"If Wheeler does propose to reclassify ISPs and regulate them under Title II of the Communications Act, that would be a stinging defeat for ISPs"
I feel this adversarial perspective is unnecessary. Title II is good for anyone who wants to build a good Internet Service Provider.
If you're an ISP, and you don't want to build a good ISP, that's bad for your business with or without Title II. Title II just provides a foundation for protecting customers of such idiots while they are in the process of going out of business.
It would be a stinging defeat for the main major actually existing ISPs, all of whom have been actively fighting any net neutrality regulation and have especially opposed the idea of Title II reclassification.
The adversarial perspective may slightly imprecise in identifying the one side ("ISPs" as opposed to "the major ISPs now in existence"), but is otherwise an accurate description of the facts.
It would be a stinging defeat for their expensive lobbyists, who will be fired.
Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, and Verizon won't change much.
A lot of people forget that AT&T, Verizon, and Google put forth Net Neutrality legislation that was perfectly good, but limited temporarily to "wireline" services, because they wanted time to regulate wireless.
That was like three or four years ago, so the argument at the time that we couldn't wait for wireless regulation is completely insolvent, since we also still don't have wireless regulation, and Title II is unlikely to cover wireless services, at least in this round - though I could be proven wrong.
Look, I'm an anti-capitalist, anti-corporate activist, but most people, fellow engineers included, have no idea what they're talking about with Net Neutrality. Most people are protecting the interests of Netflix, who is a major corporation with a massive technology budget dwarfed only by its' massive budget for paying the MPAA.
But please, keep regurgitating Netflix's talking points about how noone will be able to start a company in their basement ever again - an odd complaint, since before Comcast throttled Netflix to something like 70% of the total Comcast network, Netflix themselves may have been causing problems for people trying to launch companies from basements or garages, or just check their e-mail.
Title II is a victory for the internet, it should be a utility, I've been saying this for the entire 20 years of my career since I was involved in Time Warner's beta test of Roadrunner and noticed that as an entertainment service, it wasn't regulated like my ISDN line.
But the way this is all going down, it's clear to me that something is happening behind the scenes, and I think it looks like Netflix pouring water into a bucket with a few drops of Net Neutrality.
> "But please, keep regurgitating Netflix's talking points about how noone will be able to start a company in their basement ever again - an odd complaint, since before Comcast throttled Netflix to something like 70% of the total Comcast network, Netflix themselves may have been causing problems for people trying to launch companies from basements or garages, or just check their e-mail."
If Comcast's networks are configured sanely, then no amount of Netflix streaming would be able to interfere with email or any other sparse flows, because the packets being dropped at congestion points would belong mainly to the heaviest bandwidth users - the Netflix streams themselves. Netflix cannot possibly do anything to interfere with non-Netflix traffic on Comcast's network in a way that is not primarily Comcast's fault, just like it's not Bittorrent's fault that it revealed a bunch of network problems.
Yes, we could go far down that road, I just think Netflix makes for a poor example case. They have stirred up a lot of this discussion, which is not about them at all.
Furthermore, "configured sanely" would not be neutral, IMO. I'm in favor of regulating, but you just described why neutral networks are bad. ;)
You're presenting a horrible false dichotomy here. There are options other than racketeering or having all your equipment limited to large dumb FIFO queues. Active queue management strategies can ensure that flows with different traffic patterns cannot starve each other, without explicitly classifying them based on protocol or customer; all ports and IPs get the same rules applied to them.
VoIP and streaming video and email and everything else can coexist automatically just like interactive and batch processes get handled implicitly without starvation by CPU schedulers. Furthermore, good AQM/SQM usually results in better performance for everyone - even the Netflix users - by eliminating unnecessary retransmissions and other harmful side-effects of poorly managed congestion.
Nobody is advocating for a definition of "neutral" that would exclude such techniques except for people who are trying to make neutrality sound bad.
interactive and batch processes get handled implicitly without starvation by CPU schedulers? ;)
Look, I'm just saying that the non-technical language being used to advocate for net neutrality poorly matches the technical language, and that will cause problems when properly writing or understanding the language of such law is viewed by non-technical people as providing an opportunity for the industry to self-regulate. I don't entirely disagree, but it's irrelevant if I do, because such human concerns are likely to be raised and it would be possible to write better regulation, IMO, if we avoided the word 'neutral'.
I think, for instance, that a lot of people outside the industry conflate paid prioritization with paying for dedicated bandwidth capacity via high commits. Furthermore, some of the most popular arguments have been provided by Netflix and don't entirely hold water when applied to all parties - if I have bytes and enough people want them, should my provider be required to come to my place and constantly upgrade the link until it cannot be saturated?
[ I know that over time, Netflix refined their argument, but that was more or less how they started the conversation ]
I just think there's a disconnect, I am particularly concerned at how many people are like, "I am for Net Neutrality because I want the government's hands off my Internet!".
[ tilts head ] I'm not sure that's the conversation I want to be having. ;)
The EU net neutrality rules include that a neutral network can use throttling tools in order to handle temporary network congestion.
The key word here is "temporary", which mean a ISP can't oversell their capacity and then use throttling in order to continue selling once the capacity is full 24/7. You turn throttling from being a tool to generate profits, into a technical tool for handling congestion and establish reliability of the network. A term that technicians has in their tool belt, rather than business executives.
FCC decision is about policy. Deciding whom and why throttling is used is in my view the core issue being described with NN rules, and is 100% political in nature rather than technical.
> A lot of people forget that AT&T, Verizon, and Google put forth Net Neutrality legislation that was perfectly good, but limited temporarily to "wireline" services, because they wanted time to regulate wireless.
> That was like three or four years ago
People probably "forget" that because that didn't actually happen -- even ignoring the subject "perfectly good" description, AT&T, Verizon, and Google did not propose net neutrality legislation 3-4 years ago; in fact, four-and-a-half years ago Google was supporting and AT&T opposing an alternative discussed at the FCC to use Title II. [0]
Just because YOU don't remember it doesn't mean it didn't happen. In the ensuing time since four and a half years ago, other things than the singular event you linked have happened.
Those three companies definitely put forth a proposal with language designed to address 'fast lane' type of concerns, though that tired metaphor is very difficult to accurately apply, since internet traffic is more like water than cars.
Look, I'm not here to say, "Hey the market will take care of this and AT&T and Verizon and Google are Good Actors(tm)", I am simply stating that they came forth with a proposal whose only shortcoming was being restricted temporarily to wireline services. That happened, and at the time, everyone was up in arms about it only being wireline.
After that juncture, rarely was Net Neutrality discussed, esp in non-technical circles, until the Netflix debacle.
> Just because YOU don't remember it doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Well, no, the fact that what you describe didn't happen means it didn't happen. I've found the details of something that did happen on the same general subject, and involving some of the same actors, at about the time you describe [0][1], but it differs from your description:
> AT&T, Verizon, and Google
Just Verizon and Google.
> put forth Net Neutrality legislation
They actually put forth a set of "key elements" that they argued should be included in net neutrality legislation. [0]
> that was perfectly good, but limited temporarily to "wireline" services, because they wanted time to regulate wireless.
It was limited to wireline services (but for the transparency provision), and, in addition, allowed any provider that provided wireline services complying with the neutrality provision unlimited permission to offer any non-neutral services so long as they were distinguished in "scope and function" from the neutral service. [0; "Additional Online Services"] So, it didn't so much require wireline broadband neutrality as require wireline providers to offer a neutral service at some price point as a precondition for offering non-neutral services.
It also explicitly denied the FCC rulemaking authority, limiting the FCC to case-by-case enforcement and issuing reports to Congress. [0; "Case-by-Case Enforcement"]
Also, the temporary part is not entirely accurate. The stated reason for not including wireless services was conditions at the time, but there was nothing temporary about the exclusion (that is, the "key elements" proposed did not include any conditions for imposing wireless neutrality.) [0; "Wireless Broadband"]
> I am simply stating that they came forth with a proposal whose only shortcoming was being restricted temporarily to wireline services.
The things for which the proposal was criticized at the time for included:
1) Moving from the then-existing FCC rules "fixed" vs. "mobile" distinction where stronger neutrality rules existed for fixed and some, but weaker, neutrality rules existed for mobile to a "wireline" vs. "wireless" distinction where no neutrality rules applied to wireless. (Many neutrality proponents were also criticizing the existing FCC rules for the weaker mobile rules, but this was seen as even worse.)
2) Explicitly including a "key element" permitting wireline operators to offer any non-neutral services
so long as they also provided a service meeting the neutrality rules, and expressly limiting the FCC's authority to deal with such additional services to issuing reports. [2]
3) Imposing all the rules and loopholes through statute and including a "key element" expressly limiting the FCC rule to case-by-case enforcement and excluding rulemaking. And proposing encouragement of non-governmental dispute resolution in the framework. [3; "Meaningful harm"]
I'm implying that they are "watering down" the legislation. If you aren't a native english speaker, this may not have come across clearly.
My implication is that Netflix is trying to accomplish something in their interest which will be "flavored" as "Net Neutrality" (let's call it 'regulated internet', since I don't think purely neutral, unconfigured networks will yield our goals), and that they are using sympathetic arguments with little connection to the actual legislation or substantial issues at question to distract us all, as an act of misdirection, like a magician.
The unfortunate result may be that we have something that looks and smells like Net Neutrality, but is empty, serves corporate interests, does not address the things on the protest signs everyone is posting on Facebook, and we will have paid for it with our own misguided moral outrage.
In that case, someone should read through the legislation that Netflix is actually proposing, and explain how it isn't really about Net Neutrality... then we can blame Netflix for misdirecting us and propose some real, useful legislation.
> someone should read through the legislation that Netflix is actually proposing
Has Netflix proposed legislation? AFAICT, they've not proposed specific legislation or regulation, but filed formal comment [0] on the last FCC proposal opposing its approach and advocating regulation under Title II authority (but without specifically advocating details of what the regulations should be adopted under Title II authority.)
No, not really. It would likely commoditize the service of providing Internet addressable IP routing and set it on a path for cutting all of the margin out of the business for the ISP, while likely doing nothing to cut the overall cost of the combined service to the consumer. The companies that own the lines would still take the lion's share of the profit under a title II scenario - they'd just take it in different ways than they do today. Line sharing rules weren't effective for DSL, and I don't see how the same dance played out 15 years later would have any different results.
We need to do something, I just don't think title II is the right way to go.
Define "good internet service provider"? ISP's are businesses. Businesses exist to make money. Regulations like net neutrality push in the direction of turning ISP's into "dumb pipes" and there's no money in building "dumb" anything, and certainly not enough to justify the tens of billions of dollars ISPs invest every year into their networks.[1]
Differentiation and bundling is something you see in many areas of the tech sector. Facebook doesn't open up their platform and infrastructure for anyone to access however they want. They carefully control the points of entries onto their service, and affiliations with other services, etc.
At the end of the day, users are willing to pay, e.g., $15/month for Netflix, and don't care about who gets what part of that money. Fights over net neutrality and copyright are about how this $15 gets split up between: content creators, infrastructure providers, and user-facing websites.
[1] If you look into the actual finances of cable and fiber, you'll find, for example, that both Verizon FiOS and Charter would be losing tons of money if they didn't bundle video services along with internet access.
Sonic.net is, for my money (and they get my money, rather than Comcast or someone else who would sell me a fatter, but less capable or otherwise somehow restricted, pipe for less money), a perfect example of a "good ISP".
What makes them good? They act like a dumb pipe. They don't block things. They don't log things. They don't throttle things. They don't care what I use my service for. They fix things when things break. They stay out of my way.
And, somehow, they manage to bring in enough money that they're deploying FTTP trials in multiple cities.
Historically, there have been many successful utility providers that earned a lot of money producing simple products. Telephone companies, power companies, and oil refineries, neither won a stronghold by producing "smart" products. Most however did produce illegal monopolies.
1) Utility providers have historicaly been legal monopolies. I.e. in return for rate regulation, they get protection from competition.
2) The telephone network was a marvel of engineering at the time. Same for the power grid, power plants, oil refineries, etc. That infrastructure is the product of huge amounts of "hard engineering."
Satellite, 4G and microwave connections are poor substitutes for a wired connection. The sheer amount of latency and packet loss makes them not even an option for my connection. I would hardly call them competitive. For a wired connection, I have precisely one option: Comcast.
Even if latency and packet loss weren't an issue for my use, there are additional restrictions that come in to play. For instance, my HOA doesn't allow any satellite dishes or microwave antennae to be mounted in the neighborhood. While petitioning my HOA for change would be much easier than trying to petition for national legislation, why should those companies be allowed to divvy service areas like gangs agreeing to stay out of each others' "turf"?
A duopoly is no better than a monopoly for all intents and purposes. It creates the illusion of choice. ISP A sucks at this, this and this, whereas ISP B sucks at that, that and that. There's a voting analogy to be made there, but let's try to stick to the topic at hand....
> Point-to-point microwave latency should be the same as fiber latency at the same distance.
Actually, it's often less because the microwave travels in a straight line while the fiber has to follow the utility poles or trenches (which often aren't in a straight line due to right of way issues). High frequency traders performing latency arbitrage use microwave dishes instead of fiber because it's a fraction of a second faster than using fiber connections on a cross-country connection.
Microwave dish systems are, however, a nightmare to support because transmission can be affected by the weather, birds, and a whole lot of other things. They also aren't very high bandwidth, and if you have a lot of dishes that means a lot of interference. I'd say they're perfectly fine for things like extending your LAN to your cabin up on a mountaintop, but not great tech to run an ISP off of (though people still try).
Does 4G really offer much pure competition when the two biggest (by number of subscribers) wireless companies, Verizon and AT&T, also do business in FTTP/DSL services in many of those very same markets?
I'd be psyched to get a broadbrand provider that works like my electric company. The rates are reasonable, the power sufficient, the reliability is very high.
The electric utility in Chicago just decommissioned a pair of century-old coal plants that were costing the city tens of millions of dollars a year in negative externalities. Yeah, the electric utilities are exactly who I want investing in infrastructure that has becomes obsolete in 5-10 years.
Well my utility is a distribution company, not generation, so their infrastructure is mostly wires and substations. The equivalent for broadband would be fiber cables and switching offices, which seem like they actually could last for a very long time.
Once fiber is run to every house, I can't imagine why it would ever need to be replaced. I think it's actually physically impossible to have a faster data transport medium.
Didn't we just go through the BPON -> GPON upgrade? If you're just talking about the fiber, you're not even talking about the last mile. It's the last 100 feet. What about all the equipment cabinets in every neighborhood?
What about them? Once they're sited and hooked into the lines, replacing the gear inside is not difficult.
The question is whether a regulated monopoly could provide good broadband connectivity at a good price. Equipment upgrade scheduling is an implementation detail.
And it's a detail that is already priced into the service. It should be possible for such a monopoly to provide the same level of connectivity as Verizon or Comcast at lower prices, because for their current prices Verizon and Comcast already provide that level of connectivity plus content and software and marketing.
Big ISPs do everything necessary for connectivity, but they also develop and sell products that run on that connectivity. For example Comcast's on-demand and DVR everywhere solutions compete directly with services like Netflix, HBO Go, NBC.com, ESPN 3, etc. Developing, maintaining, and marketing that costs Comcast a lot of money--money that a connectivity-only monopoly would not need to spend.
It would be like if your electric company owned the lines, owned the power station, and sold you appliances like TVs and washing machines. Instead, electric companies just sell electricity, and everyone else sells you things that use electricity. I can't think of a reason that a similar architecture would not work for the Internet.
When it comes to oil producers and Telephone companies, both has been fined heavily for doing illegal monopolies. If there have been legal monopolies in trade for regulation, those companies would had not been found guilty in both US and EU courts.
As for your second point, my comment is only about dum products, not competition in production of said products. The cheaper you can produce a product, the more reliable the product chain is, the better a given company will do in profits.
>At the end of the day, users are willing to pay, e.g., $15/month for Netflix, and don't care about who gets what part of that money. Fights over net neutrality and copyright are about how this $15 gets split up between: content creators, infrastructure providers, and user-facing websites.
This is incorrect, the actual fight is about killing Netflix as a business. The idea is to gradually force Netflix to raise their prices to a point where it no longer seems to be a cheap alternative to cable/satellite television.
What I don't understand is how exactly ISPs managed to be declared not utilities.
Does no-one remember the really old acoustic coupled modems where you had to literally pick up the phone (utility) and place it on the receiver? All that happened was that we started plugging the phone line directly into an integrated modem - it's still going down the phone line for most people.
An ISP is a telecoms provider and should technically already be regulated as one...
ISPs ran on top of telecom service, which itself ran on telecom infrastructure, not that differently than any business that received phone calls, except it utilized telecom more heavily.
Later, with DSL, service was provided over the same infrastructure telecom used, blurring the line a bit. Additionally, by this point, the internet was becoming more important to daily life.
Now, we have telecom and other services offered on top of the network service which is provided on infrastructure designed for networks, not telecom.
So I would say, yes, an ISP is a telecoms provider, but they didn't really start that way.
Edit: I'm being sort of loose with "telecom" here. I'm using more in the "what we regulate" sense than the "what the word means" sense.
I don't even think telecom is ambiguous or used loosely in this regard; comcast provides telephone service, and "telecom", short for "telecommunications", is defined as "communication over a distance by cable, telegraph, telephone, or broadcasting."
I'm pretty sure telephone lines are indeed today regulated as utilities. That's why I can get DSL service from a company other than Verizon, even though Verizon owns all the phone lines in my neighborhood.
No one ever put the phone modem on cable networks, though, or fiber optics, or wireless. None of those are regulated as utilities, so the only service providers on those lines are the companies who own the lines. This is a big reason Verizon has sunk almost all of their recent investment into FiOS and wireless.
It's not really that simple - try to remember how cable companies started. The basic idea is that if you lived in a remote area and the TV signal was blocked by mountains, you and a bunch of your neighbors would build a tower up on a ridge with an antenna and some signal boosting equipment. Then along came satellite TV (think 6m dishes, not DirecTV), so instead of a terrestrial antenna, the coax cables hooked up to a satellite dish.
This is pretty much how cable worked until the mid-90s: cable wasn't much more than a way to broadcast satellite video content using hardware that was tunable by consumer TVs. Cities had been granting exclusive licenses for years and nobody thought much of it. Regulation was unnecessary because the market was so heavily fragmented, and even the huge players didn't serve more than a few hundred thousand homes. Since satellite dishes were relatively cheap and needed to be placed in every market, there was no benefit from economies of scale, and thus no market pressure to consolidate.
Enter DOCSIS. Cable companies figured out they could sell bidirectional 10mbps Internet connections with very few modifications to their infrastructure by utilizing unused frequency bands along with signal compression and encryption. This was in the days before ADSL, and most customers were on 56k dialup, so it was a big leap. ADSL was already obsolete by the time it was widely available, and cost the telcos significantly more to deploy than DOCSIS did for the cable companies. DOCSIS adoption happened very fast - and it was a lot cheaper to deploy DOCSIS if you had already done it before.
Internet access DOES benefit from economies of scale since terrestrial connections are far faster than satellite ones, and can be aggregated to take advantage of time sharing effects. Therefore it made sense to start connecting the various cable systems across the country, and massive consolidation happened faster than the regulators were able to react. Add in a dash of the deregulatory fever that started in the late 90s under Clinton and continued under Bush, and you have a recipe for hands-off regulation of an industry that didn't need regulation only a few years prior. Nevermind the FCC was so preoccupied with sorting out the ILEC/CLEC mess that they totally missed cable sneaking in the back door of their outdated regulatory framework.
Anyway, regardless of how you feel about the issue now, it's pretty easy to see how we got where we are today. All of the decisions made sense at the time, because we couldn't foresee how things would play out when we were in the moment.
TLDR: Cable used to be harmless and fragmented until DOCSIS came around in the mid 90s. The government wasn't used to things happening at Internet speed, so by the time it became apparent that cable companies were competing with traditional telcos, it was too late.
> Mountain View pointed out that if broadband internet access is declared to be a Title II service, then Google Fiber should be granted the same access as other utilities to poles and other essential infrastructure. It went on to say that doing so would actually "promote broadband deployment and competition."
Still not sure what you do in an overbuilding scenario. Those poles have physical restrictions such as weight and volume. You can't have 10 different telcos serve a neighborhood: there would just be too much gear on the pole. So how do you decide who gets the space on the poles? The sensible argument says you put them up for bid in an auction, but then the incumbents still have a huge sunk cost advantage.
You spin out the vertical. If the consumers can support ten services, then those services should be able to support one infrastructure provider investing in better/stronger poles.
There would be an initial land rush if the poles were to be opened, and a large number of providers would likely fail sometime after that as the market shakes things out. Even if the market will converge on 3 or 4 providers, there may be initial demand for pole access by 10+ providers. Assuming the physical limitations on the poles are less than the demand, how should a regulatory body decide which providers get access and which ones don't?
In the end, any shared infrastructure problem inevitably ends up with a limited franchise framework because it's the most efficient way to do it. The FCC has tried regulating through this framework for years via spectrum auctions, and all they've really done is provide a form of tax revenue from the big telecoms to the FCC. The spectrum is often sold with restrictions that are eventually waived quietly if the winners hold them for a little while, and they get sold to the big national players anyway.
This is exactly why Republicans want to fight it. The number of Republicans that subscribe to and believe in the opinions of The Economist are rather small.
You're fighting a pretty tough natural monopoly to get multiple sets of competing wires. That we have both copper and coax is a relic from the days where they could each only carry specific type of signal.
A form of competition could be fostered by making the wire layers into utilities that wholesale to transit providers. However, it already is this way on the telco side. In most areas, there is little third party interest for investing in competing transit networks, so the ILEC is left as the only provider. Perhaps there would be more interest if latest gen technologies were (de)regulated in the same way, but that undermines investment in new physical wires.
I think the more fitting comparison would be this:
How many roads does your driveway open onto? Just one, right?
Now, would you rather that be a public and regulated road, or a private road where the road owner can set up a tollbooth at the end of the driveway and even charge you extra for driving a Toyota instead of a Ford?
Most people don't need wires. In a normal density neighborhood, wireless on the pole would serve most people's needs. I am absolutely in favor of the last mile being owned by the people and ISPs competing for services and bandwidth. That also means that cross town traffic would be extremely low cost (free or a couple bucks a month).
Wireless in a neighborhood doesn't really address the problem, as you still have to backhaul from there. (And most people would be fine investing in wire from house to pole if they could switch it between providers without digging).
I'm all for community networks, but top-down "federal" policy will never prescribe them.
I was just pushing a specific technological solution for the last mile that is a little cheaper. Yes, a wired connection to every location would be great, but 80% of my neighbors don't need that.
In Seattle we just rolled out an LED streetlight replacement project, it would have been an excellent time to have installed the hardware for city wide mesh network. Power, placement and line-of-site are there at the top of a street light.
They did roll out a mesh network here in Seattle. The problem was that it was police only, and scared everyone. I think they mothballed it till we all forget. I found the controversy mildly funny as the public got up to speed on how WIFI works. I am personally more concerned about private businesses tracking my MAC around the store, which is already pervasive - but not eough to bother turning off WIFI... http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Police-deactivating-contr...
Of course, one can make the argument that fibre would never have privately been built out if it were subject to sharing rules. It would be great if individual communities built out in infrastructure mode, but that push has to come locally because it's never coming from corrupt DC.
Pragmatically, I'm still a huge fan of DSL (thanks to Sonic.net/Omsoft). I haven't even kept aware of what the bigcable caps are looking like these days, but I've had many months where I've done >1TB over ADSL2+ (one third of my available bandwidth).
I'm confused by your post. Are you in favor of government regulation or against?
Historically, government regulation is what has been used to create and maintain monopolies and cartels. The regulation is often pitched under the guise as being for the public good, but is then used for quite the opposite. This trick has been played time and time again in American History.
Tariffs, patents, copyrights, and regulatory capture are all mechanisms that corporations use to grant themselves the privilege of monopoly and protect themselves from competition.
Quoting Rothbard in "Left and Right" [1]:
> Orthodox historians have always treated the Progressive period (roughly 1900-1916) as a time when free-market capitalism was becoming increasingly "monopolistic"; in reaction to this reign of monopoly and big business, so the story runs, altruistic intellectuals and far-seeing politicians turned to intervention by the government to reform and regulate these evils. Kolko's great work demonstrates that the reality was almost precisely the opposite of this myth. Despite the wave of mergers and trusts formed around the turn of the century, Kolko reveals, the forces of competition on the free market rapidly vitiated and dissolved these attempts at stabilizing and perpetuating the economic power of big business interests. It was precisely in reaction to their impending defeat at the hands of the competitive storms of the market that business turned, increasingly after the 1900's, to the federal government for aid and protection. In short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market. Both Left and Right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and anti-business. Hence the mythology of the New-Fair Deal-as-Red that is endemic on the Right. Both the big businessmen, led by the Morgan interests, and Professor Kolko almost uniquely in the academic world, have realized that monopoly privilege can only be created by the State and not as a result of free market operations.
Most people here, myself included, are too young to remember what the world looked like when other industries were regulated under rules similar to Title II. It's a 1970's style, "ask permission before you do anything" regulatory framework. Such regulation was applied to airlines, trucking, railroads, etc.
One of the most exciting things happening right now is the disruption of retail with vendors like Amazon shipping directly to consumers. None of that would have been possible if it weren't for air cargo deregulation, which allowed UPS and FedEx to come into existence: http://mercatus.org/publication/unleashing-innovation-deregu....
I understand some people want net neutrality, but this is a bad way to go about it.
I'm not too young to remember that. Air transport regulation isn't a particularly good comparison. The current wireless cell phone industry is a much better comparison, because it's already regulated under Title II. If that really meant "ask permission before you do anything," cell phone providers would be having to go before the FCC -- or state commissions -- to introduce new service plans or even change existing ones. They do not.
I think it's too easy to leap on the "regulation bad, deregulation good" bandwagon; in practice, it's rarely that clearcut. Look at phone company deregulation in the 90s and the rise of CLECs, Competitive Local Exchange Carriers -- CLECs would never have existed without deregulation, right? That's true, yet it turns out that what created the first C was actually new regulation: incumbent LECs were required to share their networks with competitors. If that sort of "government interference in the market" had happened in the early 2000s with data communications, the end result might well have been having half a dozen different ISPs to choose from no matter where you lived, rather than a choice between your single cable company and your single phone company. (Of course, like what actually happened to CLECs, there's also a good chance that the lack of regulation meant nothing would prevent a series of ever more massive corporate mergers leaving us with the same lack of choice we had before deregulation, but never mind.)
>The current wireless cell phone industry is a much better comparison, because it's already regulated under Title II.
Quoting from the posted article and jiving with my memory: "[...] the FCC explicitly exempted wireless data networks from Title II in 2007"[1].
More specifically, I think only mobile voice services are regulated under Title II[2]. Mobile data (aka mobile broadband) is exempt, provided the FCC follows their own declaration made in 2007.
Because from my perspective, there's more than enough accumulated capital / lobbying / entrenched market positions to make disruption of the market a pipe dream.
In that case, I consider slapping "too burdensome" regulations and then later parring them down the lesser of two evils.
Is or isn't internet access important enough to be treated as a utility? That's what Title II asks in my opinion.
If so, then sort out the implementation details later.
(Disclaimer: In a semi-related note, I support the ACA for the same reasons. Is universal health insurance important enough to codify in law? If so, work on the details after you get that point down on paper.)
> It's a 1970's style, "ask permission before you do anything" regulatory framework.
No one yet who has made this claim has established that Title II classification would mandate the FCC to use that kind of regulatory framework, though I don't think there is any dispute that Title II classification could support such a framework.
Of course, rather than arguing about abstractions, we can argue once actual regulations are proposed, at which point -- and only at which point -- will we actually discussing anything other than what someone speculates might be the proposed regulatory framework.
> Most people here, myself included, are too young to remember what the world looked like when other industries were regulated under rules similar to Title II. It's a 1970's style, "ask permission before you do anything" regulatory framework
Wheeler went in to a little more depth about the upcoming proposed rules, which he says will be circulated within the Commission on February 5 and voted on on February 26. The chairman—who formerly led cable and wireless industry trade groups—said that in the '90s he worked on the industry side as the FCC crafted section 332 of the Communications Act dealing with mobile services and he implied that the section informed the way the FCC has structured the proposed rules.
“It just so happens that 20 years ago I was the guy that negotiated on behalf of the wireless industry to establish Section 332," Wheeler said.
“Section 332 says that wireless should be regulated under Title II as a common carrier, except that the FCC is instructed to forbear from onerous provisions and inappropriate provisions of Title II, except for section 201 and 202, which is just and reasonable, and Section 208, which is consumer protection," he added.
Sections 201, 202, and 208 include requirements for reasonable rates and practices, a prohibition against unjust or unreasonable discrimination in rates and practices, and the establishment of a complaint process. Wireless voice—but not data—is regulated under Title II. The FCC could reclassify both fixed and wireless broadband as Title II if it so chooses.
”So I say to myself, 'ok there is a way to do Title II right, and sure there are many ways to do Title II that would thwart investment, but there are other ways to do Title II,'” Wheeler told Shapiro on stage. “We ought to take a look at how that fits together with consumer protection.”
Wheeler urged listeners to look at the wireless industry under Title II to see how the FCC might enforce it. “There is no need to file tariffs, there is no need to file all these informational activities,” Wheeler said. “The problem we had at that time [in the 90’s] was the wireless industry was having to go before state commissions to change rates.” Having the FCC approve all rate changes, Wheeler seemed to imply, is not what he wants. Obama has also said the FCC should not impose rate regulation.
”We’re gonna have rules that say—we're going to propose rules that say, 'no blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritization,' and that there is a yardstick against which behavior should be measured, and that yardstick was 'just and reasonable,'" he said.
The issue is, of course, that Section 332 does not apply to wireline providers. And the FCC doesn't have the authority to rewrite the Communications Act to impose a quasi-Title II that isn't actually in the statute.
The problem is that we don't have competition because you have to dig up the ground. And, everything else which requires that you dig up the ground is regulated (electricity, water, sewage, etc.)
The ISPs did this to themselves with crappy service which they then tried to enforce by regulation (lobbying, sweetheart laws to stifle local deployments, etc.) The ISPs created the openings, and now they're going to have to live with the problems.
Other countries have to dig up the ground too, and they have competition. And no, not every of those countries has public last-mile infrastructure, the ISPs actually build it themselves.
One thing is for sure, if the define broadband as 25/3; mentioned elsewhere; and do similar for "unrestricted access" or whatever terms they use you can guarantee that is what you will get and likely the most you ever will.
Welcome to mediocrity by regulation. So the new baseline will be less than what I have now and what I have now can cost more since it exceeds the requirements... they can even brand it "ultra" or "extreme".
As soon as ISPs go under such regulation they all arrive at the lowest common denominator.
Why wouldn't companies compete at least as much as now? They might charge more for higher tiers but I don't see any, justification behind your assertions.
Either the ISP aspect of the Internet is open to regulation or it's not. That's true right now.
If it isn't, any net neutrality effort is going to get knocked down sooner or later. You have little to worry about.
If it is, this is the right kind of regulation to have, because it prevents a potential (and arguably current) oligarchy from effectively regulating the service aspect of the Internet.
I'm all for free market economics as the rational default when starting from an even playing field. However, the current market leaders got where they are by being treated as utilities from the start, in terms of subsidy and privilege for placement of infrastructure.
It doesn't make sense to give them protectionist advantages, then go hands off from there. There's a great argument for not doing the former in the first place (albeit one that probably would have prevented the Internet at current scale), but once you've committed you have to follow through.
I'll worry about the slippery slope of further regulation when it starts happening. Right now, I'm considerably more worried about ICE and ICANN jurisdiction issues and copyright/trade treaties, as far as threats to the Internet by the American government and corporate structure go.
What's more interesting about this to me is the "only 25Mbps+ is broadband" news bit from yesterday. Does that create a big loophole for exemption from Title II for the grand majority of US internet service that doesn't meet that bar?
It can't? I don't know about you, but my Comcast performance, both promised and real, has been growing steadily for over a decade, at a much higher rate than the price has increased.
That's not a natural law, that's investment in technology and infrastructure. As that investment looks to be worth less, it'll slow down or cease. Look at Verizon's dramatic reduction in FiOS deployment, for example.
I had better (in terms of both cost and quality) internet living in rural southeast Asia five years ago than I do now, living in a million+ metropolitan area in the US. From my perspective, it realistically can't get worse.
You're one person, there are 300,000,000 others that matter as well, and it's an established fact that Comcast, as a whole, is a horrible company. Their customer service is atrocious, and something I myself have had to deal with.
John Oliver had it right, it is literally "preventing Cable Co. Fuckery"
That's only half the equation, though. The other half is whether Comcast allows you full use of the line in terms of what services can push to you.
As far as whether your bandwidth will continue to go up and prices go down (comparatively), it almost certainly will if more competitors are allowed to deliver to your house.
What's trickier there is new deployment, but that's what the utility model is all about: protect new deployment of infrastructure for long enough to make rollout worth it, in exchange for a guarantee that it will be usable by the public at large without preference.
That gives you, in essence, the telephone model: copper lines protected until (probably subsidized) costs to the provider are recouped, they're a commodity and no further enhancement will occur, then alternate providers let in on them for competition. Tech changes, protect that tech rollout, repeat.
Sure it's worth less, that's why Google is deploying Google fiber...
It's worth "less" (and essentially from their market perception today) which doesn't mean it's worth little or worthless, but of course in a monopoly/oligopoly your profits are bigger and you control the market.
Sure it's worth less, that's why Google is deploying Google fiber...
If Google really believed in the potential profitability of fiber, they could spend $20 or $30 billion over the next few years to get it in every major metro area. But they won't, because it wouldn't be.
If you're considering a multi-year nationwide build-out, what's the harm in another year or two delay to allow the regulatory situation to change to make the expansion drastically easier? If it were the actual digging of trenches that were expensive, Google Fiber would have never happened at any scale in the first place. Google's words and actions make it clear that the deciding factor is the costs of the permits and other local regulatory overhead, not the physical installation.
Google fiber is plain an simple a serious enough competitor to the major telcos that they'll continue to invest in fast internet tech such as infra upgrades and fiber optics.
Google stands to make money from more people using the internet and being able to send more content to users. If they can spend enough money to force the incumbents to improve performance, they still win.
Pretty sure the point of google fiber was to break even, but not really to ever be profitable. It is more of an insurance policy. They could light up all of the dark fiber they own and be a real problem with the major ISPs if they so chose.
The existence and decline of FiOS is the perfect example of unintended regulatory consequences. FiOS never would have happened if fibre hadn't been excluded from unbundled access requirements. Line-sharing was eliminated around the same time, bringing on the decline of alternative DSL providers. So Verizon spends a few years doing FiOS build outs instead of improving their copper networks, the DSL competition dies off, and now they've stopped investing in their whole wireline business in favor of wireless.
I don't know what Title II means for ISPs. I see nothing wrong with companies paying for a "fast lane", if we define the fast lane as paying for a level of service to my devices in excess of what I'm buying (ie: If I'm paying for 6Mbps of service, Netflix can buy me an extra 10Mbps to guarantee a better streaming experience). I do have a problem with ISPs purposefully allowing their peering connections to become overloaded in order to extract payment from content companies. I'm not paying Comcast for 100Mbps of bandwidth to their speedtest servers; I'm paying for 100Mbps of bandwidth to the content companies' networks!
I don't think a fast lane means what you're saying. It means packet prioritization, so that a saturated network delivers the "fast" packets sooner and/or more reliably. Companies that push data to consumers (Netflix, etc.) would pay for this prioritization. Think QoS rules, but with companies that have paid for preferential treatment at the top.
Fast lane is a made up political gobbledygook. I think it's fine for an ISP to sell whatever kind of preferential treatment they like to any company which freely chooses to purchase it, with the caveat that they service I'm paying for isn't being degraded.
If Microsoft wants to pay so that streaming stuff to my Xbox doesn't affect my data cap, that's goovy.
If Netflix wants to pay to guarantee they can stream 10Mbps to my devices while my other devices are using the whole 100Mbps that I'm paying for, that's cool too.
If Hulu wants to pay for QoS that prioritizes their traffic to me above my other traffic, that's not cool. Bandwidth management within my home is my domain and I've got my own QoS rules, thank you very much.
When Comcast lets their peering links get saturated in order to force Netflix to pay them, that's absolutely bad. I'm paying for access to the Internet and purposefully withholding the necessary peering to the content I'm interested in means that I'm being ripped off.
TLDR; I believe that ISPs should peer on a settlement-free basis with anyone who can deliver a commercially reasonable level of traffic to any of their peering points, without regard to ratios. And I believe they should be able to sell any kind of paid prioritization they like that does not degrade my other traffic.
I'm not as worried about paying for cap subsidies, which is basically what your 1 and 2 is about.
Keep in mind that still damages the free market for new services, though, because now they don't just have a technological barrier to entry, they have a purely financial/administrative one. I prefer the T-Mobile (music) model where they allow a whole class of services priority, but not on a corp-by-corp basis.
Your Hulu/#3 example is what I'm pretty sure Wheeler's alternative (call it fast lane or whatever) amounted to, before it was shouted down. We both agree that's a pretty horrible thing.
Because if Rdio and Spotify don't count against my data cap because of a paid agreement, a new entrant into music is probably not going to get much of my attention.
They'd have to be -so- much better than the existing leaders that I'm willing to pay for a higher cap or sacrifice part of my current cap to use them.
That effectively means that to be taken seriously, a new entrant has to pay the ISPs for exemption from the cap. Further, if the ISPs can choose not to make agreements with companies, they become the gatekeepers of who will be successful. Piss them off, and you lose your agreement.
This is anticompetitive, for sure, but the FTC has no jurisdiction over common carriers. AT&T is currently flogging this argument based on cc status on phone to escape reprisal from the FTC about lying about "unlimited" plan vs. their throttling policy that effectively caps such a plan to 5 GB. The say that because they're a phone CC, the FTC has to be hands-off period on all their business concerns.
I suspect that'll be found to be BS. However, if broadband is Title II, but we add an exemption to allow anti-competitive agreements around caps, there's literally zero remedy. It's specifically not under jurisdiction of the FTC unless Congress changes that particular law.
So, not a huge worry of mine as long as it's a "exempt all music, anyone can apply," but big worry if it's "exempt Spotify only." There are plenty of streaming markets that aren't sufficiently mature to be commodities yet (PPV on-demand movies like VUDU, iTunes, CinemaNow, Flixter; remote gaming like OnLive, Sony; etc.) and even the ones that are shouldn't be immune from shakeups.
Providers would be required to allow competitors on their networks. (Similar to how AT&T is required to let other phone companies sell you home phone service over 'AT&Ts' phone line).
This opens up all sorts of good things:
- Faster peak speeds
- Lower latency
- Better customer support / service
- Lower prices
- Stronger net neutrality protections (no throttling Netflix, for instance)
Monopoly ISP's like Comcast / AT&T / Verizon will never do all of these things on their own -- there's no incentive for them to do so.
But if Title II passes, it will make it legal for competitors to start up and reuse the existing infrastructure while new ISPs attempt to build their own, then all of these things will probably occur. Similar to how this all occurred with phone companies when Title II - like protections passed on phone lines.
Serious question - what's the incentive for new ISPs to build their own infrastructure?
As a competitor that's the last thing I would do is build, given the extraordinary cost and political BS involved. I'd put all of my effort into riding existing infrastructure for as long as I could.
Well, my opinion is probably not popular, since very few companies appear to be rolling out fiber.
But as someone who tried (and failed) to raise funds to start an ISP to build their own infrastructure, I would do it because it allows better return on investment.
Title II will (presumably) make cable companies open their cable lines to other customers. This will let competitive companies offer 20-100mbps DOCIS 3.0 service. But that's not super compelling. (It's compelling -- very few people like dealing with Comcast and many might switch on that alone. But you'd be offering roughly the same product they sell)
But fiber is the future, and is a huge competitive advantage. (10x performance for the same price). The first person to lay the fiber in a city doesn't just make money on their own network, they make money on all networks. Title II would make them open those lines up to competitors, but there's a lot of money to be made by getting cash from every subscriber -- even the ones who choose your competitors.
There's no incentive for the second fiber ISP to lay fiber. But for the first one to get there, it's much like a land-grab-to-rent situation. Doing that now (before AT&T and Comcast do it) would be smart -- regardless of whether Title II passes or not.
> Do Not Call List
I think most people are pleased with this.
> The Bush Era FCC was fining people for swearing on TV and Radio.
Not Title II.
> Both parties support SOPA and 6 strikes.
Can happen with or without Title II.
> The FCC regulated phone sex lines in the 1980s.
Not familiar with this one (and I'm not going to research this specific case while at work). Though again, the government could easily decide to regulate this regardless of whether ISPs are under Title II.
My pessimistic prediction: FCC will go for Title II, a legal shitstorm will ensue, it will be determined somehow that they don't have the right to regulate ISPs in that way, then ISPs will start charging per-service and home internet will basically be like cell data plans, but worse (Google Maps requires the maps and navigation package!).
I'm a bit worried that these stories floating around about title 2 being imminent will give the monopolies time to throw more money at the problem to make it go away.
i.e. "convince" Wheeler or get congress to pass a bill.
Or it could be a ploy by Wheeler. Make noise about full regulation, then make the carriers think they have won some concession when he negotiates and implements something lesser.
I feel like this has been the Obama Administration's plan all along, and that everything else has been mostly political theater - mostly to make ISPs look bad and force them to shoot themselves in the foot.
I disagree. My suspicion is that Tom Wheeler wants to dive deeper into the powers of government. By dragging out a decision on net neutrality he has brought the media spotlight to himself. Just think about how many people now know his name. He could probably run for a simple office now and win.
I'm not sure how true that is. Generally heading something like the FCC is a bit of a death sentence to your political career. You are sort of cordoned into the bureaucrat/lobbyist pool.
The large American ISPs (i.e. cable and telephone companies) have made an enormous mistake with their recent attempts to create artificial network congestion to extract rent, and I'm glad that the FCC seems to think that this isn't acceptable behavior. I still wish that the resolution wasn't government regulation.
Everyone should be able to access the Internet, at a reasonable cost that covers their usage and makes a reasonable profit. No packages, plans, quotas or other nonsense -- no limits whatsoever. The fundamental costs of building a network lie in the instantaneous bandwidth provided and the oversubscription ratio, not in how many bits you move in a month or whether your data is going to this site or that site. This is not how things work right now for a lot of people.
Likewise, everyone should be able to serve content to these users, on equal footing relative to the legitimate costs that are being paid. If I'm YouTube, then I should pay (or make a mutually beneficial agreement to peer) for my transit, and my upstream providers should be incentivized to provide quality service (at risk of being replaced). This is how things work right now for most sites.
I think the root problem is that there is competition on only one side, the service provider side, where you can choose from tens or hundreds of transit partners. This side is undergoing substantial consolidation (not good), but I believe a significant part of that is because they have to keep getting bigger to compete with Comcast, et. al. It's an arms race.
End user connectivity, on the other hand, has already been extremely consolidated since the late 90's. There is almost no real competition in most markets, even if multiple providers exist.
Yes, a lot of people have two or more choices for ISPs at home or work. Generally it's between the phone and the cable company (AT&T and Comcast where I live). AT&T is not competitive on performance with Comcast at all, not even remotely close. There are two other good options (who I always try to do business with, when I can) in the area: Sonic.net and Webpass. They are either limited in terms of performance or in availability (or both), and their respective userbases are a fraction of AT&T's or Comcast's. They both support network neutrality.
Why do they support it when AT&T and Comcast don't? I think it's because they aren't monopolies who were gifted substantial control of Internet at public expense, they aren't trying to be paid two or three times for the same bandwidth, and they aren't trying to prop up giant unrelated dinosaur businesses on the backs of their Internet service fees. They're both in one business, and they compete for that business, and they know that if they fail to perform adequately then they will lose that business.
This is what we need to bring to all ISPs everywhere in the country, and we need it way more than formal network neutrality laws. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner did not build the Internet, so why do they get disproportionate control over it by virtue of having some buried copper that runs to my house? It is inconceivable to me that we might allow any of them to acquire more subscribers and more territories. They should be broken up.
If a company is allowed to have a monopoly in an area, fine. Maybe that makes sense. They should not be allowed to have a monopoly (or duopoly) that spans half of the country though. Chop up Comcast ala Standard Oil: one Comcast for every state (or even better, for every major metropolitan area) they operate in. They may still try to play shenanigans with Internet connectivity, but their bargaining power is now vastly reduced.
One thing that disturbs me about the Net Neutrality discussion is that nobody's talking about what we might be giving up. I've learned a lot about unintended effects of regulation. I have some ideas about what those might be, like reduced infrastructure investment by the ISPs, but as a community this discussion seems absent. Are there others out there that are concerned about the unforeseen consequences like I am?
In particular, it feels like Net Neutrality will remove the incentive for video streaming services to put investment into new and improved compression algorithms.
I worry about streaming video squeezing out simpler tcp/ip.
I feel this adversarial perspective is unnecessary. Title II is good for anyone who wants to build a good Internet Service Provider.
If you're an ISP, and you don't want to build a good ISP, that's bad for your business with or without Title II. Title II just provides a foundation for protecting customers of such idiots while they are in the process of going out of business.