Bret Swanson

Bret Swanson is a Senior Fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute, where he researches technology and economics and contributes to the Disco-Tech blog. He is currently writing a book on the abundance of the world economy, focusing on the Chinese boom and developing a new concept linking economics and information theory. Swanson writes frequently for the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal on topics ranging from broadband communications to monetary policy.

For almost eight years, Swanson advised technology investors at the Gilder Technology Report, first as a technology analyst and then as executive editor. He also helped shape and moderate the annual Gilder/Forbes Telecosm conference in Lake Tahoe. Beginning with his first full-year as executive editor in 2003 through June 2007, the GTR virtual portfolio achieved a total return of 223%.

Previously Swanson was an economic aide to Jack Kemp at the supply-side think-tank Empower America, where he researched and wrote about tax, monetary, trade, and telecom policy. He began his career as an intern and aide to U.S. Senator Richard Lugar.

Swanson studied economics and played junior varsity basketball at Princeton University and now lives in his home state of Indiana with his wife and four children.

Archives

Unleashing the Exaflood

_{George Gilder and Bret Swanson
February 22, 2008}

Two decades ago, Sun Microsystems prophesied: “The network is the computer.” Today, BitTorrent video and 3D graphics flood the Internet, Apple iPhones tap the Net’s computing power, and PC-king Microsoft pursues Net-centric Yahoo. Sun’s mantra has become reality. But as the Internet booms and moves to the center of the global economic sphere, it draws proportional attention from politicians and regulators. In Congress and at the FCC, legislators and lawyers think they can manage overflowing Net traffic and commerce better than the network companies themselves. Next week, the FCC is meeting en banc at Harvard Law School to consider two petitions that seek to ban network “traffic management.” The meeting’s host, Rep. Ed Markey, has renewed his …

Estimating the Exaflood

_{The Impact of Video and Rich Media on the Internet. A "zettabyte" by 2015?}_{Bret Swanson and George Gilder
January 29, 2008}

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY An upsurge of technological change and a rising tide of new forms of data are working a deep transformation of the Internet’s capabilities and uses. In this third phase of Net evolution, network architectures and commercial business plans reflect the dominance of rich video and media traffic. From YouTube, IPTV, and high-definition images, to “cloud computing” and ubiquitous mobile cameras—to 3D games, virtual worlds, and photorealistic telepresence—the new wave is swelling into an exaflood of Internet and IP traffic. An exabyte is 10 to the 18th. We estimate that by 2015, U.S. IP traffic could reach an annual total of one zettabyte (1021 bytes), or one million million billion bytes. We began using the term “exaflood” in 2001 to convey the …

U.S. INTERNET TRAFFIC PROJECTED TO GROW 50-FOLD BY 2015

_{New Study Shows Required Network Expansion Could Cost $100 Billion Over Next Five Years}_{Bret Swanson and George Gilder
January 29, 2008}

Washington, D.C. — New technologies are dramatically transforming the Internet and could boost IP traffic in the United States more than 50-fold within the next decade, according to Estimating the Exaflood: The Impact of Video and Rich Media on the Internet, a report released today by the Discovery Institute. Innovations like YouTube, IPTV, high-definition video and mobile phone cameras are driving this new wave of dataor exafloodof Internet and IP traffic, said Bret Swanson, an adjunct fellow at the Discovery Institute and co-author of the report. Many of the new online opportunities we cant even imagine today. But these exciting applications and services will only be possible if we make large new investments in broadband fiber-optic and wireless …

Indiana Is Open for Business

_{Mitch "the Blade" Daniels is putting the state on the free-market cutting edge.}_{Bret Swanson
March 28, 2006}

There’s about to be a building boom in Indiana, which is desperate good news for a state that has been severely challenged by the global manufacturing shift and years of ambivalent leadership. The chief architect of the boom is the state’s decisive Governor Mitch Daniels, President Bush’s former budget director. In Washington, Daniels drew scorn from congressional big spenders, acquiring the nickname “the blade” for his cost-cutting and privatizing ways. (The moniker could just as easily apply to his sharp wit and intellect.) The spenders in Washington, however, won those battles — big time — swallowing the blade and earning today’s enmity from the Republican base. But now Daniels is back home and in charge, and he is engineering a turnaround of an entire state with …

Let There Be Bandwidth

_{Bret Swanson
March 7, 2006}

Ma Bell’s back: Run for your lives! — or at least to the halls of Congress. That, it seems, is the overheated conventional wisdom. But the $170 billion combination of AT&T and BellSouth into the world’s largest telecom company is a perfectly natural progression of business and technology. The merger will rationalize a market beset by decades of political mismanagement. Some 22 years ago, Judge Harold Greene famously ruled that AT&T violated antitrust law and broke up the company along two axes. First, he divided the telecom market into local and long-distance. But just 15 years later, fiber optics and mobile phones obliterated long-distance as a meaningful market, replacing it with fixed-price, anywhere-in-America bundles, which are now under assault from voice …

Indiana Adopts Nation’s Best Broadband Policy

_{Telecom deregulation and statewide video franchise to spur massive fiber optic investments, new broadband services}_{Bret Swanson
March 3, 2006}

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Bret SwansonSenior Fellow(317) 663-0509 INDIANAPOLIS —”This week Indiana adopted the best communications law anywhere in the nation and took a bold leap into the 21st century,” said Discovery Institute senior fellow and Indiana resident Bret Swanson. “Amazingly, it’s already working. The bill was passed just Tuesday night, but already—just three days later—I have seen telecom crews surveying rights of way near my house to lay new optical fiber.” On Tuesday, February 28, the Indiana House of Representatives approved a comprehensive telecom reform, HB 1279, by a count of 79-18. The Senate had previously approved the bill 42-7. Gov. Mitch Daniels has said he will sign the measure into law. “With leadership …

My View: Our Biggest Obstacle To Real Broadband

_{Bret Swanson
February 26, 2006}

Ten years ago, Washington gave us the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The law’s complex and intrusive implementation by the Federal Communications Commission and the 51 state utility commissions resulted in the $3 trillion technology crash of 2000-02 and has now plunged the U.S. to 16th in the world in residential broadband rankings. Yet for Hoosiers, hope abounds. Indiana is possibly just weeks away from adopting the nation’s most forward looking, pro-broadband communications policy. Heartily endorsed by Gov. Mitch Daniels, the telecom reform and statewide video franchising initiatives now in the General Assembly will spur the deployment of some of the world’s most advanced fiber-optic networks. Through a combination of direct capital investments and productivity …

Statewide Franchising Questions & Answers

_{Bret Swanson
February 14, 2006}

1. What is “statewide video franchising”? Statewide video franchising creates quick, one-stop-shopping for companies that want to build new broadband networks in Indiana. It simplifies a currently fragmented and inefficient system by moving video licensing authority from hundreds of Indiana cities, towns, and counties to the state. In the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s, cities and towns granted franchises to companies who wanted to serve the area with “community antenna” television (CATV), effectively establishing local monopolies for cable TV. The theory was that one company could provide communitywide cable service more efficiently by negotiating the terms, contract, and rates with local governments. These franchise agreements imposed requirements and fees on …

Setting the Record Straight on Statewide Video Franchising

_{Bret Swanson
February 9, 2006}

On February 9, 2006, Tim Oakes of the Indiana Cable and Telecommunications Association wrote an Indy Star opinion column. In addition to resorting to ugly racial and ethnic arguments in a debate over telecommunications, Oakes’ column is simply wrong on many counts. Oakes states: We are particularly distressed by The Star’s support of state-issued franchising of video services and the contention that more competition would be encouraged. That is not true for the following reasons….Competition for video service providers is rampant….Our state also enjoys two satellite providers in every city. Satellite providers are indeed important competitors in the video market. But why is it “not true” that yet another provider in the video market, namely the telecom …

Don’t Ruin the Internet Revival

_{Bret Swanson
January 1, 2005}

With deflation under control and President Bush’s supply-side tax cuts taking hold, the case for a U.S. economic comeback gets stronger every day. But the conventional wisdom is that two of our most important and hardest hit sectors, technology and telecom, have so much capacity and so little confidence that it will be many years before they return to health. With telecom investment down 75% since 2000, economy-wide fixed investment down nine of the last ten quarters, more than 1,000 telecom bankruptcies, a nine-year low in venture capital investments, and a 28-year low in initial public offerings, it will take time to climb out of the deep technology hole.There is new evidence, however, that we are climbing faster than most people think.Despite the Federal Communications …

Loss of Guidant Could Spawn Bigger, Better Things

_{Bret Swanson
October 15, 2004}

Original article Pumping new life into mature humans is the chief business of Indiana’s Guidant Corp. But what happens when Indiana loses one of its six Fortune 500 companies to acquisition by giant Johnson & Johnson and Guidant is no more? Will the Indiana economy quiver? Will our life science ambitions stop churning? Will 170 careers be blocked? Many believe Indiana is a big loser in this deal. But in a systolic capitalist economy of constant motion, the Guidant sale is a monumental boon for the state. Part of the upside is easy to measure. In just the last few months, as rumors of a deal intensified, the market value of Guidant increased by some $7 billion. If the deal with J&J is consummated, the rise will total $9.4 billion. Since Guidant’s public birthday 10 …

What’s behind the Chinese boom?

_{Bret Swanson
January 1, 2004}

The 25-year Chinese boom is no longer a secret. But the reasons for that boom are still poorly understood. Most observers point to a general “opening up,” meaning free trade, low-cost labor, and the emergence of a non-state business sector. These factors are correct as far as they go, but their vagueness shows that Western economists and business leaders still do not understand quite how China is doing it. Most of the world population has endured “low wages” for most of history, yet low wages do not a boom economy make. Likewise, free trade is the foundation of any strong economy, but as Nobel prize winner Robert Lucas has shown, free trade explains only a very small percentage of the 50-year cascade of Asian miracle economies, from Japan to Korea to China . The …

Money and the Middle Kingdom

_{Bret Swanson
September 24, 2003}

Last week George Gilder and I attended the Forbes Global CEO Conference in Shanghai. As we peered out from our windows in the tallest hotel in the world, we saw a once-great cosmopolis rapidly regaining its status as a giant in world commerce and innovation. We had heard that 90 percent of the worlds tall cranes were at work in China, but it was still a surprise to witness the tens of stunning new skyscrapers and thousands of other tall buildings, all at various stages of construction, piercing the coastal haze. As we met with Jack Ma, the founder of the Chinese Internet, toured a Siemens mobile handset plant and the GE global research center, rode one of the worlds fastest trains, the 430-kilometer-per-hour MAGLEV, and drove by many of the numerous semiconductor fabs that will …