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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).
I appreciate the free market perspective on the net neutrality debate: the federal government has no Constitutionally-acceptable power to regulate the Internet. Net neutrality is just that: regulation where none is needed.
The biggest concern by geeks and techies is that the superpowers of the web will start restricting bandwidth for competitors' sites and promoting bandwidth for their own sites. Yet who are the superpowers we're worried about? They're the very companies that are subsidized or given monopoly powers by the State.
With a truly competitive marketplace, there should be almost zero concern over the net neutrality issue. Yet the FCC and the local State bodies are at fault for creating this fear for the marketplace -- they've created a mess of bureaucracy and redtape (and regulations and subsidies) that keeps competition out of the mix.
Sure, some techies will say that it is extremely expensive to enter the "last mile" market to provide services, but this is untrue -- if there is a profit to be made, companies will enter the market. In many towns, the last mile providers are given freedom from competition, and without competition, of course there is corruption.
Some techies fear the skies over their homes filled with cables and wires, but this too is a non-issue. In a town two cities over from mine (Libertyville, Illinois), there are 3 wireless providers who have leased tower space to provide very reasonable high speed access at a very low cost. All 3 of the companies battle one another because the village of Libertyville lets the compete -- and the pricing and services have both gotten better. Who complains about their services? Comcast, of course.
My town (Zion, Illinois) doesn't let anyone run a wireless service, let alone multiple providers. We have Comcast, and we have the phone company. Both offer unreasonable service at unreasonable pricing. I've looked into renting tower space, and the village has said NO 3 years in a row. They're concerned for what reason?
Let's stop the net neutrality debate, and bring up the proper debate: let's allow competition in a marketplace that has been "free" from competition for far too long. The cell phone companies are ready to roll out HSDPA as soon as the FCC allows them to (again, a mess of State intervention in a market that could be flourishing). The WiFi locally-owned providers want to roll it out, but the city States don't allow it. There are numerous ISPs who want to roll out very high speed DSL but can't because they're not allow to pull cable to the homes (and many local providers are more than willing to invest in this market).
Well, the Federal government can (by statute) override local governments' ability to control their public property. Net neutrality and access to the last mile is something that local governments provide in exchange for the use of public rights of way by wired broadband providers. They (cable and telco companies) have lobbied quite sucessfully to force local governments to grant this access with no strings attached.
That doesn't sound right. Local governments have very little to say about the use of the airwaves. The FCC has repeatedly stepped in on the side of wireless system operators of many kinds, from cellular companies to ham radio operators and slapped down restrictions on antenna and transmitter installations. You could live in the most exclusive neighborhood just down the road from Bill Gates with the most restrictive architecture and construction covenants, and there's nothing they can do to stop you from putting up a 150' tower with a 20 meter Yagi. I know.
You can do whatever you want on your own property. But if you want to borrow a piece of mine (public r/o/w or airwaves) then I'm going to insist on negotioating some terms for my (the public's) benefit.
Really? How many do you think the city council should allow to plow up my street? 20? 30? That's about how many ISP's we have in our region. The city would rather have the existing cable and telcos wholesale their capacity to them than create such a circus. Particularly when the existing utilities have spent more money lobbying to keep newcommers (like cities themselves) out of the broadband biz rather than upgrading their own systems. And once these new ISPs pull their cable, the third will only have a theoretical 33% of the market. The 20th will only get 5%. For the same cost per mile, no sane investor wants to have an ever diminishing slice of the pie.
Have gnu, will travel.
The only way to assure net neutrality is to encrypt every packet and randomize the ports on all the new network protocols. This is true right now for some P2P and skype.
Given the current European policy on data retention, we should do it even for mail and instant messaging. Of course you should use sftp instead of ftp and ssh instead of telnet, and your SMTP sessions should go encrypted, but that is not enough. We should rewrite every protocol and make it look like IPSEC.
This way we would avoid the following problems without the need for regulation:
- Government censorship (the China firewall becomes less efficient)
- Traffic Shaping (ISPs shouldn't have the right to decide what protocols can you use).
- Multi tier pricing (the ISP could discriminate by IP, but not by service)
- Traffic analysis (for example the European Data Retention policy. If all packets look the same it becomes much more difficult)
A technical solution is always better than a political one.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Now honestly, do you think it would work, do you think it would be anything more than a catastrophic mess, much the same as what you are proposing with the communications networks, but hey, as an Australian, go for it, you will be self destructing access to your communications infrastructure and you will be giving every other country (apart from the third world ones) a massive technological competitive advantage ;).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The whole Internet thing is and was really just a farce - it never existed...
.doc and .xls are standards, while in fact they are completely closed is another Free Market aberration. The lock-in they represent prevents consumers from choosing the best word processor or spreadsheet, rather without significant expertise and effort they have to choose the brand where they first put their data. Come to think of it, Microsoft's (and Intel's) licensing agreements are another example of restricted information. In general, people have no idea whatsoever what the costs of OS or CPUs are, because those details are hidden from them.
That's because the US has a Free Market, and the Free Market does everything RIGHT!!
So things were just hunky-dory with computer data communications before the Government-infested Internet came along and upset the apple cart. There were plenty of competitive services like The Source, Compu$erve, AOL, GEnie, Prodigy, and the like. Oh, I almost forgot about MSN and Advantis. They all interoperated just fine, and exchanged data with no difficulties whatsoever. Telecommunications lines were ubiquitous and cable penetration was increasing, so every household had all the bandwidth and access it needed, and many had carrier choice.
Let's get this straight. The ONLY reason the Internet succeeded and the rest of those names are dust (or completely changed) is because it was NEUTRAL!
One of those unappreciated facts is the the Free Market also only works with free flow of information. In order to be a proper customer, you have to know sufficient information about the suppliers' products. So you have to go back to the first piece of sarcasm in this post, "the US has a Free Market" and realize that it all went off into left field, right there. THE US DOES NOT HAVE A FREE MARKET. Nor is the first problem preventing Free Market with government regulations of the limiting nature. Rather it's because US suppliers almost always act to restrict the flow of information.
Again, US suppliers almost always act to restrict the flow of information. Talk about a few mechanisms... First there are gag orders on lawsuits, so we can't really know liability issues of some of their products. Next, there is refusal to communicate and interoperate. The line about AOL, Compu$erve, et al was obvious sarcasm, because NONE of them exchanged information until they did it through the Internet. For that matter, Microsoft's pretending
So reading as I write, I'll have to assert that the Free Market simply CANNOT exist without regulations, in practice.
First, it's in the suppliers' self interest to restrict information as much as possible, first off permitting only "good" information out, and second using information to lock-in their customers.
Second, in the short-term, short-term self-interest will always win out over long-term self interest. Besides that, if short-term self interest garners sufficient benefits in the short-term, it's entirely possible to destroy the competitor who takes long-term self interests into account. In this situation there is no long-term, merely one short-term after another. (IMHO that's what we're locked into, today)
So IMHO if Net Neutrality is cast aside, at least in the US the Internet will turn into the Balkanized pile of crap that was AOL, Compu$erve, et al so many years ago. Furthermore having surrendered what the Internet was really about when it started, the US will accelerate its competitive decline in the world marketplace and communities.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Thanks for bringing up his point about auctions, and money. Yes, Kneuer's view was that the 700 MHz auction would simultaneously a) solve the problem, if there is one, and b) raise $$$ for the government, but b was more important than a. This goes to the way FCC auctions work. In the 1995-1996 PCS auctions, there were spectrum caps in place, limiting how much any one buyer could have. This guaranteed multiple "winners". Since the old 800 MHz cellular licenses were 25 MHz and the big PCS A and B licenses were 30 MHz, no one could hold both in the same market -- that would be 55 MHz, and the cap was 45. This made it possible for Sprint to get its almost-nationwide footprint, and made the old AT&T Wireless (bought from McCaw, which had a few cities) almost a national player.
Under the Rethugs, the cap was lifted. This allows Verizon Wireless and ex-Cingular (ATTM) to outbid any new players for new spectrum. It's worth more to those incumbents to keep others off the air (help maintain pricing) than those frequencies are worth to a new entrant. In the 2006 AWS auction, with no caps, Verizon bought out huge amounts of spectrum, which they need almost as much as Libya needs more sand. SpectrumCo (now d/b/a Pivot), mostly owned by the top cable chains, was the only big new entrant, and they're just adding the fourth component (wireless) for their "quadruple play" against VZ and ATT. In the Kneuer view, this is ideal, because bidding-to-bank as VZ is doing raises the total auction revenue for the government. The value of the spectrum to the public? Totally irrelevant. It's Michael Quill politics: The Public Be Damned.