Repeat the same mistaken data enough times and people start believing it. If you're active in policy or a reporter and think any of these are accurate, please email me for primary sources. I'm writing this quick note because two respected groups just sent to me stuff I know is wrong.

There is a large, measurable cost to Internet shutdowns. If you can send your birthday gift a few days later or catch up two days of missed lessons, the Brookings report falls apart.

Connecting more people to the Internet has large economic benefits. Senior economists, including one now at Harvard, debunked this in 2009 in D.C. 

The Internet has no economic downsides. Tell that to the store owner who went broke because he couldn't compete with giant Amazon. About a third of the world's newspaper reporters lost their jobs. Almost all claims about "economic benefits" leave out the negative.

Steve Mollenkopf's creative engineers produce many of the world's best chips. It's time for him to stop promoting a bogus claim "5G Expected to Create 22 Million Jobs, Produce Up to $12.3 Trillion of Goods and Services by 2035." They offer no evidence or logic that leads to that conclusion. They hired IHS Markit to do a "study" and Berkeley Professor David Teece to sign off on it. The substance of the study is a laundry list of future services, from drones to telemedicine to IoT to VR to Smart Grid. (They provide no source for their estimates of the values of each, but added together they do come to enormous figures.)

Problem: Nearly none of this requires 5G and the report gives no reason to believe their value-add should be attributed to 5G. Nearly all of them work just fine on LTE or Wi-Fi and do not require 5G. Nowhere in the report do they provide a breakdown of how much of the total value of the drones, remote medical consults, or meter reading need 5G. Without that, the conclusions are hogwash. In addition, anyone who has worked with economic forecasts knows how hard it is to look five years ahead, let alone 20.

I've researched the requirements of AR, VR, telemedicine, and IoT. Experts in each field tell me 5G isn't needed for what they are doing. Even most of the connected car stuff doesn't need lower latency than LTE can deliver.  Thousands of Qualcomm engineers every day tell customers, accurately, that Qualcomm products today meet these needs and will be even better in the future. 

Moving the big decisions to where they have power. At the BRICS conference in Xiamen, the global South and China/Russia proclaimed, "All states should participate on an equal footing in the evolution and functioning of the Internet and its governance, bearing in mind the need to involve relevant stakeholders in their respective roles and responsibilities. The structures that manage and regulate the critical Internet resources need to be made more representative and inclusive."With the U.S. effectively blocking any 

With the U.S. effectively blocking anything of substance at the ITU, that organization is paralyzed on many major issues. Anything about security is stopped dead at the ITU by the U.S. and friends, starting with Hamadoun Touré's move in 2007 towards a treaty on cybersecurity. I laugh when U.S. politicians demand action on security; we're the ones that have been blocking it for a decade. 

Everyone in Internet Governance knows the primary goal of the U.S. is to protect freedom - the freedom of the NSA to do what the NSA does.   

Term limited. Steve writes, 

We have term limits for directors, no more than three consecutive three year terms.  I have reached my limit and am leaving the Board.  The Board’s chair is chosen each year by the Board.  The formal election of the next chair takes place at the end of the Annual General Meeting in Abu Dhabi.

He has been active literally since the beginning of the Internet. He was part of the UCLA team, led by Len Kleinrock, that connected the first Internet node, back in DARPA days. Wired has a great interview about the early days, including how Steve developed the RFC system. There's also an oral history of the early days Steve did back in 1991.

Americans Avri Doria and Sarah Deutsch have been nominated and will likely join the ICANN Board at the October Abu Dhabi meeting,

Shutdowns are India's standard operating procedure against dissent and disorder. The authorities shut down Internet and most phone service to over 20M people for several days. They believed shutting communications would prevent the demonstrations from spreading after Baba Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh was arrested and convicted of rape. Over 30 people died and hundreds were injured in the unrest. Effective action was called for but that doesn't mean shutting communications was appropriate. Even more troubling to those of us who believe in free expression, India has shut down the Internet in Darjeeling for almost three months to hinder the campaign for Gorkhaland independence.

Singh was the leader of a sect with a very strong following among the poor. Between the charges in 2002 and the arrest in 2017, he was massively courted by Indian politicians of several parties. The newspapers believe the evidence of rape was strong, but obviously this is more than a simple criminal case. 

The Internet makes it easier to organize anything, from responses to natural disasters to parades after football victories. There's no evidence the shutdowns reduced the violence in this case or several other temporary shutdowns around violent events. The authorities obviously think so; I'm dubious, but also have no evidence. 

Randall Stephenson, AT&T CEO, did not proclaim, “AT&T will spend $5B building one of the world’s best networks for Texas and Louisiana. That’s our contribution to the recovery after Harvey.” He should.

AT&T is a world leader in testing 5G mmWave small cells. They are adding three million lines of fiber home every year. There’s no reason they couldn’t focus both efforts in South Texas, performing a civic service without spending an additional dollar in capex.

They would probably actually come out ahead, as the $tens of billions in disaster relief would cover some of the cost.

Larry Babbio of Verizon responded that way to the World Trade Center. “Just watch us,” he replied to my suggestion Verizon bring fiber to lower Manhattan soon after 9/11. Verizon built Fios, which for more than a decade was the finest network in the Western World.  (Spain and France are now pulling ahead.)

Rajeev Suri of Nokia should support AT&T by offering to provide $5M in equipment for the build. He should also commit 50 of his best engineers and promise, “We will make sure AT&T has the equipment they need when they need it.” Both are already provided, of course, but it sounds good.

Randall, with the $85B Time Warner merger pending, is unlikely to disavow his very visible friendship with Donald Trump although I'm pretty sure he despises much of what the President is saying. Brian Krzanich of Intel, Kenneth Frazier of Merck, Elon Musk of Tesla, Inge Thulin of 3M, and even Denise Morrison of Campbell Soup have resigned. 

Donald Trump called the merger, "a deal we will not approve in my administration because it's too much concentration of power in the hands of too few." However, WSJ reports the fix is in.  "An approval could underscore the administration's pro-business credentials at a time when Mr. Trump's ties with America's CEOs are under unprecedented stress," Flint and Fitzgerald point out. 

Steve Schwarzman, one of Trump's strongest and richest supporters, secured a $20B investment from the Saudis. It was "announced at the royal palace in Riyadh as Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner looked on," NYT noted in a devastating article, The Benefits of Standing by the President. 

Microsoft President Brad Smith was wrong claiming "Today 23.4 million Americans in rural areas still lack broadband internet access." The figures are from 2014. Since then probably half or more have been reached by AT&T or Verizon LTE. Each report 98% LTE coverage, with T-Mobile close. LTE speeds are higher than the proposed White Space radios.

He also was almost certainly wrong claiming White Spaces would be, "Over 50 percent cheaper than the cost of current fixed wireless technology like 4G." By almost any appropriate comparison, WS would be more expensive and slower than LTE. The Microsoft/BCG figure assumes that AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon would not be part of an LTE rural plan. All four have massive amounts ofcompletely unused rural spectrum as well as existing facilities that would bring down the cost. (AT&T has 60 MHz of spectrum unused nationwide, enough to more than duplicate the entire Verizon network.) 

M/BCG instead assumes LTE would come from a new company New entrants might have high costs for spectrum and would need to be much more heavily subsidized than existing carriers.  

Their estimate for the cost of the LTE cell is based on a tower cell site sized for 300-1,000. They compare that with a WS radio sized for a few dozen at most. An LTE cell of similar size and capacity would be cheaper than the likely WS radios rather than many times more expensive. LTE gear is produced in billion quantities, a thousand times more than even an optimistic WS plan. This almost certainly will keep LTE gear less expensive.