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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

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.

Clayton Christensen first identified the concept of the disruptive innovation in the Innovator's Dilemma. The basic idea is this: a new technology slowly undermines an existing, dominant technology, by starting out cheaper and "worse," then slowly improving until it is a full replacement for the dominant one, but with newer, more flexible capabilities, and usually a lower cost basis. Classic examples of disruptive technologies include the PC (which disrupted mainframes and minicomputers) and desktop publishing (which disrupted the print industry).

As if you needed another sign that times are tough, here's a fairly reliable measure: The number of cases handled by the advertising industry's best-kept secret -- self-regulation -- are on the rise. Last year the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus handled 214 cases, up 22% from 2007. And in 2008 ad challenges, in which one advertiser challenges a competitor's claim, rose 31% to 81 cases. Why the increased activity? It's a deadly fight for share of market out there, and in down times advertisers tend to revert to hard-hitting comparative advertising. NAD's purpose is to substantiate these kinds of attack ads, and it can do it faster and cheaper than litigation can. The Federal Trade Commission seems to like the idea of letting advertisers settle their own disputes. When the National Advertising Review Council, the body that sets the policies and procedures for the NAD to enforce, started 38 years ago, then-FTC Chairman Bob Pitofsky wasn't an early convert. "If the truth be known," he said 10 years ago, "there was some skepticism about how the whole thing would work. The FTC had been burned time and time again by unkept promises of self-regulation by other industries. But this group has proved the skeptics wrong. Today, advertising has the best self-regulatory system of any industry in the country." The outgoing chairman of the FTC, William Kovacic, is also a fan. But the current crop of FTC commissioners don't seem as convinced, although they seem somewhat willing to give self-regulation a chance. In issuing guidelines for online behavioral advertising, FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz said the industry needs to do a better job of "meaningful, rigorous self-regulation, or it will certainly invite legislation by Congress and a more regulatory approach by our commission."A joint industry task force quickly seized on that statement as an endorsement for self-regulation, and said it supported FTC's goal of a "comprehensive and eff

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.

Taking genetic tests to assess potential health risks could mean cheaper medical insurance even if the results are not disclosed, a senior industry executive has told The Times. Customers who take personal DNA scans will pay lower premiums because insurers believe that they encourage a healthier lifestyle, according to Gil Baldwin, the managing director of Norwich Union Healthcare. The advent of tests for DNA variants that affect common disorders such as diabetes and heart disease has prompted fears of discrimination and the creation of a "genetic underclass" who cannot buy cover. Mr Baldwin insisted that his company did not see genetics as a tool for cherry picking low-risk customers but as a way of helping them to manage and reduce their risk of disease with the aim of lowering costs for both parties. In an interview with The Times, he said that people who take genetic screening are likely to act on the results and therefore present a much better risk profile. Insurers will reflect this in premiums, regardless of whether results are disclosed.

On a side table in his Washington offices, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz keeps a framed image of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the 1984 film The Terminator. It was given to Leibowitz a couple of years ago by one of the FTC's regional offices, an homage to his crackdown on spyware that surreptitiously gathers information on Web users' surfing habits. Now, Leibowitz wants to terminate-or at least rein in-a different practice he finds no less harmful to consumers: delivering ads to individuals based on the Web pages they visit and searches they carry out. Appointed by President Barack Obama in February to run the country's top consumer watchdog, Leibowitz has made so-called behavioral targeting a top priority. How far he goes in regulating the practice could have big implications for a host of companies that depend on Web advertising and engage in some form of targeting. These include Google (GOOG), Facebook, and Microsoft (MSFT), which on July 29 announced a plan to partner with Yahoo! (YHOO) in the area of Internet search. It would also affect the way legions of companies and advertisers craft marketing campaigns. Behavioral targeting has become more prevalent as it gets easier and cheaper to use software to track online behavior and then use the data to pitch Web users related goods and services. These ads are more likely to induce a customer to make a purchase or otherwise respond to a pitch, researchers say.