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Cable Internet Service Not Common Carrier
l2718 writes "The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed with the Federal Communications Commission that cable Internet service is an 'information service' rather than a 'telecommunication service.' This means that cable companies don't have to make their infrastructure open for competing ISPs to use. This is in distinction to the case of telephone companies and long-distance service, for example. For more information try the Center for Digital Democracy or read the Telecommunications Act."
The real problem here, and why the court was wrong, is that the cable system is a monopoly granted by the city. Only they are allowed to run cable to your home. As such, there is no true competition -- and we are screwed by it!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Besides the parent's thoughts, let's not forget that this supports the idea that VOIP is in fact not V. That is, with this ruling, anything that travels over broadband is information and not telecommunications, so it supports keeping federal regulations of VOIP off of VOIP providers.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
There's a difference between a "communications service" and a "data service"?
But wouldn't you have to communicate data in order for it to appear? And wouldn't communications be meaningless without data to communicate?
Sometimes I wonder if it's the court that doesn't understand technology, or maybe its us technology guys that don't understand the courts. This ruling doesn't make any sense to me.
In fact, there have been recent court rulings that internet telephony is a telecommunicaiton device, and subject to FCC regulation. For example, this has been used to force VoIP to include 911 service. However, just because the VoIP part is a regulated service doesn't mean that the underlying infrastrcture is -- that depends on the definitions in the telecommuncations act, which the FCC is in charge of interpreting. The supreme court decided that their interpretation is not unreasonable and therefore due deference from the judicial branch.
There might not be competition right now, however, in the next few years there will be. Satellite TV is already a direct competitor to TV for cable companies. And broadband access is in the same market as DSL right now. And when FIOS gets going it will be a direct competitor of both TV and broadband potentially offering more than cable could. I would not say life is all rosy at the cable companies.
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This ruling doesn't change anything. It states that cable companies don't have to open their lines to competitors, which is the way things are right now. Service won't get worse because of this ruling, and I really don't think it would get better had they ruled the other way. Look at how well "competitive" DSL worked, or more like didn't work. Hardly anyone can sell DSL other than the local telecom monopoly since they have priced competitors out of the market even if they do allow access to their lines. The only way broadband will be truly competitive is when wireless broadband over a large area is widely available and affordable, and not surprisingly the phone and cable companies are trying very hard to prevent this.
This is one of those rulings that will have a number of unintended consequences. There are some practical ramifications of not being common carrier (mostly, it will ultimately mean a lower grade of service and high consumer costs for cable service), but the court didn't end there.
Their conclusion was that cable internet and phone service wasn't a telecommunication service under the law. Economic issues aside, this is interesting from the standpoint of taxation (the argument that a web-based site is a mail-order busines by virtue of conducting business over the phone and thus subject to state sales tax, for instance). How about E991 -- it no longer applies to cable companies because their service is not phone service or even telecommunication service. Cable companies wouldn't need to feign neutrality on site access either -- preferred content providers get bandwidth, where others get none, etc.
In the short term, I'm sure this is considered a win for the cable companies, but I suspect in the end it will sink them.
Since cable companies are not to be considered common carriers for their internet access services, they could now proceed to block ports used for VOIP by other providers. That is, if you want VOIP, you can only get it from the cable company. The reason I say that is that in previous cases of port blocking the FCC have used the common carrier provisions to get some ISPs (that happen to be part of traditional common carriers like telcos) make them desist of their port blocking practices.
New laws are needed to bring some sanity to this.
This canard aggravates me no end. If you were to go down to your local franchising authority (FA) and actually look at the franchise contract, you will probably see the words non-exclusive. This means that the FA is allowed at any time to grant a franchise to any capable competitor who wants to do a build-out (where "capable" means "actually able to do what they say"). The effective monopoly comes from the fact that in almost all cases (Manhattan Island being an exception, IIRC), there is not nearly the population density to support two competing cable systems. But an effective monopoly is not the same as having an actual one granted by government.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Both cable and telephone systems have enjoyed a merchantilist "mandated monopoly" status in most of the country. The same reasonings were made in both cases, that market competition would make profit margins so low that service would not be rolled out for marginal customers. Same for "rural electrification" and lots of other services. Profits were, and are, legally mandated to occur regardless of the desirability of the services offered.
The ruling is a contradiction, because the cable companies continue to enjoy legal monopoly status. Their only competition in the wired IP field is in fact the phone companies, with VoIP and DSL bringing the two systems closer together in functionality every day.
Don't get me wrong, I utterly oppose anyone mandating that I provide my infrastructure to other people whether I like it or not. What I loath is the hypocrisy involved.
Now we have another judicial fiat defining differences in how they are allowed and/or required to do their business. Instead of competition driving prices down and service quality up, the companies are being limited to someone else's ideas of what they should be.
You're right that the two systems have never been regulated exactly the same. The problem is that they are regulated. As with every merchantilist scheme, we the customers are the losers.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
One possible outcome of this is that it means the rule that your ISP is not resposible for filtering content might not apply to cablemodem service anymore.
One consequence of being a "common carrier" is that the common carrier company is not legally responsible for having to know what kind of content they are sending around. If someone uses their service to speak a slanderous comment, the communication provider can't be held legally responsible for spreading that slander. If someone uses a telephone to make a prank call, you can't sue the phone company for the offensiveness of that call. These are all consequences of being called a common carrier. The definition includes an absolution of all blame for the content being carried - the blame lays only with the people at the ends of the connection, not the people carrying the connection.
Now, if that goes away for cable ISPs, that could mean they have to start censoring to cover their own ass, legally.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Actually, the companies involved are likely to start screaming for a reversal soon. Think for a moment - the main reason they've been able to avoid massive penalties for not monitoring everyone and for allowing illegal content is because they've claimed "common carrier" status.
They have now had that status well and truly removed, which means they are now potentially liable for ALL such content that they carry.
In the end, they have a choice - keep the legal protection, but lose the monopoly on the wires, or keep the monopoly but lose the protections. The former might cost them some profit, but the latter will (sooner or later) cost them their independence and maybe their existance. not much of a swap, if you ask me.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)