systems, and online content be launched and sustained in the United States with poor-quality

broadband? For example, how could YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, and so many other companies

succeed in a nation with inaccessible and “pitifully slow” networks?

Figure 1. Internet Traffic per Capita

Sources: Cisco Visual Networking Index, Central Intelligence Agency Factbook, and the author

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The most recent example is Twitch, just purchased by Amazon for nearly $1 billion. In the space

of only three years, this online streaming site for video games and the gamers who play them

grew from startup to the fourth-largest single source of traffic on the Internet, behind only

Google, Netflix, and Apple.19 These success stories are not some figment of our imagination.

The traffic data show they are real. Total US Internet and Internet Protocol traffic in 2014 is

around 18.6 exabytes (18.6 billion gigabytes) per month. This is by far the highest of any nation

and represents 29.7 percent of the world total. With a population of 318.9 million, the United

States now generates 58.2 gigabytes per person per month (see figure 1). And with 279.9 million

Internet users, America generates 66.4 gigabytes per user per month (see figure 2).

Only South Korea exceeds the United States in per capita and per user traffic, and in recent years

the United States has actually tightened the gap. America has also pulled away from other

advanced nations. For instance, it now generates 2.0 times the per user Internet traffic of Japan

and 2.6 times the per user traffic of France. Several years ago, Canadian and US traffic figures

were nearly identical, but today, the United States generates 25 percent more than Canada. It is

important to note, however, that Canada, at number three in the rankings, has an industry and

regulatory model closer to the United States than many other nations. Canada has robust

intermodal deployment of both cable and telecom networks.

Figure 2. Internet Traffic per Internet User

Sources: Cisco Visual Networking Index, Internet Live Stats, and the author

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The region most similar to the United States in terms of geographic size, population, and

economic development is Western Europe. Additionally, many assertions of US broadband

failure also extend to European success. Of the Western European nations specified by Cisco, the

United Kingdom comes closest, but US per user traffic is still 57 percent higher than that of the

United Kingdom. Compared to Western Europe as a whole—the best apples-to-apples

comparison available—US per user traffic is 2.5 times higher.

The US traffic lead over Western Europe has in fact been growing. As recently as 2010 and

2011, US traffic was 60–70 percent higher than Western Europe.20 The longer the United States

maintains its policy of regulatory humility and the longer Western Europe continues to regulate

broadband as an old telecommunications network, the larger the gap grows.21

While per capita traffic tends to measure both access (broadband penetration) and intensity of

usage, per user traffic tends to measure intensity of usage alone. Intensity, meanwhile, is

determined by network coverage and speed, the number and quality of access devices, and the

availability of rich and valuable content, services, and applications, among other factors.

Nations with advanced economies tend to have similar Internet usage penetration rates among

their populations. Any traffic differences between advanced economies therefore primarily

reflect differences in coverage, speed, devices, and content—in other words, some of the most

important indicators of a healthy broadband ecosystem.

On both measures, the United States is far and away the leader among large nations and regions,

only outdone by South Korea.

US Consumer Traffic

Is total traffic, however, the correct measure? If our goal is to ascertain the quality and coverage

of consumer broadband access networks—the last-mile links to American homes—it is wise to

look more closely at this metric. Because the United States is at the center of the world’s digital

economy, some significant portion of the world’s Internet traffic might flow through the United

States en route from one foreign nation to another. Many of the world’s largest backbone

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networks, fiber-optic landing stations, data centers, and content repositories are based in the

United States, and foreign consumers and firms make heavy use of these resources.

This traffic, although meaningful, could create the appearance that US residential and mobile

networks are faster and more widespread than they really are.

Figure 3. Consumer Internet Traffic per Capita

Sources: Cisco Visual Networking Index, Central Intelligence Agency Factbook, and the author

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Figure 4. Consumer Internet Traffic per Internet User

Sources: Cisco Visual Networking Index, Internet Live Stats, and the author

To exclude this type of traffic, I looked specifically at consumer Internet traffic. When

considering only traffic that originates on, ends on, or otherwise touches a consumer device,

however, the results are nearly identical to the measures of total traffic.

The US world share of consumer Internet traffic, at 31.5 percent, is actually higher than its share

of total traffic. Per capita consumer traffic is 49.8 gigabytes per month (see figure 3), and

consumer traffic per Internet user is 56.7 gigabytes per month (see figure 4). This is 7.6 times the

global per capita average and 3.2 times the global per user average. It is 2.3 times Japan’s per

user consumer traffic and 2.7 times that of Western Europe (see table 1).

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Table 1. The United States Generates Two to Three Times the Traffic of Many Major Nations

Sources: Cisco Visual Networking Index, Internet Live Stats, Central Intelligence Agency Factbook, and the author

Isolating the consumer portion of network traffic only strengthens the case that, in general, US

broadband networks are capacious, widely deployed, and intensively used to access a large,

vibrant, and diverse community of content, applications, and services. Over the past five years,

the US share of total global traffic has held steady at around 30 percent. During this period, the

world has added more than 1 billion Internet users, and the United States has added only around

40 million.

The United States is maintaining its share of total traffic in the face of a boom in non-US Internet

adoption, a fact reflected in widening per capita and per user gaps favoring the United States. In

sum, the United States is home to 4 percent of the world’s population, 10 percent of its Internet

users, 25 percent of its broadband investment, and 30 percent of its Internet traffic.22

Addressing Counterarguments

Some might argue that a small portion of a nation’s users could generate enough traffic to skew

global comparisons. It is true that some power users generate disproportionate shares of traffic.

But every developed nation has power users, and other evidence shows why they alone do not

account for the disparity.

Netflix, for example, is the largest generator of Internet traffic in the United States, accounting

for around one-third of peak traffic on broadband access networks. Netflix has 36 million US

subscribers, or more than a third of the nation’s total broadband subscribers. This is a very broad

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phenomenon that cannot be attributed to some small minority. It reflects widespread use of

broadband.

Do the traffic figures obscure the fact that some pockets of America do not enjoy quality

broadband? I don’t think so. Some people in some localities simply do not enjoy access to the

fastest networks. This is true, however, for any geographically diverse nation or region. The per

user and per capita traffic comparison does show that despite all of America’s challenges,

broadband still excels.

Cisco does not provide data for every nation, so does that mean someone important is being

excluded? Possibly. Several small nations not specified—such as Taiwan, Hong Kong,

Singapore, and Latvia—might do well in the rankings. By virtue of Akamai’s quarterly speed

rank, we know that most of the nations with the fastest measured broadband speeds are tiny and

densely populated. Yet for this very reason, they are not peers of the United States.23 Also, Japan

does well on the Akamai speed ranking but still only generates half the traffic of the United

States.

One common argument, even among those who accept some measure of US broadband success,

is that American prices are too high. Prices can be difficult to compare across nations. Most

studies of broadband prices, however, find that US entry-level broadband is less expensive than

in other nations, and that high-end broadband subscriptions are often more expensive than

abroad.24 One might nitpick whether these prices are “correct,” but one could also argue that this

is close to an ideal arrangement that lets affluent power users help everyone else obtain more

affordable access.

Nevertheless, the fact that the United States generates substantially more traffic than other

countries demonstrates that the cost of broadband is not, in general, depressing US access and

usage. Moreover, if we adjust for traffic—how much Americans pay for the capacity they

actually use (dollars per byte)—US prices are extremely attractive and actually less expensive

than many of the supposedly cheaper international plans.

A final argument might be that I am not adjusting for income, age, and other demographic

factors in my analysis. This is true, though adjustments for income would still leave the United

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States well ahead of the pack. US income is not two to three times that of Western Europe and

Japan.

The age factor, meanwhile, could be confounding. Younger people may use the Internet more

intensively, possibly contributing to the high traffic levels of the United States and South Korea

compared to Japan and Western Europe. Yet the quality and capacity of the network and the

ecosystem still has to accommodate that increased traffic and thus still points to broadband

health. Moreover, not all nations with young populations generate lots of traffic.

Conclusion

In the second quarter of 2014, US cable broadband subscribers for the first time ever

outnumbered cable television subscribers.25 Broadband is not only the cable industry’s best

product, but it is now also its biggest product. It is popular because consumers can access the

diverse bounty of the Internet, and subscribers are voting with their feet. My traffic measures,

which show US digital output two to three times higher (per capita and per user) than most other

advanced nations, reflect this trend.

Internet traffic is a measure of output in a networked economy. Complaints about broadband

penetration, speeds, competitive choices, and prices must contend with this central fact. High US

traffic levels, large infrastructure investments, rapid application and content innovation, and

booming sales of connected devices and broadband services mean that both the supply of and

demand for network capacity are high. Dramatically expanding output and whirlwind innovation

mean that the efforts to label and regulate broadband as a monopoly utility are misguided. Given

the demonstrated success of the US broadband value chain, calls to regulate the Internet as a

Title II common carrier are not only bizarre but also profoundly disturbing.26

If lower broadband prices are the goal, the first place to look is artificial constraints on

broadband supply, such as limits on available wireless spectrum or harmful state, local, and

federal rules that discourage broadband investment and market entry. If expanding access to rural

geographies or low-income populations is the goal, targeted programs can help rectify specific

shortcomings.

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In a liberal market economy, the burden is on the government to show a compelling need to

intervene. In flourishing markets such as those of the US Internet industries, the burden of proof

is even higher. A manifestly successful policy of regulatory restraint should not be overturned

because of assertions (such as, “the United States is a laggard”) that turn out to be false, or

because of hypothetical future harms to network firms (“packet discrimination”) that could be

more readily mitigated through narrow case-by-case review.

Internet traffic comparisons cannot definitively answer every question of network quality or

government policy. Yet they can (1) help quantify the broad-based success of the US broadband

economy and (2) substantially disprove some of the most common and crucial arguments in

favor of government regulation of the Internet. Overturning a manifestly successful policy of

regulatory humility based on a false picture of American broadband would be a historic

economic blunder.

About the Author

Bret Swanson ([email protected]) is president of the technology research firm

Entropy Economics LLC and a visiting fellow at AEI’s Center for Internet, Communications,

and Technology Policy.

Notes

I thank Guro Ekrann, Evelyn Smith, Roslyn Layton, and Richard Bennett for their helpful comments. 1. See, for example, Berkman Center for Internet and Security, Harvard University, Next Generation Broadband Connectivity (October 2009), http://transition.fcc.gov/stage/pdf/Berkman_Center_Broadband_Study_13Oct09.pdf; Edward Wyatt, “U.S. Struggles to Keep Pace in Delivering Broadband Service,” New York Times, December 29, 2013; and Susan Crawford, Captive Audience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 2. Susan Crawford, “It’s Time to Fix the Pitifully Slow, Expensive Internet Access in the US,” Wired, December 13, 2012, www.wired.com/2012/12/hey-dont-forget-about-internet-access-in-the-u-s/. 3. Claire Cain Miller, “Why the U.S. Has Fallen Behind in Internet Speed and Affordability,” New York Times, October 30, 2014. 4. See, for example, George S. Ford, Fabricating a Broadband Crisis? More Evidence on the Misleading Inferences from OECD Rankings (Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies, July 7, 2010), www.phoenix-center.org/perspectives/Perspective10-05Final.pdf. 5. See Declaration of Robert W. Crandall, Everett M. Ehrlich, and Jeffrey A. Eisenach Regarding the Berkman Center Study (Navigant Consulting Inc., November 16, 2009), www.naviganteconomics.com/docs/Crandall%20Ehrlich%20Eisenach%20Declaration%20FINAL.pdf. 6. See Bret Swanson, “Anatomy of a Deceptive Broadband Chart,” TechPolicyDaily, March 14, 2014, www.techpolicydaily.com/communications/anatomy-deceptive-broadband-chart/. 7. See Nick Russo et al., “The Cost of Connectivity,” New American Foundation, October 30, 2014, www.newamerica.org/oti/the-cost-of-connectivity-2014/. Richard Bennett summarized the New America

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Foundation study’s shortcomings: “it ignores thorough and methodical data collection on broadband price, performance, and usage in favor of an odd collection of advertising claims that bear little resemblance to actual broadband conditions in the US and our competitor nations.” See “National Pride and the Cost of Connectivity,” TechPolicyDaily, November 4, 2014, www.techpolicydaily.com/internet/national-pride-cost-of-connectivity/. 8. See, for example, Richard Bennett, Luke A. Steward, and Robert D. Atkinson, The Whole Picture: Where America’s Broadband Networks Really Stand (Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, February 2013), www.itif.org/publications/whole-picture-where-america-s-broadband-networks-really-stand; Roslyn Layton, “The European Union’s Broadband Challenge,” AEI, February 18, 2014, www.aei.org/files/2014/02/18/-the-european-unions-broadband-challenge_175900142730.pdf; and Everett Ehrlich, “State of US Broadband: Is It Competitive? Or Are We Falling Behind?” Progressive Policy Institute, June 12, 2014, www.progressivepolicy.org/slider/the-state-of-u-s-broadband-is-it-competitive-are-we-falling-behind/. 9. Because all bits on modern communications networks travel through similar mediums at a similar speed—some a fraction of the speed of light—what we are usually referring to when we use the term speed in these contexts is capacity (in other words, bandwidth, or how many bits per second). Speed (latency) is an important and related, but distinct, factor. 10. See, for example, Yochai Benkler, “Ending the Internet’s Trench Warfare,” New York Times, March 20, 2010. 11. See Peter Sevcik, “How the Netflix ISP Speed Index Documents Netflix Congestion Problems,” NetForecast, June 2014, www.netforecast.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/06/NFR5117_How_the_Netflix_ISP_Speed_Index_Documents_Netflix_Congestion_Problems.pdf; and Bret Swanson, “Netflix and the Net Neutrality Promotional Vehicle,” Forbes, June 27, 2014. 12. For a good, brief summary, see Richard Bennett, “Internet Speed: What You Don’t Know about the Web,” TechPolicyDaily, October 28, 2014, www.techpolicydaily.com/technology/internet-speed-dont-know-web/. 13. I introduced this concept years ago and have updated it often. See, for example, Bret Swanson, “International Broadband Comparison, Continued,” October 14, 2014, www.bretswanson.com/index.php/2010/10/international-broadband-comparison-continued/; and “World Broadband Update,” June 28, 2011, www.bretswanson.com/index.php/2011/06/world-broadband-update/. 14. Richard Bennett of AEI makes a strong case for this point of view. 15. Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2013–2018 (Cisco, June 10, 2014), www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/ip-ngn-ip-next-generation-network/white_paper_c11-481360.html. 16. Central Intelligence Agency, “World Factbook,” July 2014 update, www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2119rank.html. 17. Internet Live Stats, “Internet Users by Country (2014),” www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/. 18. The Internet traffic analyses of Odlyzko and Labovitz are summarized in Bret Swanson, Into the Exacloud (Entropy Economics, November 21, 2011), http://entropyeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Into-the-Exacloud-21-Nov-2011.pdf. 19. See Drew Fitzgerald and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Apple Quietly Builds New Networks,” Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2014. 20. See, again, Swanson, “International Broadband Comparison, Continued”; and Swanson, “World Broadband Update.” 21. For additional US-Europe comparisons, see Christopher S. Yoo, “U.S. vs. European Broadband Deployment: What Do the Data Say?” (University of Pennsylvania Law School, June 2014), www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/3353-us-vs-european-broadband-deployment-summary. 22. See Layton, “The European Union’s Broadband Challenge.” 23. I address the speed and peer issues in a number of venues, including Bret Swanson, “The Need for Speed: How Does the US Measure Up?” TechPolicyDaily, September 30, 2013, www.techpolicydaily.com/internet/need-speed-u-s-broadband-measure/. 24. See Bennett, Steward, and Atkinson, The Whole Picture. 25. See, for example, Marcus Wohlsen, “The Internet Is Officially More Popular than Cable in the US,” WIRED, August 15, 2014, www.wired.com/2014/08/the-internet-is-now-officially-more-popular-than-cable-in-the-u-s/. 26. See “Net Neutrality: President Obama’s Plan for a Free and Open Internet,” November 10, 2014, http://m.whitehouse.gov/net-neutrality.