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Court Upholds Internet Deregulation
Internet Voting writes "Big telecom companies seem to have won big with the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding FCC's ruling deregulating the Internet. Opponents argued that telecoms could now deny third parties access to their telecommunications lines and eliminating competition. From the story: "In its September 2005 ruling, the FCC relieved telephone companies of decades-old regulations that required them to grant competing Internet service providers 'nondiscriminatory' access to their wirelines in order to reach consumers.""
"Hey, did you see that video on YouTube today?"
"No, I can't. My ISP doesn't support that part of the internet."
"Oh... that sucks... well, I can email you the video."
"From your Comcast address? No, that won't do. My hardware is not Comcast-enabled."
This deregulation is a consumer's worst nightmare. We already have very limited competition in broadband service, and this promises to kill off what little there is.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You want to deny everybody else access to the wires you laid on public easements, using grants, subsidies, and tax breaks given to you by the government? Fine. Pay all of the back leasing costs and taxes that were handed to you so you could establish your geo-monopolies everywhere. Sounds fair to me.
The essential problem is the tendency to accelerate the concentration of wealth. Owners can always find proxies to hide the influence of a media outlet. Small players can print any limited distribution screed they want, but it takes a major daily, or a cable channel or a decent powered radio or TV station to get the mass coverage, and those are all going to big corporate ownership. Of course, you don't have to watch, read, or listen, or, especially, believe.
Radio Shack will finally have an incentive to start a Universal Adapter ISP that'll bridge the various parts of the internet, which all use slightly-different-sized plugs to transmit data.
How are we not suppose to give monopolies our money? In some sections that's the only option for internet. How much backbone fiber is AT&T?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
This "regulation" was a step toward making sure that companies could compete evenly and fairly, by limiting the power of a government-granted monopoly. How is allowing the monopoly to grow unabated and block competition equal to deregulation? It isn't.
If we changed the law so that banks didn't have to follow standard accounting practices, would that be "deregulation" or "a complete nightmare?" If we removed the requirements that food be edible and properly labeled, would that be "deregulation" too? How about we just eliminate the rule of law, and the constitution, and clear-up a whole lot of regulations?
After RTFA, I think some may be a little confused as to what this means from just the summary. Some seem to be interpreting this as a blow to net neutrality. As I understand it, that is not the case. What this means is that the owners of the physical lines (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) now can make independent deals with ISPs that don't own the lines (Earthlink, Speakeasy, etc.) instead of having to let them all have access.
Where this is bad, as I see it, is that now AT&T can basically tell Earthlink that if they want to use their precious copper to bring the Intertubes to peoples homes, it will cost them eleventy billion dollars. So basically, it means AT&T gets to set the price for DSL to whatever they want, and no one else can really compete on price because AT&T can make the cost of use to the third party provider so high that they cannot compete on price. Anyone feel free to correct me if I am misinterpreting something.
I will give you a very good reason why. The Internet is mankind's single greatest invention.
Not antibiotics. Not the motor vehicle. The Internet. Why?
Information has been given the ability to travel the entire globe in less than the time required for you to read this post. Think about that. A coup could happen in an African country, and literally the entire planet could know about it within five minutes. A discovery for an infectious disease could be made at some remote lab in Antarctica...five minutes later, the whole world would know.
Information between teachers, doctors, scientists, philosophers, religious figures....the collective knowledge of our entire species is just a point and click away.
That's why.
Living With a Nerd
Bad for the end-user, champagne and fine chocolates for the big name telcoms. Reason being the ISP's no longer have to share their telcom lines, whether those be fiber, phone, or coaxial. Which means for the most part, if you want internet/phone/tv you are stuck with the company that owns the cables going to your house.
Just so long as there are more than two or three competing telecoms
Uh, there's one in any given location, that's why the regulation was there in the first place.
Hopefully, they will compete for the business of third-party ISPs.
Sorry, that one telco can now just turn off any of the other DSL ISPs whenever they feel like it. The third-party ISPs will either grovel and shovel over a wad of cash to stay on, or they call their customers and tell them how nice it's been, but goodbye.
Presumably someone will eventually invest a trillion dollars in wiring up a second telephone network, but that'll be a while since any sane investor will realize that once the trillion dollars is sunk, AT&T will simply refuse to connect the phone networks together, and the company will crash and burn faster than MCI's "in network" calling plans. Until then, the third party DSL ISPs exist at the telcos' whims, and when they are cut off, your choices will be between one telco's DSL, one cable company's cable, and dialup or wireless/satellite.
In the end, the free market will win and the internet will stop being free. It's to be expected given that the same thing has already happened in meat space.
The only thing left to do is to buy stock in the telcos. That way, you can preserve your dignity by claiming that whereas everyone else is merely raped by the telcos, you are actually raping yourself.
It amazes me how the press gets sucked into the lingo. This is not at all a ruling in favor of deregulation. To the contrary, it is a ruling authorizing private regulation of the Internet. Moreover, private regulation in this space is much more dangerous than government regulation because it works. The government can't do much at all to regulate the Internet, thanks in large measure to the First Amendment and thanks in no small measure to the fact that the government does not have any physical control over the transport layer. But the major ISPs do have such control, and are not bound by the First Amendment. In short, this ruling says, in plain English, "Whereas the government may not and cannot regulate communications over the Internet that are protected from suppression by the First Amendment, we hereby free those of you who have the power to suppress freedom of speech to go ahead and do so."
Aire Libre
I don't agree with the ruling, but I don't see the situation as being as "dire" as some suggest. I can't see a major telco blocking access to certain websites or networks due to this "deregulation". If they do, they'll be creating new markets and new competition in which they would have to compete, and probably loose.
Lets say Verizon tries to make Google pay extra to keep the priority of traffic going to YouTube on par with other types of network traffic. Google can either payup, and keep their access, or, decide to go an alternative route, such as working with a different provider to get access to the end user, or build their own network that renders parts of Verizon's network useless. Small providers will collaborate to stay in competition with big ones. The same goes for fiber backbone, and "last mile" service. If they decide to start blocking, others will invest and build, and offer their service as an alternative to those that are blocked, or, overpriced.
Maybe I'm too optimistic on the situation, but, what else can we hope for?
I don't want them to pay back all the public funds they were give, or the tax breaks etc.
What I want is to know what percentage of their infrastructure was built with public funds and tax breaks and so on, if that is 45% then I want a 45% discount on my monthly bill.
For every site that I am unable to reach because of their deregulation, I want compensation on my monthly bill. For every censored email, I want compensation.
Don't tell me that your 'public internet access' I pay for will only access content you approve of. I will not buy a special car to drive on restricted roads. I will not pay for two services to access both Google and Yahoo. I will simply sue every time I am denied access based on their censorship. Yes, I realize that there may not be any basis for that in law, but we must do something to let them know what their consumers want.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Of course the big telcos don't want to roll out snazzy new broadband lines if they have to bear the cost of R&D and deployment, and then immediately allow competitors to use their brand new high-speed lines at the price the government insists on. I mean, their competitors can just lay new fiber optic lines themselves, right?
Oh, wait...the government created the whole mess in the first place with geographical monopolies on the right to run telephone lines, muddied the waters even more by declaring that cable companies are "information services" and thus don't have to share *their* lines, and now want to wash their hands of it and stand back and watch Joe Consumer take it up the ass.
On a *completely* unrelated note, I suggest that any group of politicians hereafter be called a clusterfuck. (e.g., A herd of cattle, a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows, a clusterfuck of politicians).
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Where I live, Verizon doesn't offer me DSL. But Cavalier Telephone offers me DSL, over Verizon's lines. (My neighborhood is fairly poor, so Verizon probably thinks we aren't worth it). So does that mean that I won't be able to get DSL then? If that's the case, my only option is Comcast, who doesn't allow me to use Bittorrent. So now I will have only one choice for broadband internet. And it's a company that doesn't believe in neutrality.
Yay for deregulation!
Its easy to get up in arms about this decision, and start poo-pooing how its going to lead to less competition. But here's the reality of the matter.
In 2008 there will be an election in the US for President. A good chunk of Congress will also be up for grabs. And unless something really radical happens between now and then, in all likelihood the next President is going to be a Democrat, and the Democrats will hold a majority in both houses of Congress. This is what happens when a Republican President falls to a 24 percent approval rating in the polls (and Congress is doing only slightly better).
Democrats are generally pro-consumer and love regulating things (Republicans, on the other hand, are generally pro-business, and like to deregulate). The first time one of the big telecoms tries to openly block competition, the Dems will be on it like hair on a gorilla. And even the telecoms are smart enough to know that.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
The problem isn't censorship, it's competition. Right now, if the copper running to your house is owned by Company A, and Company A offers Internet Service, and Company B wants to provide you with Internet Services, Company A is required to share the copper they laid with Company B. What this ruling does is allow Company A to tell Company B to take a hike. The consumer (you) now has no choice for internet service because the company that owns the copper determines what options you have.
So, if Company A were to drop prices significantly, and crush all local competitors, thus ensuring that they have a strangle hold on the local area's ISP offerings, they can then jack prices up as high as they want and the consumers will have no other options for providers.
I would guess this could also have some higher stream issues if some major back bone provider decided that it didn't want to allow data from some other provider at that level. That might be route able to still get through, but if they blocked it all the way to the last mile, you'd never get that data.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
At some point, though, a product becomes so ubiquitous that it is no longer just a common good and has become a staple. At that point, living without it really does have social repercussions and, in the case of the Internet, we are rapidly reaching that point. How many paper resumes do you think get submitted in industrialized nations these days? If the choice was limited to getting raped by my telco and/or not having a job, that's not much of a choice is it?
I'll tolerate anything
The hell we don't have a claim to it. They're running things on public land with tax breaks, government granted monopolies, subsidies, etc. In short, they're using public space and public money. If they want to not deal with us, fine. That's their choice. However, we want our public space back and them to pay back all the money we gave them to build their network. That would basically mean that they'd have to dismantle their network or buy all the space that it's using from the general public.
Also, your analogy is false. It's like the government letting you set up shop in a public park then saying that you need to let another group use it. Yes, it's your shop, but it's in the city park. You'd always be welcome to refuse, but the city could then kick you out of the park, which would hurt you business more than letting them rent space from you.
It's more like things with broadcast television networks. They're welcome to claim that they don't want to show what people want, however, the airwaves are owned by the US citizens (look it up). If they did that, the people would be perfectly within their rights to demand that the station stop broadcasting.
They presumably made a profit from the installation of the lines. It is the customers who paid for them. Further more most of the POTS lines were installed by our parents and the existing generation of Telco employees inherited them.
Furthermore if you look at the administrations of most Telcos you will find they are filled with non-productive people and paper pushers who sit around all day drinking coffee while they scheme more ways to suck book out of the customers they hold hostage. This is why we see telephone plan after plan after plan. This is why only a few years back we had horendous Long Distance rates. It is only through competition that we start to see the benefits of modern technology filter down to benefit the public. The thing is there is not enough competition.
IMHO the telco should be restricted to line maintenance and that is it. Its their job to maintain the wires just as it is the contractors job to maintain the hyways. Suppose the road maintanence crew were allowed to look inside the trailers of every semi... what would we get? Someone saying this truck is ok but that one isn't?
Basically this is what the telcos are up to.
For years, the US political system has relied on this sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge attitude by the common voter. We can talk smack against the "libruls" and "political correctness" and express our devotion to the freewheeling marketplace, but in the back of our minds we take it for granted that, wink-wink-nudge-nudge, the courts will come and rescue us whenever the business tycoons we vote into power get too absurd in their obeisance to their own wallets. But surely, by now, after a generation of primarily right-wing judicial appointees, we see that the situation has changed. The courts are no longer the last bastion of liberal social policies. Nor should they be. Let's stop expecting the old men in robes to bail us out of the messes we are in. We are a nation of laws, and we owe it to ourselves and our descendants to have laws in place that express our true political will.
Of course, that means we actually have to pay attention to whom we elect into Congress, and to what they do once they're there. Even worse, we'll have to stop being hypocrites and realize that most of us actually want a life cocooned by taxes and regulation. Are we up to that?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Before- regulations
Now- no regulations
It's really not hard. No regulations, eh? So why can't I just start a wireless ISP and beam signals? Why do I need the FCC's OK for that? And why do I need to get permission from every non-customer who lives between my central office and a customer to put cables under or their land, plus get permission from the city to put cables under or over city streets?
How long will it be before the phone company, and their physical infrastructure becomes irrelevant? Can the wireless networks now provided primarily for cell phones replace the copper wire that we are so dependent on any time soon? I sure hope so. I think the best thing that can happen in the long run, is for the phone company to shoot itself in the foot and generate enough interest to get themselves replaced. The sooner the better. Hopefully the power line companies see this de-regulation, and start using their infrastructure to bring internet access to homes. Then the phone company would have real competition. I hope. Then again, they could be like the clueless cable TV operators who seemed to be doing a real shitty job of it.
I watched a TV program the other night. It was an early 1960's version of what the future would bring. They showed handheld telephones (we have them), space flight to the moon (been there), instant food cooking (ala Microwave ovens), tiny refrigerator sized computers (we have more than they imagined) and of course, a telephone system with video. Every prediction came true, except the one the phone company has prevented. The technology has been there for decades, but there is no motivation for the monopolies to innovate. The entire world suffers stagnation as a result. Now, I'm not one to bash self made monopolies. I personally believe in some cases even though they are a monopoly they can be driven by market pressures to improve, but in the case of the phone company it has been an apathetic selfish government sponsored pig. I hope they die soon.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.