US ISPs do not deserve much credit for increasing broadband speeds

Disclaimer: I worked for Google from 2006-2013, although not on Fiber.

Towards the end of this Twitter thread sparked by Timothy B. Lee, a commenter writes (by way of defending US ISPs):

Internet speeds have increased 1500% in ten years. 250k Wi-Fi hotspots are now available. That's progress.

When I read this, I just thought, this is such bullshit. Taking it apart with sufficiently satisfying thoroughness requires more than 140 characters, so I'm going to say it here.

US ISPs are riding the wave of technological progress. Giving them credit for the wave is evidence of cluelessness so extreme as to strongly suggest intellectual dishonesty.

First, crediting ISPs for the spread of wireless hotspots is especially egregious: it's a bit like giving them credit for Moore's Law. Even if ISPs had completely failed to increase speeds beyond dial-up, people would still want local networks without the hassle of Ethernet cables. The development and spread of wireless technology was not driven by ISPs. In fact, in some ways the opposite is true, as many ISPs retained official policies against running an open wireless hotspot (or even connecting multiple devices via NAT!) long after broadband became widely available.

Second, as for a 15x improvement in ten years[0]: that might sound impressive to some people, but all I can think is that ten years equals nearly seven doublings of Moore's Law and 2⁷ = 128. Network speed doesn't track transistor density exactly, but computing technology is full of exponential curves like this (storage density, for example, doubles even faster than Moore's Law). To anyone with a clue about computing technology, 15x in 10 years obviously sounds somewhere between mediocre and lousy. In fact, Nielsen's Law predicts compound improvement of 57x over 10 years, or nearly 4x the observed improvement claimed by Dietz.[1] When Dietz calls out 15x improvement as a talking point in ISPs' favor, he is trying to rhetorically exploit an information asymmetry, namely his audience's presumed ignorance of exponential curves in computing technology.

Therefore, the reality is that US ISPs are badly managed technological laggards, just like everyone thinks.

In fact, the pace at which ISPs have taken up technological innovation is so bad that an entrant from another industry was able to enter the market and, without even trying very hard, spank the incumbents so thoroughly that it became a national embarrassment.

Google does so many things so well that you may not even be properly surprised by this fact. Let me try to give you a visceral feel for how anomalous Google Fiber is. Consider what happened when Google entered a market where its major competitor really was pushing innovation to the limit: consider Android. Google had to dedicate hundreds of its best and hardest-working engineers to the project and enlist the support of essentially every other company in the industry, and after eight hard-fought years, the best it can show for its efforts is rough technological parity with Apple.

Or, to take an example where Google was the defender, consider what happened when Microsoft decided to enter the search engine market. Again, this is a market where the strongest competitor really was pushing innovation to the limit. Billions of dollars and millions of engineer-hours later, Bing's search quality is still slightly worse than Google's.

I don't know the head count for Google Fiber (and even if I did, it would be covered by my NDA) but I will venture a strong guess that its engineering head count is far less than Android's, like at least an order of magnitude. In Google's product portfolio, judging by the scale of investment and strategic value, Google Fiber is basically a hobby, one that Google would never even have tried if US ISPs were remotely as good at their jobs as, say, ISPs in South Korea. And yet, technologically, Google Fiber simply outclassed these incumbents, who are supposedly competing and innovating furiously to earn your dollar.[2]

Imagine you had a friend who claimed to be training super-hard at tennis. But whenever you're at the courts, you see them go out to the court, set up the tennis ball machine, and swat lethargically at balls for about ten minutes, after which they sit down to sip an energy drink and diddle around on their phone. Then, one day, your niece, who's in reasonably good shape but has never picked up a tennis racket in her life, drops by, and she walks onto the court and crushes your friend in straight sets without breaking a sweat. You might reasonably question whether your friend was really training as hard as they claim.

In short, lauding the big US ISPs for their piddling achievements is the soft bigotry of low expectations.

But don't worry, ISPs, America isn't giving up on you. We believe that if you're subjected to the right mixture of tough love, including the right kinds of competition and regulation, you're capable of achieving just as much as Google Fiber did. Or, at a minimum, we believe that the ISP market is capable of achieving that. In the meantime, we'll try hard to ignore the risible bullshit of telecom hacks who claim that you're doing well enough.

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[0] Engineers generally use multiples rather than percentages to describe improvements of this magnitude. Dietz's use of "increased 1500%" rather than 15x is a classic PR hack's way of making modestly sized numbers seem gigantic.

[1] Nielsen's predictions are fitted to observations, but those observations are for "high-end users". Dietz's number, which presumably describes mean or median users, reveals how poorly ISPs have done at making high-speed internet affordable despite the march of technology. Note that we do not see this failure in other, more competitive areas of computing technology: Intel's mid-range notebook-class processors follow Moore's Law just as well as its high-end server chips.

[2] This paragraph contains a logical honeypot for telecom hacks, who are likely to see an argument that they think they can debunk, but which they can only debunk by resorting to utter bullshit, which they will promptly be called upon. See if you can spot it.

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