Uncle Sam this week opened the door to public comment on the government's new national broadband policy, and has quickly piled up more than three hundred of them from all manner of corporations, consumer advocates, corporate policy front organizations, random ninnies, and consumers. As you might expect, the responses range from a desire to see the United States government deploy a massive wholesale fiber network -- to comments pretending that there's no broadband problems that need fixing.

Consumer advocacy firm Free Press issued a comprehensive filing (pdf) asking the FCC to go back and seriously study all of their policy decisions since the 1996 Telecommunications Act to see if they actually helped anybody (other than incumbents). The Government of Japan chimed in as well, apparently confident after (like France) they took our since-discarded idea of local-loop unbundling and made it work.

Of course carriers like AT&T, Clearwire and Verizon are well represented in the comments, as are content operators like Google and hardware vendors like Cisco. All of the major corporations who commented are of course more than willing to expand broadband to every nook and cranny -- provided they get funding from the government and Uncle Sam doesn't impose any tough government regulation on industry.

It's that last bit that's going to make crafting a new broadband policy tricky. One of the biggest reasons we've had no broadband policy over the last decade is because major carriers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have spent millions to ensure that we don't. We've spent the last decade hearing how deregulation of the telecom sector leads naturally to broadband utopia -- and that all government regulation leads naturally to disaster.

Yet despite unprecedented deregulation in the sector over the last decade -- competition remains largely non-existent in many markets. The United States is ranked nineteenth in terms of average advertised download speed, fifteenth in terms of penetration (per 100 inhabitants) and seventeenth when it comes to the average monthly cost of a broadband subscription. Whatever your position on how it's accomplished, we can do better.