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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."
You can view the complete ruling in pdf here:
1 200/www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/04pdf/04-277.p df
http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/27jun2005
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Cable providers also sell digital phone services over the same cable. Why then is this not a 'telecommunication service?' Phone companies investigated providing television style programming over the phone lines but the service proved too slow to carry the programming (DSL was born.)
Personally, I say hooray for the cable companies. They get to keep control of their equipment and the users who are utilizing it. Broadband and dial-up wholesale outfits generally provide poor service and limited capability (no Static IP or PPP Multilink.) Some of the outfits that have recently come (and gone) in this area went so far as to charge for tech support ($2/minute.) How tempting do you think it is for them to 'generate revenue' by causing issues on their own network.
"Numbers are down this month Bob, run that script that resets random passwords again."
"Lame" - Galaxar
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."
Since cable internet isn't a telecommunication service then I bet that the Voice over IP providers will favor cable. The E911 is mandated for voice lines and there have been a few state cases where internet phone providers have been sued. This ruling then (should in theory) alleviates the necessity of E911 for cable internet and lets the market decide if E911 is worth the cost. I just wonder if VOIP becomes widely used then will Cable Internet become re-classified as phone service?
Ah yes, the Center for Digital Deomcracy. . .
fine work they do, daily fighting the spread of Omcracy that has taken so many young lives and minds.
-nando
Is it unreasonable for me to be confused? Is a little consistency too much to ask here?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
Does this mean that cable companies are now excluded from VoIP "tappability", the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), or from the other law enforcement attempts to log EVERYTHING on the internet(s)?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
At least in helping big business. Let's see first they make it easier for big business to steal your property. Now they make sure that cable remains a monopoly.
Since they have been labeled an information service rather than a telecommunications service, it means they can filter your traffic. I know for a fact that Time Warner (my cable service provider) sells IP phone Vonage type service, but charge a minimum of 39.99 a month for it. How long until that is the only VOIP service they allow on their networks and providers like Vonage suddenly "don't work" and "aren't supported by our service" Lunch
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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If you're writing "cheques" you're probably not living under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. :-P
MRSH-Recording device, corned beef sandwich with kraut, seafaring bird, and the foamy top of a beverage.
Every time this sort of anti-competetive stuff occurs (99% of US cable markets are monopolies by license, aka local gov bribery), it makes me wonder if the various forms of wire infrastructure ought to be public property, just like the roads, water pipes, etc. Companies would be allowed to connect to them at cost. I can't help but think it would be win-win for everyone, except the monopoly owners and maybe Adam Smith purists.
Hmm...considering last week's supreme court ruling, perhaps the gov should just TAKE all the wires away from the companies by eminent domain. Infrastructure is about the only thing I consider a valid "public use".
The cable co's may come to regret this.
I think (IANAL) this could render them liable for any "information" provided from their "service" -- from copyright violations to kiddy porn to libel. It's "common carrier" status that protects the phone company and other ISPs from this liability.
-- Alastair
Great! Now that Cable is officially an "information service" (today's ruling) and Internet is an "information service"(FCC 96-488). Then previous rulings regarding ISPs accessing channels via leased access should be overturned.
I quote from the FCC website http://www.fcc.gov/mb/facts/csgen.html:
"Channel set-aside requirements were established in proportion to a system's total activated channel capacity, in order to 'assure that the widest possible diversity of information sources are made available to the public from cable systems in a manner consistent with the growth and development of cable systems.'"
A company called IVI tried this before around the same time. It fell on the FCC's ears with a resounding thud. One comment I remember is that they did not, at the time, consider the Internet an information service.
Cable companies are tiny municipal monopolies. The FCC has found in the past that they try to lock out competition so they established the framework required promote that competition. Why don't they use it?
Considering the cable companies are in fact part of greater media conglomerates, I don't think they care. They WANT to have this kind of control over the content they have on their network, and this ruling in this area is in fact to their advantage, not disadvantage.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Take care to read Justice Scalia's Dissent. In it, he shows a good understanding of how internet service works and what this means legally.
His point is that the cable companies are prodviding two services:
- communications from your home to their ISP facility.
- their ISP facility connects you to the rest of the Internet.
The second is an "information service" under the law. The first is a "telecommunication service". The cable company is bundling them together exactly to get around the regulations by claiming that the joint offering is an "information service", but they shouldn't be allowed to play such shenannigans.Since they are not considered a common carrier, are they going to be held responsible for the content, including copyright issues, indecency issues, etc? This could have some interesting ramifications like forcing them to prove beyond doubt that a customer was responsible for content, instead of being able to finger-point as soon as the RIAA/MPAA come knocking.
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.