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The Coming Internet Monopolies
scrm writes "'The Federal Communications Commission is quietly handing over control of the broadband Internet to a handful of massive corporations according to this Salon article." Very important stuff; Slashdot has covered this before, but this is a great article which sums up everything that has gone on over the past few years.
I prefer the Internet be controlled by a couple greedy corporations that by a single greedy government with armed forces to back it up.
Call me paranoid, but I'm sticking with Linux, where I know I'm secure.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Isn't long distance telephony infrastructure also controlled by a few massive corporations? Equal access carrier laws and preventing a single company from owning the whole thing has fostered enough competition to really hammer AT&T, for instance.
When TimeWarnerAOL (or Disney or whoever else ends up as the big players) decides you shouldn't be seeing this or that website, or sending this or that data down the wire, you'll care.
Remember, these are the same companies who bought the DMCA - they do not have your interests in mind.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
Yes, but read the article.
In order to be a more interesting read , Salon takes a "sky is falling" approach to points 2 and 3.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Who controls access to the airwaves in the US? The FCC. And who controls the FCC ...?
The majority of consumers can take their pick from 2,3 & 4 broadband providers right now (not resellers). WiFi and 3G will add additional choices. Seems like competition to me - how would a few shoddy DSL resellers improve the situation? I know I *loved* my DSL through Flashcom & Northpoint.
In MANY cases, the companies ARE monopolies, because they DO control the entire market in an area. For instance, Comcast is the only cable internet service provider in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so they have a monopoly on that market.
The term is used correctly, and just because there are multiple companies doesn't mean there can't be multiple monopolies.
Linux is dead.
LU
So you either pay up, or go without. How many here would actually give up the internet in protest? Round about none I'd wager.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Seemingly unbeknownst to many in the USA we actually have access to the Internet here in Europe. I believe it is available in Australia and Japan too.
Certainly in the UK we have similar sorts of difficulties with broadband access, with an effective monopoly supplier in the shape of British Telecom. However, I wouldn't glorify this with an article containing a line like "BT is taking over control of the Internet". Hyperbole anyone?
That the Internet and the networks that happen to make up the Internet themselves are fundamentally two different animals.
Remember the roots of the word. An internet is a network made up of a bunch of networks.
The reason the internetworking in general, and the Internet in particular, work, is because we all agreed on some standards, and a global addressing scheme that ensured unique, routable address space.
Far more important in the long run is making sure that address allocation is impartial and open to everyone. Even now this is erorded.. for reasons that seem unavoidable at present.. but it's still eroding.
You see, before, you could get a block of address space assigned to you, whether or not your network was hooked to anyone elses. Why would you do this? On the mere POSSIBILITY that one day you would hook it up.
Everyone could get unique address space, and network together at will.
Now.. you ahve to prove your precise need for those addresses, and you must get them from your isp. This makes sense if you consider the increasing scarcity of addresses.. but there is a quality that is being lost.
My point is.. we have to make sure that, regardless of who is offering what, that global IP routability is still there, and that Joe Farmer, if he invents a new transmission method, can get routable address space.
Separate platforms exist for separate purposes, and have separate capabilities. While I am as enamored of Bluetooth as anyone it is not the same as a fat cable pipe.
The FCC rulings do not (as I understand them) prohibit one company from owning multiple "platforms" If the local wireless net, and cable, and DSL all come from the same source then nothing has been gained.
In any location where one company has a monopoly on most services such as broadband, etc. Where is the incentive to develop a new "platform"? If a town has cable and DSL controlled by AOL then I have little or no incentive to develop a wireless alternative there. The startup costs will be (as they are for anything) huge. In order to break even (until I get a lot of subscribers) I will have to charge more than AOL can charge. So, while I am depleting my cash reserves trying to undersell them they are a) selling at a fraction lower than me, and b) blocking my ads from running and my web page from working on "their" lines and c)running news on their service saying that I torture kittens in my spare time. Then once I'm gone they can jack up the prices again.
Where is the incentive to invest in infrastructure going to come from? Once you have a service that "works" and are facing no competition, why upgrade? Why waste your cash reserves on making life better for your captive audience when you could be working on expanding your audience.
Monopolies are only good for themselves, and the economists that they pay.
Heck, oligarchy describes nearly every large political system ever.
What would have happened if every auto maker had to build their own highways?
Our national rail infrastructure wouldn't have been destroyed. Hazardous materials could be shipped more safely. There would be far less pollution. And all our base wouldn't be belong to the oil companies and the countries that drill for it.
Doesn't sound too bad to me.
grep -ri 'should work'
Thats a terrible idea.
Ask anyone that owns a car with expensive wheels shod with low-profile tires what they think about how the govenrment handles public roads. One pothole and its a bent wheel and an annoying steering wheel vibration until you replace the wheel.. usually at a tune of several hundred dollars.
Or think of this - the roads are perpetually underconstruction to provide work for the latest general contractor who had a 500 plate at the latest politicians power-lunch.
Government is the most inefficient possible action agency. It has the curious talent of doing the pathalogically worse possible thing in all situations. Destryoing roads that are good, never fixing roads that suck, always destroying traffic flow for months at a time (i have NEVER seen a sign saying 'fines double in construction zones' and actually seen construction WORKERS in said zone!)
So, imagine what internet access would be like if the govt managed the last mile. It'd take 3 days for someone to walk over to the dslam and notice that now _both_ power supplies had failed (the primary having failed 6 months prior and no one cared at the time). it'd take another 2 weeks to get someone from the Power-Supply-Installers union to replace them both (finding this person would require 2 or more layers of contracting agencies).
I dislike big corporate involvement in my data access. I dislike big government involvement in anything. I can choose a different big company, or i can choose no company at all.
When you try and choose no government at all, you usually end up getting shot.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Under current conditions, anyone who can get a good SDSL connection (for instance, Covad/Speakeasy, available in all the major population centers) can, for a bit over $100 a month, run a medium traffic Web server, ftp, a listserv, dns.... You can't do that over cable, and you can't do that over telco ADSL.
Now, you can do that by renting space at a server farm somewhere, but then you'll also need broadband to administer that at all efficiently. On the low end you can match that $100 a month, but in the middle range - say you want to have lots of content available, multiple URLs, custom configurations of Apache and whatever, you're talking about something over $200 a month for a dedicated server, plus your own broadband - tripling the price. So you significantly raise the bar for citizen participation in Internet publication. Where's the public interest in this? It's like giving the dominant newspaper control of the price of paper and ink.
As a small note: cable isn't even in the picture if you don't have cable - and some of us out here have no interest in $35 a month for basic cable - the effective cost of cable broadband is that much higher if you don't want that crap.
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
The large ISPs also promote spam. Consider Qwest, Verio, and UUNET just to name a few. These companies are so large they know they cannot be blacklisted, so they just keep on selling the pink contracts and to hell with the rest of us.
Unforunately, at this point it look like only a national law will even begin to bring those companies to heel (and a law will only affect companies with a significant business presense in the country that has the law...). I hate saying that - I dislike the "There outta be a law...." types, and any anti-spam law will have severe negative consiquences, but this is the direction we are being driven in.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I was wondering if anybody sees this as the same type of monopolistic behavior MS was convicted of when they bundled IE with the OS?
Technically, you cannot have DSL unless you have a phone line. It doesn't have to have voice service on it, but you must at least have a copper pair from your house to the DSLAM (usually to the central office, sometimes to a remote terminal if you're lucky, with a fiber line from the RT to the CO). Since most phone companies keep track of DSL lines based on your phone number (it's basically used as a database key), it would be awkward for them to provice you DSL service without you having a phone number assigned, which you normally wouldn't without voice phone service, but if they had a way to reference it, it could be done.
But, the cost of a DSL line (usually around $30/month not including the ISP cost) is based on the idea that you already have voice phone service, so some of the costs of providing DSL service (such as physical wire maintenance) are covered by the money you pay for voice phone service.
It should be possible for you to get a dry line (a phone line with no dialtone) and put DSL on that. This would be cheaper than phone service, but there would still be a charge for it. However, since demand for this is very small, phone companies have no incentive to offer it.
Does that answer your question?
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You are very mistaken. Capitalism works precisely because it does _not_ assume that people are good and honest. Capitalism assumes that people will act out of self-interest, which is usually true.
If a broadband provider in your area is charging too much or blocking access to things people want, then it's only a matter of time before another alternative is developed to take its place. Someone else will see that there's an opportunity to make some money or spread some goodwill. Intelligent regulations don't make these corrections happen (they happen anyway) they just keep things moving a bit more smoothly.
The subject under discussion is specifically an example of what happens when capitalism is not allowed to correct the problem. The cable companies and other broadband providers got where they are because they were granted an artificial monopoly where competition was prohibited by the government. Some would claim that those were necessary incentives to encourage the huge investment needed to create the infrastructure needed, and that may have been true. But removing those antiquated regulations would change everything. Adding more won't change anything, at least not for the better.
Consolidation is OK so long as individual users mostly have choices on an individual basis. Despite media consolidations, there is more real
media choice today than ever.
Not long ago, I saw a talk on broadband connectivity here in Texas, especially with reference to rural communities; there are alot
of mighty small and isolated communities here in this state. Surprisingly many had access to broadband. Communities of any size at all had access to actual choices - two of cable, DSL, or wireless. Communities which only had one of those did so only because of widespread satisfaction with the 'monopoly' provider. It seems reasonable to believe that competition will spring up if satisfaction thins with that provider.
And, of course, everybody has access to satellite, but it doesn't seem to be needed in surprisingly many places.
Here in Austin, we have monopoly cable companies, and we have DSL mostly provided by a single cable company. Two near-monopolies in terms of individual technologies, but they do compete. Their prices are competitive; they don't dare let their service departments go too far south; they are always running TV ads blasting each other.
And if it doesn't work out, we can always reregulate. No matter what people say about money and politics, democracy will not be suspended
as a result of this decision.
This is good in theory, but if the local provider has a lock on the market, and is blocking content, there is not going to be much you can do. You are dealing with a high infrastructure cost medium. There is a high barrier to entry into the market.
If (and this is a big if) some other provider wants to get in on the action, the first provider (for all intents and purposes a monopoly) can easly squeeze the new provider by dropping thier price and or loosening up the control over the content to passify their current clients.
Even if a second provider wanted to get into the local market they would have to be highly capitalized and would probably resort to the same tactics (almost collusion) that the first provider resorted to.
Just look at all the CLECs carcases near the baby bells. Do you think that Verizon, and all their evil bretheron, just passivly sat by while new competition was gaining a foot hold. Hell no, they fought them every step of the way, in the courts, with predditive pricing, and sloppy/incopentent service.
I hate to say it, but there needs to be strong regulation of at least the last mile or there will never be any competition.
Your arguement is essentially
1) Companies want money
2) The consumer gives them money
3) They must appease consumers for money
1 is correct.
2 They can get money from other companies. For example Disney could pay the ISP to allow more bandwidth for downloading their stuff.
3 In the real world not even close. If their are only 8 companies (sometimes called an olgapoly) controling everything, they will probably tacitly agree to not out do each other since this would lead to "destructive competion."
They will all benfit if they all agree to not lower their prices. (This can often be an unspoken thing. They say let's not lower our prices because our few competitors will do the same and we will gain more market.)
It is different if there are more companies because if company X controls 0.01% of the market and it lowers its prices then it would increase its market share because its competitors would not respond to this because company X has an insignificant affect on the market.
I have been talking about pricing but everything I said also applies to quality of service.
Companies also don't need to improve products if they use fraud and high quality marketing but thats not as relevent to what we're talking about and this post is already to long.
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So are you suggesting that I just "vote with my wallet" on PG&E's brownouts? Obviously, I have no choice as there is not another electricity company serving the greater SF area.
...and THAT's the point of the article. Capitalism also implies that substitutes are available. What if they aren't - and can't be? Then what?