• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, October 7, 2010

Government bashing was at the top of the agenda at CTIA's fall convention in San Francisco, according to reports Thursday. Steve Largent, the wireless trade group's CEO, warned against too much government intervention in the industry.

On the one hand, he welcomed the Federal Communications Commission's goal of making 500Mhz of spectrum available in the next 10 years as part of the agency's national broadband plan. Part of the plan also calls for taking much of the unused spectrum from TV broadcasters and putting it into wireless broadband.

At the same time, ex-U.S. Congressman Largent inveighed against government regulation when it comes to something like trying to enforce net neutrality -- the idea that all broadband traffic should be treated equally. He argued such rules wouldn't allow carriers to manage their data networks properly.

In a follow-up keynote, Sybase CEO John Chen echoed Largent's theme, calling himself a free-market believer and inveighing against regulation of core wireless services and Internet applications by the FCC and Federal Trade Commission. According to Light Reading Mobile, Chen told the crowd there are a lot of "'F' words" that trouble him. Who writes this guy's material? Leno?

Jokes aside, the industry appears to want to have it both ways: Give us all the spectrum we need to increase our capacity to deliver broadband and generate higher revenue -- and then get out the way. The underlying assumption is that mobile data growth and greater government involvement are inimical. But in Asia, often cited as the most advanced market for mobile data, government and industry have worked closely together to achieve the region's leadership in broadband.

Both the Japanese and South Korean governments, for instance, pressured the the major countries' major telecom providers to invest more aggressively in broadband. To encourage expansion, the governments also let carriers write off their network investments at an accelerated rate, reducing the taxes they had to pay. So governments gave something -- tax breaks -- but expected something in return: faster build-out of broadband service.

Data released today by comScore showed mobile subscribers in Japan outpace their counterparts in the U.S. and Europe in most types of mobile data consumption. For example, nearly 60% of Japanese cell users are browsing the mobile Web, compared to 34% in the U.S. and 38.5% in Europe. And all that with Japan having its own equivalent of a net neutrality law.

The reflexively anti-government attitude of the U.S. wireless industry is counterproductive, diminishing the opportunity for the private sector and government to effectively collaborate to expand the nation's broadband infrastructure for the benefit of carriers as well as consumers. The blanket assertion that government involvement dooms broadband growth is a canard.