The OECD global broadband rankings released earlier this week showed the United States dropped further when it comes to broadband penetration. The politicized and polar response to the report is a prime example of why the nation has no broadband policy in place -- we simply cannot agree on how to proceed, much less come to a common understanding that there are issues regarding rural broadband deployment in America that may need addressing. A collection of opinions from the week:

•Municipal Broadband Attorney Jim Baller (who we've interviewed twice) has this to say:

"The great Adlai Stevenson once observed that Americans can't read the writing on the wall until their backs are up against it. How much worse must things get for America before we start to take seriously the need to develop a national broadband strategy and concrete action plans to implement it? Please reread our 8-step plan in the light of today's news."

•Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps:

"Every year brings more bad news as the United States slides farther down the broadband rankings. It's a national embarrassment and the only way to change it is to develop a broadband strategy like every other industrialized nation has already done. These rankings aren't a beauty contest -- they're about our competiiveness is a country and creating economic opportunity for all our people."

•Media Reform Group Free Press:

"The growing digital divide between the United States and the rest of the world will have real-world consequences," said S. Derek Turner, research director of Free Press. "The growth trends indicate that the United States is likely to continue to fall behind the rest of the world in broadband penetration, which will have lasting and significant effects on U.S. economic performance on the global stage."

•The National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA):

"Deployment and adoption of high-speed Internet service in the U.S. is a success story that shouldn’t be portrayed as a failure because of misleading statistics -- Cable’s broadband service is available to at least 94 percent of all U.S. homes, McSlarrow pointed out. At the same time that broadband availability has increased, McSlarrow said, the speed of the service also has jumped while prices have declined."

•The NTIA and U.S. State Department:

"The U.S. Government took note this week of the publication by the OECD Information, Computers, and Communications Policy (ICCP) Committee's study on broadband use and the accompanying statistics on the use of broadband services in OECD member countries -- we are concerned about the methodology on which the new statistics were based, and their failure to capture important factors,particularly their reliance on user subscriptions as the measure of broadband use."

•Conservative Congressman Fred Upton:

"It is important to understand two things: first, the methodology that the OECD uses to produce these relative rankings and how it understates the actual level of broadband connections in the U.S.; and second, that this ranking reflects the fact that we are just now overcoming the anti-infrastructure, anti-investment and anti-broadband decisions made by the FCC in its implementation of the 1996 Act during the 1996-2002 timeframe."

•Industry-funded "Citizens Against Government Waste" (CAGW):

"Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today urged Congress to say no to a national broadband policy and government intrusion of the Internet.The implementation of burdensome regulations, wasteful subsidies, and complicated tax breaks that other countries are imposing will only stifle growth and innovation. Competition and the free market must be allowed to continue to work."

There you have it. A broad consensus on how to proceed.

We're sure the comments below will further illuminate just how unified we all are on the issue.