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FCC Commissioner Urges, Don't Regulate the Internet
Brett Glass writes "In an op-ed in today's Washington Post, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell makes a case against government regulation of the Internet, opining that 'engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.' With state governments pressuring ISPs to pull the plug on Usenet, and a proposal now in play for a censored public Internet, McDowell may have a very good point." McDowell is one of the two FCC commissioners who did not vote with the majority to punish Comcast for their BitTorrent throttling.
McDowell is one of the two FCC commissioners who did not vote with the majority to punish Comcast for their BitTorrent throttling.
So by 'not regulating' he means that ISP's should be free to throttle whatever they please? Interesting stance.
If the government doesn't step in, it won't be engineers regulating the internet either. It will be Sales and Marketing managers (or maybe someone higher up the food chain) trying to squeeze every last drop of profit from their paying customers.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Realistically, we want some middle ground between regulation and lack of regulation. Obviously we don't want the government to do something overly obstructive and bureaucratic, or something that makes it difficult to have a web presence, but we also don't want to have so much power in the hands of a few telecoms and providers that essentially they can do whatever they want, including stifling competition, charging twice for bandwidth, or taking billions of dollars in government subsidies to lay unneeded cable.
(To pick a few examples.)
Similarly, we want enough anonymity that people can report corruption anonymously, but not so much anonymity that it's impossible to track down people who abuse kids and post videotapes of that on the web. Web regulation is a complicated issue.
Thousands are enslaved every day. A River of In
One or the other will be regulating the internet. There is no perfect solution, but at least with government there is a chance of some accountability. If it's left to comcast, ATT, etc al, there is zero chance.
Caveat Utilitor
It looks like USA and Sweden is copying Chinas "Golden shield" to protect its citizens. Sweden with the new FRA law, and US censoring Usenet.
I really hope we can stop this before the politicians try to "protect" me too.
Most muslim states are of course already "protecting" its citizens heavily.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.
If the problem was only an engineering problem, I might agree... but since this has vast political, economical, and social consequences, and could undermine the entire Internet as we know it, I think governments should step in and pass a law that simply states "don't discriminate against traffic based on the source/destination."
I know government regulation can make things messy, but I don't know why it has to be any more complicated than that.
But if ISPs are found messing with the neutrality of the connections, then they should be held liable for all content that comes across their lines. It would establish one of two senarios. A) they leave the traffic flow alone and thus avoid a ton in liability. B) they go into complete china lockdown mode and allow nothing even slightly questionable through. If B occurs, then there will eventually be enough resentment to eventually re focus on why telecom is a big monopoly. Right now average joe doesn't care. As long as average joe can watch Utube and porn, the status quo remains. This whole net neutrality issue wouldn't even exist if the free market wasn't botched/hijacked in this country.
Regulation in and of itself can also be a slipperly slow. That is why we need Net Neutrality laws. Yes, it's a form of regulation in a sense, but it's the best we can probably do.
Net neutrality is to regulation what the GPL is to copyright. It is regulation designed to subvert "regulation" by making the imposition of restrictions on the internet illegal.
Anyone who does not understand this is ignorant, and anyone who opposes it is willfully corrupt.
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Because you own the spectrum and there's no longer a valid technical reason to grant it exclusively. Government granted monopolies on spectrum is a primary internet regulation someone that believes in free markets should oppose.
Laying cable and fiber in other people's back yards and public property is a privilege. Those granted that privilege must accept public regulation in return for the public servitude. Think about that for a while and you realize that the Internet is already highly regulated but the regulations do not always serve the public interest. Common carrier and net neutrality is the least the public can ask in return for exclusive use of public property. The public can and should also demand competition in wired service. Someone who believes in free markets would lower barriers to entry and use of wired networks.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Some people (read:ISPs) say that laws protecting Net Neutrality are regulation which will stifle innovation and mess up everything, but laws which exist to safeguard freedom still need to exist...
Like the Bill of rights... Maybe Net Neutrality shouldn't be a regular law, maybe it should be an ammendment.
With state governments pressuring ISPs to pull the plug on Usenet
Wrong. Lets get this clear - The recent push to shut down usenet access is being led almost solely by Andrew Cuomo - the Attorney General from NY - some guy who you probably never voted for. In fact, you've probably never even seen his name on a ballot.
Isn't it cool how some douchebag elected in a different state gets to dictate national policy?
Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy.
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Here is the trade association (read: telecom lobbyist group) that he served as assistant General Counsel and Vice President: http://www.comptel.org/.
From his bio:
Libertarians, I know he's speaking your language with this regulation==evil talk, but he does not have your interests at heart.
I totally fail to see how allowing ISPs to inspect and mangle data passing through their system is "pro-competition" or even "anti-regulation". These people want to destroy the internet as we know it.
The USA isn't censoring Usenet... it's encuraging ISPs to drop an area that has become too much of trading point for illegal files. The ISPs are complying willingly because it's not been profitable for them to run, and most users won't miss it.
Still, services like Google Groups and EasyNews are still up and running. There's no threat to those as of yet.
The very notion of "illegal files" is the essence of censorship.
Copyright may be called by propaganda terms like "intellectual property", but it is censorship (which can be performed by anyone, not just government, BTW) at its core.
I agree with McDowell with one giant exception: the laissez-faire approach will only work if there is competition in the last mile. Given that most people only have 1 or 2 choices (huge telecom and/or huge cable company), I really don't think the conditions warrant a completely hands-off approach by the FCC. Once I have several high-speed ISP options, then I'll agree with him.
Also, does anyone know what exactly Mr. McDowell is referring to when he talks about the Internet bandwidth crisis and solution of 1987?
The problems with regulation of the internet are not really liberal or conservative issues. It just does not break down along those lines. It is not exactly liberal or conservative policy to deliberately screw over their constituent. (Really, it isn't.)
Liberals are generally for freedom of expression (and hence will want little regulation with the internet) and Conservatives are for freedom of market (and hence will want little regulation with the internet). No reasonably popular political view when taken as a whole would back heavy internet regulation. (No, fascism isn't reasonably popular).
The problems arise from politicians (hiss, boo) who have something to gain from pushing for such regulation and either don't understand the repercussions or don't care. It really does not matter what label they've slapped on themselves. It does not matter what party you're from, Saving The Children is usually viewed as a Good Thing, and directly opposing it is political suicide.
I know, I know, don't feed the trolls. Sorry.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
The very notion of "illegal files" is the essence of censorship.
Copyright may be called by propaganda terms like "intellectual property", but it is censorship (which can be performed by anyone, not just government, BTW) at its core.
I couldn't have said this better myself.
The notion of owning and controlling the distribution of information is antithetical to a free society. The fact that the "progress of science and the useful arts" clause is so brief comes from heated contention of the merits of allowing copyright to exist in the first place. Our founding fathers were pretty fresh and raw from the old copyright cartels founded and abused by the crown.
I'm sure if you brought them all forward in time to today, and gave them the last year or two of the YRO section to read, a few would turn around to the others and scream "I TOLD YOU SO!"
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If ISPs aren't required to keep the internet open and free, then they can work in collaboration to charge for access, slow down or block access, and in short destroy the Internet as we know it. It's great if your idea of the Internet is a medium dominated by corporate interests. If so, than you can lap up this latest from lobbyist cum chairman McDowell, and sit back eagerly as he and others work to turn the Internet into a version of television. Corporations want profits and control of content, officials want funds and control of content, everybody wins (or at least those who matter).
We are a decade or so past where we can just say, let the engineers decide, and trust that some PHB isn't going to step in and make a bad policy. The importance of the Internet as alternative mass media is too vital to not protect through a little bit of regulation. McDowell tries to make his regulation = death to innovation FUD pitch, but net neutrality would spur innovation.
You can prioritize traffic in a neutral fashion, that's all many of us are asking, and that's all the regulating that is required.
Well, I found this bit:
Some parties claim that we should meter all connections by the bit.
What I can't find is the bit where you cite that. At all. So who's saying this?
But while we're on the subject:
Firstly, users tell us overwhelmingly that they want charges to be predictable.
Yeah, and I'd like my gas, water, and electric to be predictable, too.
But you know what? They are. If I leave the water running, or the lights on, they'll be high. Otherwise, they'll be low. And it's entirely my responsibility (and under my control) whether this happens.
Secondly, users aren't always in control of the number of bits they download.
Bullshit.
Users may not always have the skills to control it. But this is exactly the same as any other utility -- should I be penalized because I use, say, incandescent light bulbs instead of compact fluorescent, thus drawing more power? I may not have the skills to change a light bulb, or to tell one light bulb from another, after all.
And, in fact, unlike the power in my house, we have much more sophisticated instrumentation for analyzing and interfering with IP traffic.
From one central place in my house, I can, maybe, check how much power the house as a whole is using. If I turned on and off individual devices, I could find out how much they're using. I could probably buy some sort of device to attach to individual outlets, to find how much is being drawn from them.
But from one central place in my house, I can measure precisely how much bandwidth is being used, and what it's being used for. I could even set my own limits and throttles. I could completely block that nightly virus update, if I was skeptical about how much it uses.
And finally, a requirement to charge by the bit could spark a price war.
GOOD! This is what we call "competition".
All Internet providers will compete on the basis of one number, even though there's much more to Internet service than that.
Like what, exactly?
You could cite reliability, or responsiveness, but these can be reduced to numbers, too -- uptime and latency, respectively.
For once, my signature is relevant -- it doesn't matter to me much one way or the other. But why, exactly, is price per bit a bad thing?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I used to think that any kind of government regulation of the Internet would be a bad thing, according to the "slippery slope" principle. Now, after reading about the concept of "net neutrality", I've decided that some regulation is probably a good thing, and that there's a difference between regulating speech and regulating utility.
I want the FCC to keep out of other people's business with regard to content, but I also want them to ensure the internet remains "neutral" with regard to protocols and routes.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
I wouldn't want my highways owned and administered by companies having an interest in transportation. Imagine private traffic cops stopping all competing vehicles for various random safety inspections and allowing the companies own vehicles to travel beyond the speed limit. Doesn't make sense for roads. Doesn't make sense for the Internet. In my opinion, content providers should not administer the Internet nor be allowed to interfere with its traffic.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
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That's a nice sound bite (typical of bureaucrats nowadays), but an engineering problem (bandwidth utilization of P2P networks) has been turned into a business opportunity -- restrictively low caps with excessive overage charges --- by the ISPs.
So, in effect, the lack of regulation due to "engineering problems needed to be solved by Engineers" has evolved into "engineering problems being solved by accountants".
I'd rather have regulation.
After that, think long and hard about the alternative.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
This is the beginning of a very slippery slope. What if Comcast decides to ban all torrent traffic?
Then take your business elsewhere. Is that so hard for the average Slashdot reader? Many people seem to be totally unaware that they are the invisible hand.
Wholesale rates is still making you a profit.
Say if your competitor stole all your business but was buying all its traffic through your lines at a reasonable wholesale rate, you would be making a profit and he would be making a profit.
It would also be your fault for having a crappy retail department who couldn't retain and gain satisfied customers.
I think we may have differing definitions of troll. To me, submitting a story appealing to nntp users, well-meaning libertarians, and freedom of speech and expression advocates, while having an agenda that is, in fact, at cross purposes with those groups, seems a bit trollish.
It seems like your agenda is to give ISPs the right to block the services and software that most of us here on /. depend on every day in our careers. If you didn't mean it, I don't know why you said it in your letter to the FCC or in your testimony. Your words seem unambiguous...
Your vitriol towards "lobbyists" also seems strange, as the person you are praising was the vice-president and assistant general counsel to a FCC lobbyist group directly before his appointment.
I'm totally willing to listen to your explanation. I'm really not a troll.
What if most people don't share your preferences as consumers?
In a free market, that would mean they get a flat rate, or some more complex plan.
Sure, most Slashdotters are fine with pay-per-bit, if it means no application discrimination.
Really? Given that most Slashdotters are heavy bandwidth users, I'd imagine most of us would rather our bandwidth bills be subsidized by people whose heaviest usage is YouTube -- or better, people who only bought broadband so their Yahoo Mail will come up faster.
But I prefer a low-cost ISP that doesn't impose a unit cost on bandwidth use, even if it means some of my Bittorrent TCP streams are reset.
Why?
What right does the FCC have to dictate that no company can provide it to me?
Well, all things equal, you are saying that you don't particularly care about your TCP streams being reset. Some of us do.
Net neutrality with sufficient bandwidth is pretty much the only way to make all users happy -- if we really need our torrents to not interrupt our Skype calls, we can apply our own QoS on Linksys routers and the like.
The pricing is a separate issue entirely.
If you can't throttle, you've got to price per bit--otherwise, everybody pays more because the ISPs have to upgrade to satiate extreme users.
I don't think anyone is saying you can't throttle.
What we are saying is, don't throttle based on such inanities as number of open TCP sockets or port number, and certainly not on things like deep packet inspection. Throttle on raw bandwidth alone.
Which means, either price per bit, or daily/weekly/monthly caps, or some combination thereof -- as long as it's explicitly and fairly agreed upon in the first place.
And believe me, there are people out there (like myself) who'd gladly pull in terabytes were it not for monthly usage caps.
So install software on your router to cap your monthly usage, if it starts to hurt your wallet.
Or are you saying you're like those Slashdotters I'm talking about above, where you'd rather Grandma pay for your bandwidth bill?
ISPs should duke it out and battle for customers by experimenting with varying methods of managing congestion.
Wonderful -- "managing congestion".
You do realize it's not just about dropping some torrent connections, right? Here, borrow my tinfoil hat for a moment...
Suppose Comcast notices that a huge amount of bandwidth is being used by YouTube, and that people are watching less cable TV. So, they drop the occasional YouTube connection, artificially alter a few others, maybe even intercept the stream and recompress it down, making it look artificially worse, in an effort to drive people back to cable TV -- which costs the users more money, and is cheaper for Comcast.
That is one of many scenarios that net neutrality prevents.
banning protocol discrimination because it violates some sacred principle means fewer choices in the end.
I would call the loss of YouTube "fewer choices" indeed. And that matters more to me -- I'd much rather be able to choose between two providers who can show me YouTube, or Vuze, or some newer, more disruptive technology, than fifty who will only show me Fox News through their own, proprietary IPTV system.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That's not what he said at all if you actually read the article. In fact, at the end of it, he thanked the interest groups for bringing this to the FCC's attention and publically shaming Comcast. The result was that Comcast will stop using TCP resets and implement a protocol agnostic network management system by the end of this year and they're working with BitTorrent corporation and the P4P group to improve BitTorrent efficiency as well as a P2P users' bill of rights and responsibilities. So the process of the public and the FCC putting public pressure and humiliation on Comcast did the trick.
See http://www.itif.org/index.php?id=162 and http://www.formortals.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/88/Default.aspx
The problem with the FCC majority decision is that they're trying to enforce something that they said was never intended to be enforceable and they never went through any formal rule making process.
I really, really wish this were true. Ever since "Ill be damned if I'll pay for a landslide" it's been considered foolish to pay more than is necessary to buy the election. That elections are always bought is assumed. No 0-budget loser is going to get herself elected no matter how good her term might be for the country.
That means that perverting elections to the highest office in the land are increasingly swayed by individuals who can move the margin by a fraction of a percent. Cheating is getting increasingly easy. If IT makes jobs more efficient then it follows that digital polling booths make exploiting the US election system easier with every innovation.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The problem is that when you let ISPs decide what is good, it will not be engineers deciding, but managers and marketing people. The only way to have engineers deciding about the future of the internet is for the FCC to ask a lot of engineers for their opinion and then make a regulation from this opinion .
"Why is there just one phone company and one cable company in most areas?"
My understanding is that you have to apply for a TV license per municipality. When I lived in DC you could have Comcast in one country or city and across the street would be Cox because that was a different county or city. The cable companies kind of colluded by saying I won't go in your area and you won't come in mine. This is one of the big roadblock for Verizon Fios/Fios TV.
One of the solution is to create a universal TV license for the whole nation. Cable companies would realize if Phone companies and other cable companies could take their market, they need to expand to get into other markets to compensate. More service providers should allow for better options. This isn't the grand solution but it is a step in the right direction, instead of doing nothing.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert