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Bits readers have a serious case of broadband envy. I've been writing about the debate about how the government might encourage more high-speed Internet use and you've complained loudly that people in other countries have faster, cheaper, more widely available broadband service. Even customer-service representatives of Internet service providers overseas are nicer too. I don't know about manners, but it's easy to find examples that American's broadband is second-rate: In Japan, broadband service running at 150 megabits per second (Mbps) costs $60 a month. The fastest service available now in the United States is 50 Mbps at a price of $90 to $150 a month. In London, $9 a month buys 8 Mbps service. In New York, broadband starts at $20 per month, for 1 Mbps. In Iceland, 83 percent of the households are connected to broadband. In the United States, the adoption rate is 59 percent. There's more than just envy at stake here. President Obama campaigned on a promise of fast broadband service for all. On the White House Web site, he writes "America should lead the world in broadband penetration and Internet access." And the recent stimulus bill requires the Federal Communications Commission to create a national broadband plan in order to make high-speed Internet service both more available and more affordable. I've spent the last week trolling through reports and talking to people who study broadband deployment around the world to see what explains the faster and cheaper service in many countries. We'll start with where the United States isn't doing quite so badly: the basic speed of broadband service. If you take out the countries that have made significant investment in fiber optic networks - Japan, Korea and Sweden - the United States is in the middle of the pack when it comes to network speed.

In the paradises of broadband - Japan, South Korea and Sweden - nearly everyone can surf far faster and far cheaper than anyone in the United States. What is their secret sauce and how can we get some? The short answer is that broadband deployment in those countries was spurred by a combination of heavy government involvement, subsidies and lower corporate profits that may be tough for the economic and political system in the United States to accept. Those countries have also tried to encourage demand for broadband by paying schools, hospitals and other institutions to use high-speed Internet services. Sweden has built one of the fastest and most widely deployed broadband networks in Europe because its government granted tax breaks for infrastructure investments, directly subsidized rural deployment, and, perhaps most significantly, required state-owned municipal utilities to create local backbone networks, reducing the cost for the local telephone company to provide service. Japan let telecommunications companies write down about one-third of their investment in broadband the first year, rather than the usual policy, which requires them to spread the deductions over 22 years. The Japanese government also subsidized low-cost loans for broadband construction and paid for part of the wiring of rural areas.

Broadband is cheaper in many other countries than in the United States. "You have a pretty uncompetitive market by European standards," said Tim Johnson, the chief analyst at Point-Topic, a London consulting firm. Other countries have lower costs for the same reasons their DSL service is faster. Dense urban areas reduce some of the cost of building networks. In addition, governments in some countries subsidized fiber networks. But the big difference between the United States and most other countries is competition. "Now hold on there," you might say to me. Since I wrote that many countries don't have cable systems and the bulk of broadband is run by way of DSL through existing phone wires, how can there be competition? Aren't those owned by monopoly phone companies? True enough. But most big countries have devised a system to create competition by forcing the phone companies to share their lines and facilities with rival Internet providers. Not surprisingly, the phone companies hate this idea, often called unbundling, and tend to drag their feet when it is introduced. So it requires rather diligent regulators to force the telcos to play fair. And the effect of this scheme depends a lot on details of what equipment is shared and at what prices. Britain has gone the furthest, forcing BT Group to split off a unit that operates the actual network and sells to various voice and Internet providers, including its own telephone service, on an equal basis. The United States was early with this sort of approach, requiring telephone companies to allow rival Internet service providers to sell DSL service using their networks. The way these rules were written, however, meant the wholesale cost was so high that providers like AOL and Earthlink couldn't offer a better deal than the telcos themselves. And the plan was largely abandoned in 2003 by the Federal Communications Commission on the theory that the country is better served by encouraging competition

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski will unveil in a speech on Monday new proposals that would force Internet providers to treat the flow of content equally, sources familiar with the speech said on Friday. The concept, referred to as net neutrality, pits open Internet companies like Google Inc against broadband service providers like AT&T Inc, Verizon Communications Inc, and Comcast Corp, which oppose new rules governing network management. Advocates of net neutrality say Internet service providers must be barred from blocking or slowing traffic based on content. Providers say the increasing volume of bandwidth-hogging services like video sharing requires active management of their networks and some argue that net neutrality could stifle innovation. "He is going to announce rulemaking," said one source familiar with his speech about broadband, to be delivered at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank. "The commission will have to codify into new regulations the principle of nondiscrimination." The FCC could formally propose the rules aimed at applying to wireless and landline platforms at an open meeting in October.

"We all know that Internet and communications technology is changing rapidly, creating huge opportunities for business innovation and individual self-expression. Most people are probably not aware, however, that privacy law is not evolving nearly as quickly. It is time to update legal protections to reflect the impact the digital revolution is having on modern life. Cloud computing -- a bit of tech-jargon meaning the use of remote servers to store and process data -- is a great example. The movement of personal and proprietary data off desktop computers and into "the cloud", which is made up of server farms and broadband connections, is a major disruptive trend in computing. Unless our laws change to account for cloud computing and other equally momentous technology developments, the Constitution's protection against unreasonable search and seizure will become a relic of the past. The federal law setting standards for government access to personal communications -- the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) -- was written more than two decades ago, before the Internet took off. "

European Union's move indicates growing government concern over how Internet companies are using individuals' private data The European Commission began legal action against the U.K. Tuesday over its failure to protect Internet users from Phorm -- a covert behavioral advertising technology tested by the U.K.'s biggest fixed line operator, BT, in 2006 and 2007. The move signals growing concern in Brussels over the way new Internet-based technologies are using people's personal data. In addition to taking legal action against the U.K., the Commission also issued a general warning to all 27 E.U. countries to uphold privacy laws, especially regarding social-networking Web sites and users of RFID (radio frequency identification) technologies. In Canada, the federal government has even proposed a legislation that will provide law enforcement agents sweeping powers to obtain user information from ISPs. The Commission, the executive body of the European Union responsible for upholding laws, said the U.K. had failed to enforce E.U. data protection and privacy rules, because broadband Internet subscribers were not informed that their browsing was being tracked.

The debate on Internet privacy has begun in Congress. I had a chance to sit down recently with Representative Rick Boucher, the long-serving Virginia Democrat, who has just replaced Ed Markey, the Democrat from Massachusetts, as the chairman of the House Subcommittee looking after telecommunications, technology and the Internet. Mr. Boucher is widely regarded as one of the most technologically savvy members of Congress. As he ticked off his top priorities for his panel, most involved the pressing demands of telecommunications regulation. There is a law governing how local TV stations are carried on satellite broadcasters that needs to be renewed. There is the Universal Service Fund, which takes money from most telephone customers to pay for rural service to be improved. And there is the conversion to digital television and the investments in rural broadband to be supervised. But high on his list is a topic that is very much under his discretion: passing a bill to regulate the privacy of Internet users. "Internet users should be able to know what information is collected about them and have the opportunity to opt out," he said. While he hasn't written the bill yet, Mr. Boucher said that he, working with Representative Cliff Stearns, the Florida Republican who is the ranking minority member on the subcommittee, wants to require Web sites to disclose how they collect and use data, and give users the option to opt out of any data collection. That's not a big change from what happens now, at least on most big sites.

WASHINGTON -- Few tech policy debates are plumped up with more rhetoric than those concerning Net neutrality and privacy restrictions for advertisers. It should be a noisy year at the Federal Communications Commission. Here at the Cable Show, the annual conference hosted by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, advisors to the three current commissioners outlined some of the simmering issues that are likely to boil up at the FCC this year, and those two are on the short list. Rick Chessen, acting chief of staff for interim FCC Chairman Michael Copps, said the agency could move toward adding to its Internet policy statement a fifth principle that would explicitly bar ISPs from discriminating against certain traffic on their networks. "The principle would be one of nondiscrimination, but you would recognize the need for reasonable network management," Chessen said. The FCC's broadband principles comprised the policy document that was at the center of last year's action against Comcast, where the agency found that the cable giant had unfairly blocked peer-to-peer traffic on its network without notifying its subscribers it was doing so. The new principle Chessen suggested would seek to clarify the agency's stance against the selective blocking of traffic. Comcast is challenging last year's ruling in a court case where the outcome could broadly shape how Congress proceed with Net neutrality policy. Rosemary Harold, the legal advisor to Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell, said her boss is more cautious than the two Democrats on the matter.

The Obama administration is trying to take the lead on a number of technology issues, including cybersecurity, network neutrality and broadband availability. But one prominent omission is privacy, a topic about which the administration has said very little. At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Washington on Tuesday, one administration official did address privacy somewhat. Susan Crawford, a member of the National Economic Council looking after science and technology policy, listed some of the efforts by the Federal Trade Commission to press for new rules for behavioral advertising. But she didn't mention that all of those rules were written under the Bush administration. Peter Swire, an Ohio State law professor who served on the Obama transition team, offered one reason it might be difficult for the administration to find its voice on privacy. There is a split, he told the conference, between the typical view of privacy among technology experts and the emerging view of people brought up in the social networking, Web 2.0 world.