The Federal Communications Commission pushes its universal service program the way a drug dealer pushes cocaine. To keep carriers in check, it has devised a system that some carriers believe they have to depend on, while the FCC sells them on the need to keep doing lines because it will give the carrier the confidence it needs to go out and serve unserved areas of the country. It’s time for carriers to break the dependency and free themselves from this regulatory crossfire. The carriers are not the bad guys when it comes to broadband adoption and I would go further and argue that they should not be responsible for financing its expansion. That responsibility should lie with online content producers, including companies that publish news, movies, and blogs.

Content providers, not broadband providers, are the primary beneficiaries of broadband adoption by the remaining 100 million households the FCC targeted in its national broadband plan. If a land developer wants to ensure people come to its development, buy houses, and live in the development, the land developer is going to build roads, lay conduits for communications and water, and maybe throw in a school building. Google, Amazon, and Netflix are not doing that with broadband, even though it’s broadband that brings them the eyeballs for their content.

Content providers are not doing that with broadband networks. With the help of the FCC, they have dumped the negative externality of adoption costs unto broadband providers. Net neutrality is famously their prime mechanism for doing so; by requiring that traffic from all content providers be given first class treatment on a broadband provider’s network. The other instrument, universal service via the moniker Connect America Fund, while reimbursing broadband providers for the cost of deploying facilities where their business models dare not tread, really takes final payment of this subsidy out of the wallets of the end using consumer.

The Connect America Fund had about $185 million left on the table for broadband providers to apply for and use to help with the cost of getting broadband to Farmer Smith and Dr. Jones so that they can deliver services to an increasingly demanding broadband consumer. These funds are also meant to help people access the Internet at high-speed so that they can take advantage of news,information, goods, and services provided by larger e-commerce entities including Amazon, Ebay, Walmart, and Google.

If these companies, who need the Internet like humans need air, want to reach their potential customers that bad, why don’t they invest the cash sitting on their books to subsidize broadband adoption? For example, Google, with four dollars of current assets with one dollar of current liabilities, has enough cash on hand to kick in and incentivize broadband adoption. And let’s not forget Facebook, with 1.1 billion subscribers, some of whom are connecting via wired and wireline broadband, has ten dollars in current assets for every dollar of current liability has enough liquidity and cash to kick in some direct funding for broadband adoption.

Carriers are just middlemen, unless they are endowed with content properties like Comcast. Being in the middle makes you a target for regulation, including the onerous requirements of a universal broadband service fund, but equity calls for the incidence of broadband adoption initiatives to fall on the entities with the most to gain, and those entities are the content providers and e-commerce companies selling goods and services.

Highways, airports, roads, bridges, harbors. All are part of the conduit that moves American commerce, getting goods and services from consumer to producer. They are part of the commonwealth, owned by municipalities, states, and the federal government. When commenters talk about building or renovating America’s infrastructure, these are typically the components they are referring to.

The financing of these components is usually done with tax revenue or revenue or bond issues paid back with tax revenues. Accounting wise, a municipality may have a specific fund established which accounts for the revenues dedicated to and expenditures resulting from an infrastructure project.

Broadband facilities tend to be mentioned in the same breath as the infrastructure components mentioned above. Broadband facilities, the “information superhighway”, carry digitized voice and data between our cell phones, lap tops, and tablets. Broadband facilities are described as the on ramp to electronic commerce, much like the on ramp to Interstate 20 at Joseph E. Lowery and Oak Street in the West End of Atlanta.

That’s about where the similarities end.

Unlike airports, highways, bridges and toll roads, the vast majority of broadband facilities are owned by private entities; Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, and AT&T, to name a few. The vast majority of the capital used to build and deploy central offices, nodes, other packet switches, and cable is provided either from equity shareholders or creditors. Broadband providers go into the markets to buy the capital needed to meet the demand for facilities. The private versus public ownership of these facilities creates a dependence on the private sector for the financing. Price paid for capital, not government mandate, determines whether capital will be available to meet the consumer demand for broadband facilities.

Sometimes the consumer demand comes from geographical areas that make a business model very expensive to finance; specifically rural and insular areas. Terrain and climate raise challenges to broadband providers because in addition to the physical deployment of facilities, a business case must be made about the probability that consumers in rural and insular areas will be able to pay the higher than average cost of receiving broadband services. The price mechanism may preclude broadband providers from buying the investment capital needed to make the investment. The rational investor or underwriter may not buy into a rural or insular broadband business model.

Enter the irrational. Enter the Federal Communications Commission.

Driven by its interpretation of universal service as provided in the Communications Act, the FCC has over the past few decades implemented a universal service and inter-carrier compensation scheme designed to subsidize delivery of telecommunications services to the poor, underserved rural markets, and health care providers in underserved areas. Business customers were basically overcharged in order to subsidize residential customers. Interexchange companies paid originating and terminating fees to local exchange companies with these funds placed into a pot where LECs would receive a cut after certifying the expenses claimed were for providing telecommunications services.

The FCC, threw its Connect America Fund, has essentially modified the model so that funds go to broadband services versus the legacy plain old telephone service network prior universal service finds financed. To date, the FCC is still trying to get broadband companies to bite on the remaining $180 million in subsidies available during the first phase of CAF. Broadband providers leaving money on the table should be a red flag that something is wrong with this model.

What’s wrong with this model is that it does not take into account that the infrastructure belongs to private entities, entities that could borrow at near zero rates, but who do not finance infrastructure projects in unserved, rural, or insular areas because a strong business case cannot be made for it. The FCC and the Congress throw money at them anyway, hoping that the initiative will get broadband to the homes. In a free market, capitalist society where the method of production and delivery is held in private hands, this 1930s view of stimulation cannot work. What is needed is something more direct especially if government is to participate in stimulating broadband demand.

While it is good to see Mr. Genachowski and his Gang of Four act like supply-siders, what is needed for broadband deployment is a combination of demand stimulation and a “private equity” mindset on the part of government, in this case, the FCC.

First, Congress should get rid of language describing the methods of implementing universal service. Rather than extorting money from IXCs to fund universal service, Congress, via the FCC, should issue poor consumers vouchers to be used with the broadband provider of their choice. This voucher could reflect the difference between the average monthly amount paid for broadband in the consumer’s market area and what they pay for telephone service.

Second, Congress should establish a broadband infrastructure bank to be administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The infrastructure bank would be funded from general tax revenues and would lend funds to broadband providers who present innovative business plans for providing service in insular, rural, and urban unserved and under-served areas. Funds would be paid back to the infrastructure bank at some rate below prime. The infrastructure bank could also issue debt giving investors another avenue for hedging other investments. Profits would either be returned to the Treasury, reinvested in the voucher program, or go on to support broadband in schools and libraries.

The current universal service program is open to abuse, such as skewing most funding toward carriers that do not need the funds. It introduces additional government regulation for the purpose of financing broadband deployment by private actors when those actors could go into the markets and get financing themselves; financing based on the showing of a good business model. By requiring the showing of a good business model, broadband providers would be required to develop innovative technologies to provide service. Innovation will beget financing which begets the value added to a service, value that consumers will identify and demand.

The New York Times yesterday posted on article on real time bidding for online advertising that I found interesting. The article cited a petition filed with the Federal Trade Commission by the Center for Digital Democracy, where the CDD alleged that real time bidding, a process where advertising space on web sites is sold via an electronic trading platform, amounts to an unfair and deceptive practice.

Specifically, CDD alleged that electronic trading systems for advertising, where marketers can bid for consumers within milliseconds of a consumer visiting a web page, can unfairly stratify consumers, relegating some to inferior treatment while offering better pricing to others. According to CDD, not only does it resemble a cattle auction while reducing consumers to a “chattel” status, but these trading systems also threaten consumer privacy because advertisers are using consumer data obtained via data mining practices by third party aggregators. Consumers are not reaping the financial benefits of their very own data while advertisers, web sites, and third-party aggregators reap the profits.

Under section 45(n) of the Federal Trade Commission Act, the FTC applies a standard of proof and other public policy considerations when determining if an act is unfair and deceptive. There has to be, under the Act, a showing of substantial injury to a consumer from the party exhibiting bad behavior. The substantial injury must be a kind that is not reasonably avoidable by the consumer and not outweighed by countervailing benefits to the consumer and competition.

When reaching its conclusion on whether an action is unfair or deceptive, the FTC may consider, on a secondary basis, public policy.

I think the primary public policy consideration the FTC needs to take is whether a transaction has taken place where consumers are seeing degradation in their welfare. First of all, real time bidding does not directly involve the type of consumer that CDD is apparently concerned about. Consumers visiting web sites may not be interested in purchasing anything. Even if a consumer has a fetish for Gucci handbags and as a result of real time bidding finds her looking at ads for designer accessories, that’s not a deceptive act. It would be as if she walked into her favorite store and the attentive clerk who is aware of her penchant for these items lets her know that the store has some in stock. It’s simply information being shared.

Real time bidding gets information to a consumer faster because it leverages the history of the consumer’s tastes, desires, and ability to pay to get product in front of the consumer that she, based on these consumer characteristics, may be interested in. Back in my merchant days, we called this good marketing. The consumer’s welfare is also increased because she is receiving information that she can take into the market place and use when the time is right for her to make a purchase.

Also, the FTC needs to stay mindful that as households who have not yet adopted broadband continue to see other households take advantage of goods and services marketed directly to them based on their perceived tastes and desires, these unconnected households may choose to join the 21st century and get connected to e-commerce via broadband access. Following CDD’s lead and tainting cyberspace as a scary space to transact in will only delay the closing of a digital divide too many households are still facing today.

BIA/Kelsey today issued a press release stating that consumer spending on online deals is expected to reach $3.6 billion in 2012. This, according to the online deal adviser, should represent a 86.9% increase over 2011. BIA/Kelsey also expects consumer online deal spending to increase 23% in 2013, with spending hitting $5.5 billion.

Online deals offer discounts on consumer items, such as clothing, electronics, toys, and travel.

In addition, a BIA/Kelsey survey of small businesses found that 26% of small businesses are likely to participate in an online deal over the next six months, while 24.3% of small businesses are somewhat likely to participate in a deal.

Affordable broadband, especially affordable wireless broadband can keep millions of minority and low income consumers connected to such deal offerings. Making necessary resources like spectrum available to carriers willing to service these markets puts the FCC in an indirect position to positively impact consumer welfare.

Today the House Committee on Small Business heard from the heads of the Federal Communications Commission, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and the Rural Utility Service. Each agency described how it was contributing to the deployment of broadband, ensuring competition amongst broadband providers, and financing the construction of facilities.

The testimony of the agency heads did not provide any new information that would move markets, raise any additional concerns about regulatory uncertainty, or otherwise would cause investors any heart burn.

Notable mention should be given to FCC chairman Julius Genachowski for telling committee members that the FCC intended to continue a light touch approach to regulating the Internet and RUS head Jonathan Adelstein taking the position that industry consolidation was not necessarily good for broadband deployment in rural areas.

My take away from this afternoon’s hearing is the reminder that the Congress is responsible for regulating commerce. Commerce refers to trade on a large scale, usually across states or countries. Large scale trade needs the appropriate infrastructure to move large volumes of goods and services. E-commerce has the same needs from the infrastructure we call broadband.

What Congress needs to do is continue with its light touch approach to regulating commerce that goes across the broadband infrastructure. Speed limits and other network management requirements don’t need to be placed on it. Additional requirements will only dampen economic growth. The innovation and job creation each agency head mentioned today has been emerging from a light touch regulatory scheme. There is no need to change that.