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9th Circuit Overturns FCC's Cable Modem Decision
rednaxela writes "The 9th Circuit today issued a decision overturning the FCC's classification of cable modem service as an 'information service,' stating instead that cable modem service consists of both an 'information service' *and* a 'telecommunications service.' Telecommunications services are classified under Title II of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and are subject to all kinds of regulation. Information Services are classified under Title I, and are largely free from regulation. If upheld, this decision will likely require cable modem providers to open their networks to competing ISPs. Further, this is likely to derail, or at least complicate, the FCC's plans to classify DSL service (which is provided primarily over incumbent telco facilities) as a unified 'information service." Bottom line - the 9th Circuit's decision may well have preserved open access for competing ISPs on all forms of wireline networks.' Here is the 9th Circuit's ruling (PDF).
Dont' worry, the current Vegas Odds on the 9th Circuit Court being over turned are 21:1, based on past history alone.
I hate that Shaw is such a monopoly in my particular region. In cities, they compete with Telus - but frankly, Telus is the greater of the two evils. That's another topic for another day, however.
Out here in Ruralland Canada, Shaw Cable is the only choice for highspeed, and they charge an arm and a leg AND make you sign over your firstborn. It's very annoying. I'd like to see them put in charge of the infrastructure alone, and have mom & pop ISPs handle the cable modems, and the end-user support. They should only have to pay a small per-client licensing fee, and be given free reign to charge what they'd like above that for internet access. They should also have the option of regulating speeds at their own discretion, for various bundle offerings.
Does anyone think this is a good way to break up monopoly power, or is it just silly?
Let's say that there does come pressure for cable companies to lease their lines out to third parties. What about protections to keep those third parties from being charged exorbitant rates for their leased lines?
Holy cow! I thought this guy was evil incarnate. So now, it looks like he's evil incarnate, who's trying to make himself look good.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
maybe now the most-technologically-advanced United States will catch up with third-world South Korea in broadband!!
People are complaining about ISPs not doing enough about the spam problem, and yet people also complain about how on-line privacy is being erroded..
Now, someone please explain to me how these two "goals" (less spam and more privacy) can co-exist with each other. I just really don't get it.
Yes, competition is good, but does that also mean more taxes for cable modem service if it's classified as a telecommunications service?
I'd like some cable modem competition here.
:)
I'd love to see something like this happen here in Australia. You'd have some pretty interesting things happening with Bigpond and Optus customers. Bigpond cable customers would be jumping enmasse to Optus for the better bandwidth policies. Since Bigpond and Optus also run different speeds, it would also be possible for people to use Bigpond on Optus' higher speed cable (and use their bandwidth limits faster).
The biggest benefit though would be for the small ISP's who can't afford to lay cable. They could piggyback onto the cable network and reach more users. Personally, I'd love to use suck my pipe (unlimited bandwidth) on Optus' high speed cable.
To know that you know what you know, and that you do not know what you do not know, that is true wisdom. --Scooby Doo
They covered this in NPR; it's a myth that the 9th circuit gets a higher % overturned. It happens to be one of the busiest circuits (I think *the* busiest), so more cases go through and more cases later get overturned. But their % of rulings later overturned is no higher than other courts.
This is bad for those that lack access to high-speed cable Internet, perhaps because they don't live in highly metropolitan areas. As it becomes more likely that a cable company will have to share its infrastructure, the cable company becomes more likely to drag its heels. For example, Verizon held back the deveopment of DSL in the northeast because they were forced to share their network.
Any thoughts?
Why not open a company that taunts "free P2P sans RIAA risk!", and just lock the P2P to the network only, thus preventing anyone outside from identifying you or snagging your stuff?
If enough privacy could be designed for such a system, I have a feeling people would flock in droves to it. The only problem is the obvious lawsuit that the RIAA would hit you with.
My opinion is that you could win the case based on the internet's ability to remain private, and if the ISP got a radio broadcasting licence, in which case they could effectively bypass any copyright nonsense.
Regulation != Choice
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Just leaving some blood in the water.
It was my understanding that the phone companies had to open their lines up because their infrastructure was in part funded by the government. And a lot of the initial capitol to build a reliable phone system was provided by the taxpayers.
I thought the cable companies totally funded the construction (or purchase of pre-existing) system, and had no government assistance financially or otherwise? If this is the case is it fair to force a private company to allow competitors to use the fruits of their labor?
I picture a similar case being United Parcel Services being forced to share it's truck fleet with the competition, just because no one else can afford to buy their own trucks.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
I didn't say that. Actually, I dislike most of the regulation in the telecomunications industry, but I also can't overlook the possibility that competition could lower my cable bill, or at least give me an alternative provider that might not screw up my billing every month
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My cable internet bill has increased with each aquisition (Comcast formerly AT&T formerly Mediaone) and the last time I had to order basic cable in addition to keep the bill under $60/month. Hopefully another company will now step in so I'll stop dreaming of going back to sucky DSL.
You can't even find a decent ISP anymore. You hear people talking about how this and that company is a monopoly, customer service sucks, they don't deal with spam properly, service inconsistent, etc. Why is that? What the hell is going on!? Why can't there just be a high-speed ISP that does what it's supposed to do? Is it that they just don't give a crap or what? Remember back when Microsoft said that high speed internet was going to take a couple of years longer to come to the mainstream then anticipated? I think there's something fucked up going on. Fuck high-speed internet, fuck technology... fuck computers. The whole industry makes me sick to my bloody stomach.
I'm not anti-microsoft. I'm anti-bullshit. Which means I'm anti-microsoft.
They covered this in NPR; it's a myth that the 9th circuit gets a higher % overturned. It happens to be one of the busiest circuits (I think *the* busiest),
~11,000 cases for the 9th vs. ~8700 for the 5th, next in line. The All Things Considered story was Sept. 17, 2003; "Arguments on Recall Filed with Appeals Court"
The 9th is an astute court, and intentionally "serves up" issues which the Supremes would otherwise neglect or not have before them. Please, before you critize their opinions on this or any other topic, RTFA.
Bush Lies On the Record.
The judiciary defined for itself the role of final vetoer in Marbury v. Madison. Before that (it wasn't around for very long before that, of course) it was designed to be the home of justice. The common man couldn't appeal to the Executive branch and certainly couldn't appeal to the Legislative branch of government beyond his single vote at election time. The courts were designed to be the middle ground between the government and the people.
History has brought us to the point where we look at the courts as some sort of 'check and balance' which can be used to rewrite law, but it wasn't designed to be that way.
Read your Constitution again and find the article that describes the Supreme Court's ability to veto laws. You won't find it in there. What you will find is that the people have put so much trust into the courts (not necessarily a bad thing given the alternatives) that they have essentially allowed the courts to become the legislators.
Seriously. The telcos and cable companies shouldn't have to share their hardware. However, local governments need to make it as easy as possible for competitors to get approval to build new networks. Fiber-to-the-home, anyone? HDTV over IP multicast? The "monopolies" are vulnerable if anyone wants to give it a shot.
If the "monopolies" started doing dumb things like blocking Internet traffic between their subscribers and Mom & Pop Internet Co., then you'd have a case for regulation, assuming the free market didn't smack them for such foolishness first. But making companies share their plant to the point that the "competitor" is just a marketeer slapping their name on the same service is silly. Powell is right.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but doesn't it seem odd that we're all expecting the cable companies to allow competition on a physical network that they built and own? If someone wants to compete with them, let them build their own network. Am I completely off base?
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This type of case exemplifies the problem you have when you let a govt. grant a monopoly. Once a govt. grants company a the exclusive right to lay down a physical network (cable, phone, power, etc.), that company is a de facto monopoly. Here's how the game works. Govt. grants exclusive rights initially to the company paying for the netwrok to encourage investment in the network with a guaranteed monopoly. Once the network is working well, the monopoly right is taken away, and other comapnies are allowed to use the network at or below cost. This has the immediate effect of screwing the company that owns the network by changing the rules on a whim in the middle of the game. The secondary effect is that incentive to improve the network has been significantly diminished since money invested won't get a return since it benefits your competitors at your expense. Also extending the network to areas outside the current reach is unlikely for the same reason. The only good solution is to allow two or more companies lay redundant networks. The real competition between AT@T, Sprint, Verizon, etc. has vastly improved long distance and lowered the rates. The artificial competition in local phone markets has not reduced cost or improved service substantially, however. Don't expect there to be any improvement in cable service due to this artificial competition.
Vote for Pedro
These were the clowns who wanted to take the reference to God out of the Pledge of Allegiance.
I find it amusing how people tend to forget about the clowns that put the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegience.
You speak as if it was always in there, but it was not.
maybe now the most-technologically-advanced United States will catch up with third-world South Korea in broadband!!
South Korea has a much easier time rolling out broadband than the US.
In particular, something like 90% of the population lives in large apartment buildings in dense cities. LARGE apartment buildings. SO large that they each have a small telephone exchange in the basement.
Wiring all those apartments for broadband is a snap. For instance you can put a router in the basement, hook it into the SONET ring, and feed the phone lines with DSL. They're so short that getting 6 Mb to every apartment is a snap. (Or use two pair in the phone cable and send 'em Ethernet.)
In the US, on the other hand, you're dealing with a country that spans a continent from side to side and about a third of the way from top to bottom. Thousands of miles both ways. (It takes a week or so to drive across it.) On the average that takes a LOT of wire/cable/fiber to get everybody hooked up.
You'll notice that, like South Korea, the net (both narrow and broadband) is being rolled out mostly on existing copper: dialup, phone-pair DSL, and cable TV coax. (Exception is wireless, which also doesn't involve stringing something new to each house - just shine an antenna on it.)
But UNlike South Korea maybe half the population lives too far from the CO for even a 1.5 Mb downlink / puny uplink to work over phone pair.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Michael Powell supports media consolidation redardless of the side effects(mostly negative for the consumer). In this example, Fox is squeezing Cox(;0) by demanding cox pay a higher rate for Fox Sports. This means higher cable bills for consumers which in turn drive them into the waiting arms of Direct TV, also owned by Fox parent News Corp.
The problem here is that a for-profit entity was granted a monopoly (and usually given special government levys and sometimes even public bonds for funding) instead of setting it up as a non-profit "governmental" entity giving public ownership. This sort of stuff happens with the falacy that just because something is commerially owned that it will be competitive. Corporations in a non-competitive market are usually slower, less attentive, and more costly than government due to profit maximization... at least with government you can kick the ring leader out of office every few years.
On the flip side, government has no business being in a field where their could be competition. And thus even though a non-profit "governmental" organization may own the resource, this does not mean that everything should be done by the non-profit's employees. Within a monpoply are many potential competitive marketplaces, opportunities for capitalism to thrive -- laying the wire, maintaining the wires, content providers, maintainers of wires, etc. Thus, just beacuse a non-profit ("governmental") entity may own the resource does not mean that it should try to do everything internally. The distinction is actually quite clear; for a power company, the non-profit should own the transmission wires, while the power plans themselves can be for-profit (properly charged for polution they create to keep the playing field level).
Unfortunate when it gets all messed up like this, and then regulation is used like a bandaid to fix a more fundamental resource ownship problem. The overall goal is to maximize competition and thus efficiency; phone, energy, and cable companies rarely do this on their own -- the 9th circut is just doing its best to "encourage" a monopoly to be at least somewhat competitive. Ick. The courts would be better off forcing a sale of the "necessary public" aspects of the company to a non-profit and then having the maintanence of these resources open to public bidding. While this would be very painful up front... it would correct the core issue.
They're just refusing to force existing cable providers to open up their lines. They're not stopping anyone from laying thier own cable to compete.
And, who says cable competition is necessary? End users do not subscribe to cable - they subscribe to internet service, which they can also get by satelite, DSL, modem, cell phone, leased line, etc. Or they subscribe to TV, which they can also get by satelite, broadcast, DVD rental, etc.
Just because products are not the same does not mean that competition doesn't exist.
paintball
You know, if this trend continues, US citizens might even have (shudder!) freedom again. And companies might actually have to have good service to keep customers interested.
As it stands, we are all rationed cableTV/modem access the way Russians were rationed vodka and food.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
If you're talking about the Presubscribed Interexchange Carrier Charge (PICC), it's not a tax. It was a payment mandated by the FCC that the long distance companies pay to the local phone companies, and it was set at about $1 per month for residence lines. Lots of long distance carriers charged up to $5 per month which is pure profiteering. It was really just a cost of doing business and they have no business charging you extra for that any more than they could charge a line item for the CEO's golden bidet. But they probably did it so they could say "don't blame us, it's a tax that the FCC forces us to collect". Which is a lie. I say "was" because that charge was eliminated for most phone lines in 2000. So if they're still collecting a "National Access Fee" in year 2003, consider it padding for the bill so they can offer you those low low long distance rates.
You missed the other half; this is obviously an attempt to shut down or regulate the nascent VoIP market. The big phone companies don't want to slash their margins and have to compete with Vonage and the 10-10 numbers on price and value, so they'll do it in the courtroom.
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The cable company is granted a "franchise" in most cities. This is, in simple terms, a monopoly. They are protected from competition. Lately, they've had to compete with satellite, but cable companies do have advantages (apartment buildings, high-rise condos, etc don't allow dishes).
As a result of this competition, the individual consumer has very little "say". There's no opportunity for anyone else to improve on the product.
Opening up the "local loop" allows competition. It doesn't necessarily promote the original owner to upgrade or enhance the system. They can drag their heels, saying, "If we upgrade, we don't see all of the possible revenue."
So, there are 2 evils: Government regulation, or de-regulation and living in a free market. Both have their downfalls. Everyone wants something in between.
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