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Congress has recently charged the Federal Communications Commission to establish a National Broadband Plan. This paper argues that a customer-centric plan, which puts the customer in control of decision-making, will yield the best broadband result for the U.S. The Federal government must establish a market infrastructure that encourages competition, requires transparency of both network providers and application providers, and includes vigorous antitrust enforcement. Competition from wireless broadband is present now and will become far more prevalent shortly, on the basis of current and announced investment plans. Regulators must also make available far more licensed spectrum to ensure this competition is realized. Calls for regulation in the form of mandated unbundling and more unlicensed spectrum are regulatory cul-de-sacs with proven track records of failure. Calls for regulatory control of network provider practices (other than transparency), such as network neutrality, are misguided. Such decisions are best left to customers, who can very well decide for themselves which of the broadband providers offer terms that best suit the customer.

Over the past decade, the demand by commercial, military and consumers for use of the electromagnetic spectrum has literally exploded. The most obvious examples are digital cellular telephony and WiFi, both of which have become ubiquitous in developed and less developed countries around the world within a very short time. And there is no indication that this growth in spectrum-dependent technology will abate soon. Tracking devices, machines that can "talk" to one another, exchanging information, are being deployed as we speak. Unfortunately, the systems we use in the US and worldwide to allocate and manage spectrum is bending under the strain these demands place on the system. Government allocation of spectrum, either by "beauty contests" (traditional) or auction (more recent) has failed to keep up with the growth in demand. Even worse, government allocation has led to an extraordinarily inefficient use of this valuable resource. Large swathes of spectrum are underutilized and beyond our reach even while the demand for wireless voice and data services strains existing wireless providers beyond their capacity.