Last week a coalition, led by Google, wrote a letter to the chairman of the Georgia House Committee on Energy, Utilities, and Telecommunications urging him to not pass HB 282, the Municipal Broadband Investment Act. The bill, if passed, would require that municipal broadband networks serve only areas that are not being served by a private broadband provider. It also requires that the Georgia Public Service Commission (GPSC) make a determination as to whether an area is unserved and to draft rules that specify violations of the Act.

Seeing Google and the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) is scary enough. These two have nothing on common other than they represent content providers who would rather not directly pay to have their content distributed over the Internet. Both have been pro net neutrality, NATOA more so, because they don’t want to see their content throttled.

Scarier yet is the lack of support for the assertions made in their letter to the committee chairman. Most glaring is their arguments about how the bill would hinder economic growth in Georgia. What’s hindering economic growth in Georgia isn’t the lack of broadband, although the job creation resulting from construction and deployment of broadband infrastructure wouldn’t hurt. What is really hurting growth in Georgia is the lack of a more diversified economic base compounded by a loss of manufacturing jobs. Also, Georgia is trying to get from under a foreclosure crisis exacerbated by high unemployment.

Even if broadband deployment were the panacea for our economic ills, HB 282 would direct deployment where its most needed; in the areas that are unserved and could probably get a boost from the type of industry where a broadband connection is key.

Google and NATOA should spend less time playing carpetbagger and get to know the state before making unwarranted assertions about economic growth. That phrase has been bandied about to the point where it’s staring to lose value.

If Google and NATOA are so concerned about expanding broadband, they should support legislation that calls for an universal service assessment on cost causers like Amazon, Facebook, and Google, requiring that they pay a percentage of income made from advertisements and/or online retail. That would go long way toward getting the unserved online, whether they reside in an area serviced by multiple broadband providers or none.

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.

We are in the middle of the silly season and social networking sites will be abuzz this week as the Democratic Party kicks off its national convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s a good time to have a broadband connection as the activity on Twitter showed last week during the Republican Party’s convention in Tampa, Florida. Whether you support the GOP or not, if you are an avid political geek as yours truly, you were definitely getting in your two cents on how well the Republicans were making their case for whether they should be allowed four years in the White House.

Pew Research recently released an assessment of how all this tweeting and Facebook posting is impacting political discourse in America. Overall, the report found that postings to social networking sites are having some impact on political views, especially among people who identify themselves as Democrats or liberals. According to Pew Research, 24% of liberal social network site users and 18% of moderate social network site users said that use of social network sites have prompted them to change their political views. Only 11% of conservatives who use social network sites are prompted to change their views as a result of interacting online.

In addition, 25% of social network users have become more active as a result of using social network sites. Sixteen percent of social network site users have changed their political views as a result of interacting on the sites. Nine percent of social network site users took the opposite turn and became less engaged with political discussion as a result of postings online.

Oh well. Happy tweeting and see you tonight online at least.

The New York Times recently posted a debate about the importance of social media. Keith Hampton, a professor of communications at Rutgers, made the following point in his post:

“Only a small number of social media are used by a majority of Americans (i.e., Facebook), but many others have obtained a critical mass with niche populations. The biggest threat to discontinuance does not rest with the possibility that social media are a fad, but with their proprietary nature. The failure of a single telephone company does not undermine the value of the telephone. However, because social media are both brands and channels of communication, a significant strategic or technological failure is the most likely impetus to mass abandonment.”

Social media is not a fad. It will, like telephone networks, reach critical mass, and I guess, based on his analysis, stay on that plateau until the next big thing. I guess at critical mass, social media becomes a utility, like its traditional media kin …. at least until the next Facebook.

A John C. Abell piece for Reuters.com caught my eye this morning. Mr. Abell notes that Facebook’s consideration of a plan to subscribe 13 year olds reeks of desperation and lays out a good argument for that conclusion. You can see his article here.

I agree with him. Investors have to ask themselves, would a business model built on desperation curry favor on the Street? I don’t think so. This action, if implemented, may lead to a further devaluation of the stock. Thirteen year olds online would be subjected to cyber bullying, stalking, and other crimes and Facebook may face additional lawsuits and potential liability in the process.

The Street doesn’t like uncertainty.