If by "cherry-picking the metrics" you mean "citing actual research data instead of just spewing lame anecdotes," I'm guilty as charged, your honor. There are 144 footnotes in the Whole Picture report, so that's a lot of cherries.

It's interesting to see a discussion of my op-ed on Slashdot, it's been a while since I've had my work critiqued here. The last thread I remember on one of my pieces was the text of a speech I gave on net neutrality in 2008 that ended up being the second most read piece on CircleID for the year, http://www.circleid.com/posts/86147_net_neutrality_innovation_081/ Slashdot effect. . Many of the claims in the op-ed are controversial because they're contrary to conventional wisdom, but they're all based on empirical data. You can see the research here: http://www.itif.org/publications/whole-picture-where-america-s-broadband-networks-really-stand and view a panel discussion with members of the FCC's National Broadband Plan team. . The op-ed doesn't address the specific problems with rural broadband, of course. The approach that most policy analysts support is to re-purpose the Universal Service Fund that presently supports telephone service in rural areas for broadband, but the costs need to be brought under control. Subsidies can be as high as $50,000 per line per year, and that's obviously neither sustainable nor fair to the urban telephone users who pay for the subsidies. If it's any comfort, rural broadband is better in the US than it is in most countries, even if it's not as good as it is in the suburbs and cities where the market works. In general, 94% of Americans have some sort of wireline broadband option, 4G/LTE will be available to 98% by 2015, and satellite is available to the rest at ever-improving speeds; currently two carriers provide speeds > 10 Mbps by satellite, and it's much better than most people think. . Publicly financed broadband isn't really an option for competitive markets because the higher speed networks are not shareable in the same way that ADSL networks are. Cable, xPON, and even Vectored DSL require exclusive use of the wires at layer one, so the days of attaching your own DSLAM in a CO are in the past. . The US is installing more fiber every year than Europe, despite having less population, land mass, and population density, and more Americans use broadband per capita than Europeans, so the complaints about the U. S. market system don't seem to reflect any legitimate issues. . I notice that the usual critics have denounced ITIF here, as they usually do. So let me point out that the University of Pennsylvania's Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program ranks ITIF as the fifth most important science and technology think tank in the world: http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=think_tanks . Carry on.