Spirited Exchange Over Net Neutrality

LukeCage sends us to The Register for a rabble-rousing account of a US Commerce Department official's talk at Supernova 2007. The article is headlined Bush official goes nuclear in New Neut row, and points out that the speaker, John Kneuer, is a former telecom lobbyist. To figure out what really went on in that session — whether it was a shouting match as El Reg reports — be sure to read Suw Charman's notes from the floor and Kevin Werbach's note (Werbach is the conference organizer).

Comments

Summarizing the posts so far...

[Catbeller]

:fingers in ears:

didn't happen didn't happen lalalalalalalalalalalalala thereg is commie.

America needs an enema.

Re:Net neutrality is not a concern -- regulation i

[plague3106]

the federal government has no Constitutionally-acceptable power to regulate the Internet.

Sure they do; the internet most certainly crosses state bounderies, and net neutrality is all about the telcos trying to make more money by throttling bandwidth for companies that don't pay. None of the major telcos are located entirely within a single state.

So while normally I agree that the interstate commerce clause is normally abused, this is pretty much interstate commerce and falls under the federal jurisdiction.

Re:Bush's Pronounciation is In The Dictionary

[Aladrin]

I assume you've only got 1, then.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nuclear

Only 1 of those lists the metathesis pronunciation. And nowhere can I find that metathesis gives us a valid pronunciation, only that it happens. If some ignorant fool decides to pronounce 'carpal tunnel' as 'capral tunnel', that doesn't mean he's correct simply because there's a word for it.

Stop trying to excuse ignorance and stupidity and try to learn something instead.

Re:The talk is on line

[martyb]

Why take somebody else's word for it when you can watch the actual talk? Thanks to conference organizer Kevin Werbach:

http://conversationhub.com/2007/06/27/video-john-k neuer-on-spectrum-policy-and-network-neutrality/ [conversationhub.com]

Thanks for that link! I watched the whole presentation and discussion. What I saw/heard was far less incendiary than what I was led to expect from TFA summary. Seemed to me that Kneuer handled himself relatively calmly in the midst of a confrontational audience. At least twice he asked for the audience to bring on the hard questions. Here's my take on it;

• Kneuer claimed we've got some great infrastructure in place.
• Audience member pointed out we're 19th in the world in availability of high-speed internet access.
• There's this 700 MHz band becoming available with the movement of TV broadcasting from analog to digital.
• There is a market for the US government to auction off this spectrum (i.e. raise $BIGNUM for the government).
• Also implied, if the barrier to entry is high enough, then there can be no competition from groups other than the incumbent telecom companies.
• There are some people who want some of that spectrum to be made freely available to consumers, just as the 2.4GHz spectrum was. (I woul dlike that to happen, too.)
• This spectrum is especially valuable because the 700 MHz band, by nature of its frequency, can readily be a more long-distance transmission medium than 2.4 GHz spectrum could ever hope to be (Watt for Watt). (I don't know if this is true; it's just what I picked up on from the discussion... can anyone confirm/deny the better/worse ability of this spectrum to penetrate obstructions, etc. and thus be more viable as a long-distance carrier?)

My conclusions:

• There's money to be had for the US government in them thar spectrum.
• If we make some of it freely available:
  1. That will be some spectrum that cannot be auctioned off, i.e. government gets less money.
  2. If a free infrastructure can actually develop in the asked-for free-slice-of-spectrum, it diminishes the value of the part of that spectrum which gets auctioned off, i.e. government gets less money.
  3. The existing telecoms would face heightened competition and might not be able to continue their current money-making ways.

IOW: I took this as a spirited discussion. Some good points were made, by both sides, but not really entirely understood, by either side of the discussion. Kneuer was coming from a business ($$$) perspective. The audience seemed to be coming from a purely technical side and did not acknowledge the $$$ side to the discussion.

The 3rd or 4th audience comment had the right idea, I believe. He gave a concrete example of how the non-auctioned 2.4GHz spectrum had been wildly successful. He got Kneuer to buy in to all of this for 2.4GHz. But, the audience member failed to make the connection from the tech details and speak to Kneuer at the level Kneuer is dealing with: $$$.

I'm struggling to find the right words to tie this all together. Does anyone else see the point I'm trying to make here? PLEASE take a stab at making it clearer.

Re:Painful to read...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what she was doing was "live blogging" the event . . . this means she was trying to type what the Bushite was saying as he said it, posting in real time. So you should think of that as a bunch of un-editted shorthand notes, not an essay.

That said, what I have read of the Bushite's talk made my head hurt even when it was editted.

Re:The talk is on line

[ceejayoz]

The actual controversy is better understood in terms of a turnpike (a.k.a. toll road). A third party -- not the taxi service you have hired -- has set up this nice road that is, realistically, the only good way for you to get from point A to point B. But if you travel along it, you'll have to pay a fee. You're either misinformed or misinforming about the fight going on with Net Neutrality. No one opposes the idea of toll roads - after all, we pay our ISPs for their services, and they pay the big ones for theirs, and so on and so forth.

Net Neutrality is about not letting those big ISPs charge the users' destinations - YouTube, Google, MSN, etc. In your toll road analogy, it'd be as if the people you're going to visit have to pay a toll too. I already pay my ISP for access. Google already pays for their bandwidth. Why should they have to pay again?

Re:The talk is on line

[anticypher]

This was a spirited discussion, although Kneuer intentionally missed the point about the un-auctioned 2.4GHz band. Knowing enough (far too many, really) economists, this is a fairly common tactic, to provide responses that completely miss the point and allow you to repeat your opinion ad infinitum ad nauseum. The current slang for this seems to be "talking point". Kneuer knows that the 2.4GHz wifi market is booming because of lack of regulation (I'm talking forcing a particular modulation scheme or licensing, not FCC/ART/TUV limits on power and antennas), but he can't admit it, so he re-iterates his "talking point" about not regulating the monopolies. I'm pretty sure this was quite intentional, Kneuer was a lobbyist far too long for that to have been a mis-understanding.

the 700 MHz band, by nature of its frequency, can readily be a more long-distance transmission medium than 2.4 GHz spectrum could ever hope to be (Watt for Watt)

700 MHz can go longer distances, and is less vulnerable to the line-of-sight problems of the microwave frequencies of WiFi, but that is not what makes it interesting. 700 MHz can penetrate walls, windows, trees, and other structures with greater ease than higher frequencies. This means that municipal 700 MHz WiFi/WiMax local distribution could become a reality, one antenna covering a few hundred houses within a 500 meter radius would not require external boxes for each house as with the current 2.4GHz WiFi setups. Although the 65 MHz bandwidth being talked about in the speech would only be enough for 10-12 WiMax channels with a maximum throughput of 6 Mbps each.

The 2.4 GHz band was chosen because it is completely unusable for longer distance communications. Water vapor absorbs too much energy, so concrete, brick, trees, rain, fog, all block 2.4 GHz signals, and degrade 5.4-5.8 GHz signals. The worst absorption comes at 22 and 60 GHz.

The WRC/ITU-R hasn't discussed opening a new worldwide band, the 700 MHz spectrum would be for the U.S. market only. There would be no economies of scale with only the U.S. market for cheap wireless gadgets. The U.S. only accounts for about 10% of the worldwide electronic gadget market. Here in ETSIland, any reclaimed spectrum would be different for each country.

This is the main reason WiMax has the ability to run on any frequency, because there isn't going to be another worldwide lightly regulated band like 2.4 GHz for the foreseeable future. The WARC (predecessor to the ITU-R/WRC) first proposed the 2.4 GHz band be opened up for general public use worldwide in 1979, after almost a decade of committee wrangling. Once the band was decided (because 2.4 GHz is the most useless band in the spectrum for a whole range of technical/physical reasons), it still took from 1979 to 1993 to agree to push national regulators to free up the band from existing licenses, most countries had it reserved for military use or it was unused. Just opening up the band as unlicensed created whole industries like cordless phones, baby monitors, with WiFi coming along much later.

My conclusions:... There's money to be had for the US government in them thar spectrum

Governments aren't concerned about the revenues an auction would bring in, small change compared to the money to be earned from sales tax revenues and new industries from something like WiFi. This is all about protecting the revenues of the incumbent duopolies that have taken over the American market. If the government holds an auction, an incumbent can grab and hold the spectrum, preventing any "free market" competition, and forcing U.S. citizens to pay obscene amounts of money if they want access to the internet. The government limits access for physical media, granting right-of-way easements for fiber/cable/copper phone lines, which create an artificial scarcity and keeps profit margins healthy. Licensing spectrum to one auction winner also creates scarcity, and keeps any competitors from innovating. Look at the innovation in the 2.4 GHz space to see what happens without auctions or licensing, but Kneuer is paid to ignore that.

the AC