No matter how you cut it, the United States is not the world's superpower in broadband Internet service.

So says a new article in Information Week magazine, which runs through a lengthy laundry list of measurements for broadband -- penetration rates, speed, cost -- and comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that the U.S. now trails many other countries when it comes to broadband. The article also makes a strong case the U.S. is falling further behind with each passing day.

Among the many troubling findings in the article:

* The U.S. currently ranks 12th in broadband adoption rates, significantly down from its ranking of fourth in 2001.

* The U.S. is in 20th place by number of households with broadband access and in 19th by individual broadband access. Those ranks have been falling, not rising, in recent quarters.

* The price-per-megabit of connection speed is more than 10 times as high in the U.S. as in Japan. And for sheer speed, overseas offerings blow the U.S. away.

The article also takes to task U.S. Internet service providers and the Federal Communications Commission for their use of misleading data on broadband availabilty and costs. For instance, one recent FCC report defined a ZIP code as "covered" by broadband access even if just a single broadband line was active in that region.

The issue of lousy and misleading data from the FCC is also the subject of a new paper from a group called the Data Consortium for Media and Communications Policy titled "Toward a Federal Data Agenda for Communications Policymaking."

The paper contains a whole raft of recommendations for improving the quantity and quality of data collected by the government to inform the debate on communications policy. Hopefully, policymakers will have broadband service and will be able to quickly hop on the Internet and read those recommendations.