The Only Republican in San Francisco

Copyright and fair use

A group called the CCIA has an interesting report on the value of fair use and copyright:

Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion, said Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion.

The fair use economy's "value added" is thus almost 70% larger than that of the copyright industries.

The $4.5 trillion in annual revenue attributable to fair use represents a 31% increase since 2002, according to the report, which claims that fair use industries are responsible for 18% of U.S. economic growth and almost 11 million American jobs.

Which, I don't doubt that there is truth to this. I do think fair use, kept reasonable, provides a nice mechanism for balancing intellectual property rights and open exchange.

However, one point seems to have been missed: that fair use can only provide value if the copyrighted works exist in the first place. Fair use is a free rider on copyright.

It would be easy to conclude from the numbers above that we should diminish copyrights and expand fair use to maximize economic benefit. I don't claim to know the right balance. But this sort of thing is a misreading:

In short, those industries that rely on copyright to fuel their business should be even more grateful for fair use exceptions to their copyrights. The U.S. economy would shrink if it were purely based on compliance with traditional intellectual property strictures.

In other words, we need "leakage" in our copyright rules in order for copyright to work at all. Open source is a way of vastly broadening "fair use" in software, making it highly available for third-party usage. I'd therefore suggest that we'll see tremendous economic value created by open source.

As, in fact, we do. Imagine that.

This would be to imply that the government is a better judge of usage rights than the copyright holders. That's not true -- copyright holders are entirely free to allow companies like to Google to use their work in ways that benefit both parties, without resorting to government enforcement.

If sharing work is beneficial to the copyright holder, then they will do so. And if not sharing the work is detrimental to the copyright holder, as the above claims, then their competitors will gain an advantage.

In other words, if fair use is truly beneficial to both parties, we don't need no stinkin' laws.

Dems demand free health care for the rich

McQ over at Q and O adroitly points out that the Dems are trying to socialize health care in bits and drabs, using under-the-radar programs and "for the children" arguments:

As usual, that's not the whole truth. In fact, according to Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) the bill includes an provision which would provide health insurance for children of parents at 400% of the poverty threshold.

What does that mean in terms of household income?

$80,000 for a family of four. So this particular bill and those particular taxes are aimed at a completely new demographic which anyone, even some who hang out here, would have difficulty defining as poor (although they'll try ... just sit back and observe).

A program that provides health care for families earning $80k is simply welfare for the rich (and not unlike Social Security, btw).

The median household income in this country is a bit over $40k. A family earning $80k is in (approximately) the top 30% of incomes -- meaning they are wealthier than 70% of US households. So why are Democrats suggesting we need to be transferring money from other taxpayers to them?

Now that the Republicans are in opposition, we are seeing Bush start to act like, well, a Republican. He is making the case clearly and publicly.

"Members of Congress have decided, however, to expand the program to include, in some cases, up to families earning $80,000 a year — which would cause people to drop their private insurance in order to be involved with a government insurance plan," Bush said in a speech in suburban Maryland.

"If Congress continues to insist upon expanding health care through the SCHIP program — which, by the way, would entail a huge tax increase for the American people — I'll veto the bill," he said.

Better late than never. Maybe keeping Republicans in a slim minority is the best way forward...

Klein's confusion on Social Security

Joe Klein gets into it with new Time blogger Dick Armey. He takes exception to what he calls Armey's blather on Social Security and other entitlements, but displays some fundamental misunderstandings. Here's Joe on Social Security:

And then there's social security...that poor, little, teeny-tiny, no-risk safety net we have for those who didn't do so well in life.

I ask, if Social Security is such a great deal, then why is it mandatory? [Armey's quote]

Since you asked: Because, in a democracy, we have this weird concept: the consent of the governed. Social security ain't the third rail of American politics for nothing. The people really like it, and have for 70 years now.

What Joe calls the "consent of the governed" is synonymous with saying that it is just that minorities must live with the decisions of majorities. I think a phrase might have even been coined. Joe, correct me if I am missing the distinction.

More to the point -- if "the people really like" Social Security, then there should be no risk in making it opt-in. We already know that everyone wants it. Right?

Stepping back, I am sure that Joe intended "teeny-tiny" and "no-risk" as a bit of sarcasm. If we mean a system which removes 12% of working people's income a year -- that's in addition to payroll taxes -- then, yes, it's teeny-tiny. It's also no-risk in the sense that it (along with Medicare) threatens to swamp federal finances over the next 70 years.

To say such things are no-risk is to be fundamentally ignorant on the concept of opportunity costs (think education).

But the more revealing part is that he imagines Social Security to be a "safety net we have for those who didn't do so well in life". Here's a clue Joe -- it's a pension, not a welfare system. How do we know? Well, those who have done best in life reap the greatest SS benefits later.

If Joe would like it to be a welfare system, great. If we take the biggest beneficiaries out of the system, that leaves more for the needy. Of course, we'd need means-testing. I suspect that this is not his vision.

Welfare states and cultural homogeneity

The Economist, citing Tyler Cowen, describes how a Scandinavian welfare state struggles with immigration:

But note that there are two definitions of "compatriots".  One is "people who share my culture and heritage"; the other is "people who are legally entitled to live (and/or vote) within the geographic and political boundaries of my country".  [...]  The welfare state is a means of expressing solidarity with people who are mostly just like you are.  Other people with different values cannot be trusted not to abuse the system; worse, they don't much care what you think of them, and so they are immune from the social pressure that regulates consumption of benefits in homogenous communities. [emphasis mine]

I've said in the past that welfare states can only exist in places where most people agree as to what the priorities are. The article frames it in terms of cultural trust, but I prefer to see it as a question of diversity.

After all, in a socialist system, the government makes more decisions on behalf of the citizens. If you and your neighbors generally see things the same way, this can be done with relatively little conflict. The countries of Scandinavia have long fit this description.

Such a system is much less likely to work if not everybody has the same priorities. A variety of ideals is a good thing, but it means that if you want (or have) a diverse population, you need a system that is fundamentally built to allow citizens to pursue different economic goals.

Socialism is not compatible with diversity, as history repeatedly demonstrates. A free market, however, not only can survive cultural differences, it often thrives on them. (Think specialization of labor.) Paradoxically, by allowing economic diversity, we achieve greater assimilation.

The countries of Scandinavia are often cited as places with vibrant economies accompanied by generous social protections. What isn't cited is that these countries are historically among the least diverse in the world.

Immigration is a fantastic thing, not least for the country on the receiving end. Immigrants display the best kind of self-selection; these are people who are willing to sacrifice many comforts for the sake of bettering themselves. Their work ethic often puts natives to shame. And, in aging populations like the West, they represent an influx of productive young people.

Tyler asks:

Does immigration bring Nordic welfare states to the verge of collapse? They all seem to think so, but I've long found this fear puzzling.

It doesn't have to be that way. But it clearly requires at least a partial abandonment of the social welfare model.

Immigrants are willing to go through great changes for their own economic survival. Are their hosts willing to do the same?

Muni Wi-fi, where is the market?

Business Week reports on the struggles of municipal wi-fi to gain a foothold. I think it's a fine thing that private companies are trying to make this work -- but the fact that it inevitably involves the local government means that it won't die when it should.

The first rule for promoting a new technology is to make sure it works. So it's a surprise when a four-person team from EarthLink Inc. (ELNK) tells me that the wireless broadband service the company is rolling out for the city of Anaheim, Calif., won't work in a coffee shop there. This is the same Starbucks (SBUX) where the EarthLink folks had just spent an hour pitching their Feather service. "The walls are too thick," explained Cole Reinwand, vice-president of products strategy and marketing. [...]

[I]n buildings of more than three stories, you need additional receivers to boost the signal. [...]

With only 2,000 subscribers in the five cities that are up and running, CEO Mike Lunsford told analysts in April that it will reduce plans to bid on more cities so it can "demonstrate the marketability" of Wi-Fi.

As I've mentioned before, municipal wi-fi is a solution in search of a problem. Most people have their needs served indoors and outdoors, and muni wi-fi seems to be aimed at a strange niche: people that want mobile Internet, yet only out of doors and only within the city limits.

Cynthia over at IP Democracy offers her own experience:

Get too far away from the transmitters and you’re out of luck. Go into a building with thick walls and the signals just can’t through. If too many people are on the network, the speeds drop to below dial-up levels. Most of the time muni-Wi-Fi is a Rube Goldberg proposition and, to make matters worse, even when everything is working well, customers aren’t flocking to it.

I don't mean this as schadenfreude -- I live on technological progress. The great thing about truly free markets is that we get a lot of hard information, very quickly, about the applicability of a solution to a problem. If there is city money involved, however, that market information tends to fall on deaf ears.

Economic quickies for a Friday

The US created 180,000 new jobs in March of this year, for a total of around 455,000 new jobs since the beginning of 2007. As I've mentioned before, this represents 455,000 people whose incomes have gone from $0 to (let's assume) the median of around $37k per year. It is the equivalent of taking that many people out of poverty.

For each year that these people keep their jobs -- which is to say, every year that employment growth is zero or higher -- $16,000,000,000 of new wealth will be created.

You would be hard pressed to find a charity with that sort of performance, which is why I think job creation is the single greatest humanitarian effort we can make. Has the United Nations brought 400,000 people out of poverty since the beginning of the year?

As an example, the (Red) campaign -- probably the highest-profile charity campaign right now -- has raised only $18M in the year since it launched. That's one-tenth of one percent of the money created by these new jobs. If the celebrities involved truly cared about human suffereing, they would lend their images to the cause of, say, reducing the capital gains tax or agriculture subsidies that keep poor people poor. But that ain't sexy, yo.

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The biggest driver of inequality in this country is the education premium [pdf]. In a nutshell, higher levels of education result in higher pay, and that those with better educations are in increasing demand.

The recent news is that top colleges are seeing higher-than-ever applications, and thus are only able to admit a smaller percentage of applicants. Will this drive the education premium -- and therefore inequality -- higher?

Maybe:

The number of high school graduates has increased every year since 1996 as the children of the huge, post-World War II baby-boom generation passed through. During the same time, college applications soared as the economy increasingly rewarded higher education. Federal data in 2004 showed male college graduates earning 67 percent more and female graduates 68 percent more than those with only a high school diploma.

Or, maybe not:

The one bit of good news, often overlooked by worried families, is that there are still many more spots available nationwide than there are college students. Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities are accepting only about 10 percent of their applicants, but the average U.S. college accepts 70 percent.

Studies have shown that students with similar personal characteristics, such as persistence and charm, do just as well financially 20 years after college no matter whether they went to a well-known or little-known college.

So, going to a prestigious university may help in the short-term, but after you've been in the workforce for a while, it's your performance that matters. It also appears that the quality of applicants is increasing, which means that there are more well-prepared students in the world.

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Bruce Bartlett says we are all supply-siders now [h/t Mankiw]. Read the whole thing.

Locking out talent

The Senate has introduced a new bill intended to make it harder to hire foreigners into high-tech positions:

The 32-page Senate bill would impose a host of additional obligations on employers. They would be required to pledge that they made a "good faith" effort to hire an American before taking on an H-1B worker and that the foreigner was not displacing a prospective U.S. worker. [...]

In an attempt to discourage employers from hiring foreigners at lower wages than their American counterparts would command, employers would have to pay all H-1B workers the "prevailing wage," as calculated by a different method that raises the minimum to a higher level than it currently stands. [...]

This is a step in exactly the wrong direction, and it is particularly shocking that it has appeared so quickly after Bill Gates and others rightly implored Congress to do the opposite -- to let as many talented people in as wish to come.

Make no mistake: the new Democratic majority is beholden to economic ideas than are outdated at best, and xenophobic at worst. The only people who benefit from these sorts of policies are union leaders. Everyone else -- from US consumers to those who happen to be brown and born in other places -- is worse off.

The best thing we can do for our economy is to let highly-trained, highly-paid inventors set up shop here. Such people pay more taxes and create more jobs than any other segment of society. Sun Microsystems is a good example:

McNealy observed that Khosla and Bechtolsheim both were born in another country, as was James Gosling, who was instrumental in the creation of the Java software technology.

"We are absolutely torching ourselves by not letting all the really smart people come here to the valley. We shouldn't let them in unless we get them to commit to staying at least 10 years. Instead, we do the exact opposite," McNealy said. "Why don't we want another James Gosling or Vinod Khosla to set up shop here."

And the Internal Revenue Service hasn't suffered from Sun's international connections. "How many billions of dollars of taxes have you paid?" McNealy asked of Khosla and Bechtolsheim. "You are hardly a burden on our society."

Our goal must not be to "protect" American workers, but to protect the things that make America a place where people want to work. Understand the difference?

High-tech work can happen anywhere in the world, and the work will follow the talent. If India retains better talent than the US, much of the work will simply flow across borders and be done there. Ditto China, Estonia, and other hot spots.

We can't force wealth and productivity to stay within our borders. Such ham-handed legislation merely pushes smart people, and the wealth they produce, to find other accommodations.

And if you want to look at this geopolitically: a person that desires to work in the US is voting with their feet. If you believe that the world is dividing itself between progress (free markets & democracy) and regression (resurgent socialism & theocracy), then it seems that we should embrace these "voters" with open arms.

No single country can't maintain a lock on any particular industry over the long term. The place where a country can compete is in hospitality toward wealth creation. Shouldn't we do so?

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Update: The Immigration Service opened H-1B applications for fiscal 2008 yesterday. Guess how long it took to reach the limit?

What sort of business imposes a ceiling on its potential customers? There's only one kind. 

Dvorak and the myth of "free"

John Dvorak has a long tirade about municipal Wi-fi and phone companies' supposed conspiracy to kill it. I like Dvorak's curmudgeonly ways. But the risk of such muckraking is that he gets a lot of things wrong. Let's start with this:

If you take a city the size of San Francisco and give the entire population free high-speed Wi-Fi, think of the applications that will fall into place. That includes VoIP calls galore. Move over, cell phone; hello, Wi-Fi phone.

Mr. Dvorak is committing the common sin of getting people's hopes up while not doing his homework. Let's put aside the fact that the network doesn't yet exist. Here are the incorrect assertions:

1) Free wi-fi will be faster than the phone companies' wireless plans. Dvorak says:

Wi-Fi is currently at 54 Mbps and has been for years. Reaching 100 Mbps is easily achievable thanks to pre-n and other tricks. The cell connections run from 384 Kbps with EDGE up to maybe 2 Mbps on EV-DO, if you're lucky.

All true. Except that in San Francisco, the free Wi-fi offering promises only 300kbps, which is six times slower than the mobile offering above.

And keep in mind that these are theoretical numbers. Add an apartment building -- or a neighbor's microwave oven -- and Wi-fi bandwidth drops a lot. The mobile phone companies have been working around physical barriers for a lot longer than the Wi-fi folks.

In both cases, you'll be sharing that bandwidth with a few hundred thousand of your closest friends. Wi-fi only works within the city limits, while the phoneco's coverage is much broader.

Advantage: phoneco's.

2) The SF wi-fi network will support VoIP. The basic, free, ad-supported service promises around 300kbps. This is theoretically enough for a voice call -- but only if that bandwidth is consistent and glitch-free (see above).

I use Skype over my hard-wired 5-megabit connection here at Casa Republicano. It works fine in most circumstances, but breaks up with some regularity.

Now imagine a wireless network with 1/15th of that bandwidth, and shared by your neighbors. You might be able to achieve an intelligible conversation here and there, but I can't imagine anyone will depend on it.

More importantly, I suspect that free service will not even allow VoIP traffic. Did I mention that it's ad-supported? Google inserts ads into web pages. How do you insert ads into a third-party VoIP call? You don't. So it's a fair bet that Google and Earthlink will only allow traditional web surfing on the free network.

Advantage: phoneco's.

3) The public is interested in switching between mobile and wi-fi. According to this report:

The research firm Ovum predicted in a report released Tuesday that by the end of 2010 only a little more than 2 percent of all mobile subscribers, or fewer than 5.5 million people, will have purchased dual-mode services.

I dig the idea of a phone with Wi-fi capabilities, but it would have to work with a minimum of fuss. I am not gonna tweak network settings all day long. And I'm a geek! Most people's tolerance for the cutting edge is much lower than mine. Of course, these things might improve drastically. But until they do, don't expect a change in that 2% figure.

Advantage: phoneco's.

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Now, let's get to the meat of this. Is municipal Wi-fi desirable? Dvorak puts it this way:

Is the public so stupid that if given the choice between that service and free municipal Wi-Fi, they'd want the slower expensive service over the free faster service?

Probably not when the extremes are that broad, but you can be sure that the local politicians will cave on this, and we can forget free municipal Wi-Fi and Skype phones. Free is, by definition, communist! And it hurts free enterprise!

Who needs progress when you have profits?

I appreciate his snark here, but I am afraid that a) it's not faster [see above] b) it's not free and c) it's closer to communist than John thinks.

Municipal wi-fi projects have all been enormously wasteful boondoggles paid for by taxpayers, and largely unused by the public. Here are a few samples from this new report [pdf]:

• Dalton, Georgia: $171.0 million
• Tacoma, Washington: $110.9 million
• Grant County, Washington: $ 76.4 million
• Jackson, Tennessee: $ 63.7 million
• Alameda, California: $ 59.3 million
• Provo, Utah: $ 45.7 million [...]

...and these are just preliminary numbers. The funds have gone to creating new bureaucracies, which will certainly continue to grow. How many teachers you figure those numbers would pay for?

These networks do not need to perform to continue to receive funds. This allows them to work poorly while undercutting commercial offerings on price. So yes, it does hurt free enterprise, which many of us call progress.

And here in San Francisco, socialism is alive and well:

IN SAN FRANCISCO, says Ross Mirkarimi, one of 11 members of the city's elected Board of Supervisors and a co-founder of California's Green Party, “suspicion of corporate interests flows as thick as the fog.” So it has come naturally for the Board, the city's legislature, to force a delay on a plan, signed in January by the mayor, Gavin Newsom, and two technology companies, Earthlink and Google, to let the firms blanket the city with free or cheap wireless internet access by putting little “Wi-Fi” antennae on lamp-posts.

[The] reason appears to be that fog-like suspicion. If “big business”—ie, Earthlink and Google—is so keen on that wireless network, “we should consider doing it ourselves,” says Jake McGoldrick, another supervisor. He wants to study other options, including a network financed, owned and run by the city.

This is quite the opposite of Dvorak's concern. He seems to think that free-market types like me are the barrier to municipal Wi-fi. In San Francisco, the primary barrier is that the current proposal is not socialist enough.

h/t Glenn, who has more.

Environmental heresies

An environmentalist (and SF legend) named Stewart Brand is beginning to imbue some rationalism into his environmental politics.

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering.

My biggest fear about environmentalism is what I see as a certain Luddism -- that problems are best solved by moving to old ways. Organic farming is one example, resistance to nuclear power, empowering government to make more economic decisions. What all these have in common is a strong traditionalism and change aversion. They show a lack of confidence in humanity's ability to adapt and make choices.

It is very much the opposite of my view of the world. I think that humanity's prospects are greatly improved by people making more of their own decisions, especially economic ones.

Mr. Brand seems to understand this. He almost sounds libertarian, not by having moved across the spectrum from left to right, but perhaps by wrapping around the back. After all, "left" at one time was a position of rationalism -- not so these days, of course. But guys like Brand are hoping to reclaim the mantle and righties should welcome it.

Some examples of Mr. Brand's new rationalism:

“Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don’t know where it is and you don’t know what it’s doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody’s atmosphere.” [...]

He sees genetic engineering as a tool for environmental protection: crops designed to grow on less land with less pesticide; new microbes that protect ecosystems against invasive species, produce new fuels and maybe sequester carbon. [...]

He now looks at the rapidly growing megacities of the third world not as a crisis but as good news: as villagers move to town, they find new opportunities and leave behind farms that can revert to forests and nature preserves. Instead of worrying about population growth, he’s afraid birth rates are declining too quickly, leaving future societies with a shortage of young people. [...]

Give the whole thing a read.

US broadband mythology

Cynthia over at IP Democracy has an analysis (of an analysis) of US broadband in comparison with the world, to which I will add an analysis.

She contends that the US is falling behind in broadband and implies that we are in bad shape and need more government involvement. She makes some cogent points, but doesn't dig deep enough.

The first and most predictable example she points to is South Korea, and she claims that they have 100Mb/s upload and download speeds. I will make the equally predictable point that population density does matter (scroll down), but the real question is: how does she know that they actually get 100Mb up and down? She doesn't, and the original article doesn't -- it's just a meme that gets reported a lot.

An outfit called Analysys looked at actual network performance vs advertised performance [pdf], and found that South Koreans only get around 40% of what they pay for, at least for the "fast" plans, while the US gets over 90%. Their actual bandwidth is around 20Mb on the high end, while in the US we get around 13Mb.

Yes, Korea is still faster, but with 10 times the population density and the drum beat of a Korean miracle, shouldn't we expect something more miraculous?

Due to this inefficiency, the South Koreans pay around $3/Mb for connectivity vs around $5/Mb in the US. Since laying a mile of fiber will reach 10x as many people in Korea, shouldn't their prices be around 10x lower? Or even 5x? In fact, it sounds like the Koreans are getting ripped off, considering the efficiencies available to them.

Further, our actual throughput is well ahead of all of the European countries included in the Analysys survey. In working with colleagues at my company's European offices, I know this to be the case. I will take real bandwidth over advertised bandwidth any day.

Richard Hoffman (author of the original analysis) attempts to take apart the population density argument by pointing to countries with lower densities than ours who have better broadband penetration:

That argument falters, however, when one considers that five of the 11 nations that lead the U.S. in per capita broadband penetration, including Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Canada, have significantly lower population densities than the U.S.

...and that's fine. But notice that four of these five countries are Scandinavian welfare states. Really, he is offering a single counter-example with a number of different names.

These countries do not refute the population density argument. Rather, they illuminate what I have said before: that socialism can only succeed in a homogeneous population. These countries are among the least diverse in the world -- so much so that the Human Genome Project chose Scandinavia because of its limited gene pool.

If the goal is broadband penetration in a non-diverse economy, Scandinavia offers a good example. The government can make spending decisions with which a majority of the population will agree. The rest of world, especially the US, requires a little more diversity of opinion and priorities.

In fact, we can combine all of Scandinavia, call it a country and still be smaller than a single US state --  say, Florida, which is a leader in broadband. In just one year, the US added more new broadband users (24 million) than the total populations of Richard's Scandinavian examples. So what are we comparing, exactly?

So while Cynthia's and Richard's articles offer some interesting insights, they are not blowing the lid off of any broadband myths. In fact, they are often simply repeating them.

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Look, we can consider broadband policy to be about keeping up with some mythical Joneses, or we can consider broadband policy to be about making the best choices for our citizens and our economy.

The idea that our state of broadband is hurting our economy is betrayed by the facts: a look at our job creation, unemployment, per capita incomes and growth rates tell a very different story. None of this should be taken for granted, of course, but the "broadband = competitiveness" meme is not borne out. How many jobs is Iceland creating, by the way?

If broadband penetration in the US is relatively low, we might consider the possibility that citizens have given it a certain priority in their lives. We'll get higher rates over time -- Richard notes 24 million new US broadband users over the course of a year, a 40% increase. But to have the government setting policy on this is to impose a priority on citizens that they have not chosen for themselves.

Of course I would like to see more and faster broadband. We are building a lot of it in this country, and broadband use and availability are growing apace. Let's focus on doing the right thing, instead of making a superficial top-10 list.

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Related: Martin Geddes asks us not to panic:

If we separately ranked US states, or divided the UK up into regions, the picture would change radically. London and southeast England would look great. So would a few US states like Virginia.

Some of those little regions with greater connectivity have familiar name tags. Like ‘Norway’, and ‘Luxembourg’. Yes, they’re real countries. [...] Yet their position in the rankings is an artificial by-product of how we divide up the statistics. It means nothing to the median European or North American.

If North and South Korea had a massive reconcilliation tomorrow, and thus the Unified Korean Republic plummeted to #102 in the world, do you think things are getting better, or worse? (Hint: begins with ‘b’.)

That's the question. We can easily point out that California and Florida have broadband rates that exceed those of the cited "leaders", with similar populations. So aren't they on the list?

If we want a meaningful list, let's talk apples to apples: compare actual, usable broadband across a number of large and diverse economies. How about North America vs the Euro area? Or versus the greater Far East?