Earlier this week, Ars Technica's Nate Anderson wrote a good piece on the state of the broadband union. It consists of the same points I've been making for years, namely how our lack of any broadband policy whatsoever has left many markets without reasonable competition, leading to high prices and poor customer service. Our lack of broadband policy is courtesy of industry lobbyists and investors, who rather enjoy the current status quo of you paying a lot, but getting a little. A tidy Anderson summary:A simple enough point. Countries do better when they adhere to the three F's: "financing, fear (competition), and federal mandates." As opposed to doing absolutely nothing, spending government money on Bear Stearns bail-outs instead of infrastructure, and letting phone and cable companies write the nation's telecom laws. But wait! The folks over at the Verizon PR blog argue that those of you worried about broadband competition really shouldn't, given you actually have (or will soon) access to eight different options for broadband service.As long as we're throwing out every possible network as an example of competition (whether it's available...or built), we may as well include satellite broadband and carrier pigeon, giving you ten broadband options. Eleven if you include dial-up, and at this point, why not? I would also argue that soup cans and string, while there certainly are throughput problems, can technically be considered competition.

Ok so to be fair, Verizon is doing a great job being the only major carrier in the United States deploying fiber in profitable markets. And that is prompting competitive cable speed responses in those same profitable markets. But even FiOS (and FiOSTV) isn't lowering prices (in fact just the opposite). And for every community served by FiOS, there's countless others where users are lucky if they have more than one option.

Verizon should know that, given they just sold their networks in three states because they didn't want to deploy to rural Americans. Perhaps if they weren't so busy fighting efforts to accurately map broadband in this country, they'd better see that we aren't living in a competitive utopia. Can you hear me now?