Earlier this month, the FCC, who's in the middle of designing a national broadband plan, issued a report (pdf) identifying seven major factors that are considered "critical gaps" preventing broader broadband deployment. Among the gaps identified are some correct and rather obvious ones, including the fact the USF doesn't fund broadband expansion, broadband may be unavailable or too expensive, spectrum is limited, or broadband is expensive to deploy.

There's some additional nebulous "gaps" identified by the FCC and commenters, including a lack of control for consumers over their own information as it travels across the "cloud," and a lack of competition and innovation on the retail settop cable box front. While those are somewhat pertinent, it's odd that nobody involved identified a lack of competition or bad FCC policy as major obstacles. Mike Masnick over at Techdirt puts it this way:The FCC itself should probably be at the top of the FCC's own list, given you'd be hard pressed to find any FCC policy decision in recent history that, once stripped of a promising outer veneer, wasn't primarily aimed at improving incumbent ISP revenues and little else. While the FCC sometimes has put on a good show when it comes to competition (think of their misguided devotion to broadband over powerlines), they've done very little in the way of innovative policy that actually fostered any.

The vast majority of the time, FCC policy presented to the public as being centered around creating competition, is really just the technological equivalent of giving Ma Bell a backrub. "Franchise reform" is one such example; the FCC insisted the revamped state-level franchise rules lobbied for by AT&T and Verizon would lower TV prices -- but the real result was the erosion of local consumer protections, higher prices, and increased "cherry picking" of next-gen broadband deployment.

Usually, such policy is put into place under the pretense that eliminating regulatory barriers will result in some form of telecom competitive utopia. After several decades of such policy however, U.S. consumers pay more money, for less broadband, in fewer locations, than more than a dozen developed countries. Why? The largest ISPs don't really want eliminated regulation -- they want regulation that works in their favor, which often means regulation that gives them an unfair market advantage, but discourages smaller competitors. This wasn't what Milton Friedman had in mind when he thought of a "free market."

If the FCC's looking for gaps to broadband deployment, they might be well served looking at the FCC's fealty to the largest carriers, and how this has prevented real competition from taking root. Real competition fixes many of the problems identified by the FCC -- in addition to other issues such as network neutrality violations or predatory pricing (ultra-low caps and high overage fees).