How do we get the attention of policy makers? It’s very simple, use national rankings. These are very good at actually grabbing attention. Back in the late 1980s we did some work at the OECD on how to develop performance indicators for public telecom operators. The work we did comparing countries, etc, got the interest and I think spurred reform.
More recently, the national broadband rankings by OECD, World Bank, etc have really helped raise awareness among policy makers. Japan follows what’s happening in Korea. The USA is very worried it’s suddenly fallen to 15th.
The second lesson is if you’re going to make international comparisons, you need to have the appropriate sized goldfish bowl. I’d like to quote the work done by Rohan and Bill on mobile termination rates. There was a concession that the rates were completely justified. What Bill and Rohan did was extend that goldfish bowl and compare mobile termination rates in Europe with America, Asia etc. This shone a light on the excessively high rates and focused the attention on regulators on what was effectively price gouging.
In the 1990s the US was convinced they had the best, cheapest prices. Once we shone a light we saw that the US was actually fairly expensive. Again that helped spurred policy change.
The third lesson is that we should always be careful about making unsubstantiated claims. What we say has big consequences on the real world. In the early 2000s a particular soundbite was that the level of internet traffic was doubling every 100 days. It might have been true for one period, but it certainly wasn’t true for a longer period. We were also using unsophisticated ways of measuring internet traffic. In many ways we were guilty of leading to the dot-com boom, and the dot-com collapse.
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