Slashdot Mirror
Net Neutrality Vets Join Obama FCC Transition Team
circleid writes "The Obama-Biden transition team on Friday named two long-time net neutrality advocates to head up its Federal Communications Commission Review team. Susan Crawford, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, member of the board of directors of ICANN, and OneWebDay founder, as well as Kevin Werbach, former FCC staffer, organizer of the annual Supernova technology conference, and a Wharton professor, will lead the Obama-Biden transition team's review of the FCC. 'Both are highly-regarded outside-the-Beltway experts in telecom policy, and they've both been pretty harsh critics of the Bush administration's telecom policies in the past year.' The choice of the duo strongly signals an entirely different approach to the incumbent-friendly telecom policy-making that's characterized most of the past eight-years at the FCC."
Reuters has a related story about Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), who plans to introduce net neutrality legislation in January.
...does this mean you'll be able to hear a random "fuck" on free-to-air television in the U.S. now without a hefty fine?
I suppose it still depends on how many people are complaining.
Why do "net neutrality" advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a "series of tubes," and then trust them to regulate it?
or
?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Because trusting the phone companies to regulate it has worked even less for us in the past ten years.
It is refreshing to see that Obama is pulling from academia and groups such as ICANN, rather than just from industry to populate his cabinet. I believe that those that have served in industry can offer some of the best insight into policy, but choosing a significant number of executives definitely skews policy in the wrong direction. For that matter, having too many of any one group leads to problems.
I hope that Obama can see beyond what his party wants, and make decisions based on advice from all sides. Lincoln and Kennedy were both known for filling their cabinets with diverse members from a wide political and social background. After the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs Kennedy sought to limit group think - where all dissenting opinions are squashed by excessive group homogeneity - Kennedy specifically divided up similar advisors and brought in outside experts to help successfully diffuse the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had the political savvy to understand that difficult decisions have no right answer, just answers that are more or less positive for everyone.
Hopefully Obama will balance his cabinet appointments in a similar way. Drawing from universities is a good start, but some industry experts mixed into the bunch is an excellent step in the right direction as well. As L. B. Johnson said of Hoover, "I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in." It's better to have dissenting opinions inside helping you make positive choices, rather than showering you from outside and making your life more difficult.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
What does this have to do with that?
And I'm not aware of politicianS doing this stupid comparison; only of one, who has just been convicted of corruption and lost his bid for reelection.
The public would not pay for its Internet services if AT&T discriminated against content, [Jim Cicconi, AT&T executive vice president for regulatory affairs] added. "We'd be shooting ourselves in the foot."
But, if the public only had a choice between DSL w/ AT&T, cable w/ Comcast, or no internet at all, and both companies throttled content, then the public is really left without a choice. It used to be that consumers had a choice between their internet provider. Nowadays, many major cities and municipalities only have one or two choices, usually both of them major players. And when regional monopolies exist, regulation has to exist to ensure that the monopolies aren't abused.
Deregulating Wall Street has done wonders for the US economy, unleashing the creative powers of the investor class unto the world. Deregulating the telecom industry is working just as well!
Hm. Internet terrorist? o.O http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_mitnik You know he runs a security consulting company, right? No doubt another leftist conspiracy, helping people keep their computers and networks safe.
My fellow Americans, let me be the last to retail slanderous rumors. I have great respect for Mr. Obama and his family. But when our nation and our GOD-given rights are at risk, no patriot can remain silent. It has coem to my attention that our worst fears have been confirmed. "Barack Obama," whose real name is Giuseppe Franconi, is an agent of the sinister Italian power! Americans, imagine the not-so-far future: government agents violating the sanctity of our TV-rooms, our base ball parks, and our children's schools and churches, confiscating our GOD-given hot dogs and replacing them with salamies! Is this the "change" you believe in? Is this your "hope" for the future? I for one will not remain silent as nefarious Italian agents use the cover of the freedoms that we love to spirit their nefarious ices into our Democratic sanctuary.
Now let me say I have nothing against the Italian people, who are a peace-loving people with a noble and historic culture. Their language, Mexican, is shared by many proud, upstanding hispanic citizens of this great land. But the hot-dog conspiracy is war, by a small secret cabal of Italians who hate freedom and our GOD-given meat products, and our freedom to eat hot dogs in our tv rooms must be defended. As long as I am the president, this administration will take the fight to the enemy and defeat the Italian menace. Thank you and GOD BLESS AMERICA.
What are you babbling about and what does this have to do with net neutrality? Please, wipe the drool off your chin and go back to quietly reminiscing how cool you used to be.
On topic now, it's good to see that net neutrality is getting some serious consideration. Like the GP said, when you only have 1-2 choices and they are both behaving the same way, well, you have no choice. I will say, however, that there has never really been much choice for broadband outside of bit metro areas. When there was choice for Internet access, that was mostly dial-up. It was/is cheaper to terminate a butt-load of phone lines to a modem than roll out your own cable infrastructure.
"successfully diffuse the Cuban Missile Crisis"? I think you mean "defuse". In the context of missiles, diffuse has pretty much exactly the opposite meaning.
I've said this before, but why not say it again :)
The basic issue with Net Neutrality is not how the service should be offered, or anything to do with the technology. It's fundamentally just an issue of who pays. Telecoms would like to collect subscriber revenue from their customers, then turn around and collect more revenue from content providers as well.
The important thing to understand here is that as bad as the current ISP situation is, under the current model a customer theoretically has the option to respond to price signals by changing their service options, e.g., switching to another provider, or --- if none is available --- simply reducing their consumption. That keeps costs under control to some extent.
Under the proposed model, it's the content provider who pays. Since a content provider is not a direct "customer" of the ISP, they have very little leverage with the ISP. If, say, Google wants to reach a given class of customers (e.g., the tens millions of customers served by Comcast), they have no choice but to deal with Comcast on whatever terms it chooses--- or give up a huge percentage of the market.
Now on the surface this seems like a fine deal to Comcast's customers, since they get enhanced network services without any additional service charges. But this leads to a problem: without any price signals, there's no strong incentive on Comcast to moderate their prices. Anything they charge will ultimately be passed along to the customers by the content providers, in the form of higher service charges, reduced quality, and/or dramatically increased advertising. But customers won't see this directly and link it to the ISP, so there will be very little incentive to control costs (no doubt Comcast will mandate that content providers distribute these costs equally, and not single out their customers for additional surcharges). It imposes a huge tax on a very dynamic and growing part of our economy, and it's certainly one we don't need now.
(Larger providers, incidentally, will have some leverage in this model--- since who wants to be the ISP to cut off iTunes service? But their leverage will come at the cost of squeezing smaller providers for more revenue, dramatically increasing barriers to entering the market. Goodbye new ideas.)
There are various solutions to this problem, all of which require the ISP to bill their enhanced services to the customer. In the end this gives the same set of enhanced services, but also allows customers to make a decision as to whether they want to pay the ISP, cut down on service, or switch to another provider. Done correctly this should encourage ISPs to open up their networks to many providers, since their revenue will be driven by customer interest and not self-interest.
The new President is appointing knowledgeable experts to important government posts instead of industry cronies? Pinch me.
Why do Linux advocates ridicule operating systems for being closed-source and bloated, and then trust an operating system to run their computers?
Why do vegetarians ridicule food for being immoral and unhealthy, but still eat food?
Why do voters criticize candidates for holding positions they don't like, and then vote for a candidate?
All this noise about net neutrality, supporters and against'sers would not have come at all had AT&T CEO kept his trap shut that fateful day.
By showing his greed for double-dipping and charging websites AND ISP consumers for directing traffic, he showed the face of corporate greed prematurely. This resulted in congress and Obama forcing ISPs to agree to neutrality.
AT&T CEO must be cursing himself for opening his mouth that day...
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I prefer a more libertarian approach here. If CBS wants to show boobies after a reasonable time, say, 9:00 (the internationally accepted "Boobie Hour), have swear words and show people's heads exploding like a melon, let them. The market will sort things out. People will either watch and support CBS' decision and CBS will show more boobies.
And you know what will happen? Ratings will skyrocket, resulting in 3 dozen copycat stations - and virtually none for those people who don't want to see nudity and violence all the time (like the reality show trend). Market numbers will always look good for that type of trash, because a large percentage of people who don't like smut 24/7 have already given up on TV anyways (prime example: the book readers). So realistically, you would have to bring those people back to TV to even know what audience you're missing. It's similar to the American Idol effect: ratings went through he roof, because people you didn't even know existed tuned in because it wasn't tabloid TV.
I'm 26 years old, I don't have any kids, I'm not a very religious person, and I don't have a college degree. I don't belong in any of the groups that would typically go for this sort of thing - yet I feel TV is complete garbage. Entirely too much shock value, and not enough substance.
Look, I'm a "Full Blooded American", but I'm honest enough to know that American citizens are neither smart enough or responsible enough to decide what's good for TV. We'd sell our souls and our youth for good entertainment, and we'd do it without hesitation. We're prisoners of the moment, and we never understand - or even care about - the big picture.
> Why do "net neutrality" advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a "series of tubes," and then trust them to regulate it?
A) Ted "Tubes" Stevens is a convicted felon who won't be in the Senate much longer (even if that count goes the other way, he'll get expelled by the Republicans and replaced by Gov. Sarah Palin).
B) There's no true competition among ISPs. If a backbone provider does this, we're screwed. Period. Full stop. You can't just stop using the backbones. That's why they're backbones. The only way we can force them to listen is with regulation.
So it's not like we want regulation per se, it's more like regulation is the only way to keep them honest. Unless you know of some other way to control the behavior of natural monopolies that doesn't require duplicating billions of dollars of infrastructure when we've already paid for it once?
But you're right. Regulation is a responsibility. We can't just let the rules grow into a huge morass. We have to be careful to come up with clear, simple restrictions like "You cannot throttle traffic based on its destination unless it's part of a DoS attack." Let customers do their own QoS. They know better than the ISP what they want to prioritize, anyhow.
The Clinton FCC had forced phone companies and cable companies to lease their lines to competitors at fair prices.
One of the first things the Bush FCC did was to undo this.
(The exact opposite happened in France around the same time; the EU forced phone line unbundling to the former state monopoly. Result? Cheap, abundant broadband)
Net neutrality would be an irrelevant issue if we'd just deregulate the spectrum, giving people access to a plethora of competitive wireless carriers (as opposed to now, where we auction off what in reality is infinitely divisible). As it is now people worry about what companies will do without net neutrality laws because our telecom regulation regime is such that it creates a few big heavyweights and doesn't allow much competition. But all you have to do is open the spectrum to use by anyone, and pretty soon Comcast and Verizon will lose their awesome market power.
But, if the public only had a choice between DSL w/ AT&T, cable w/ Comcast, or no internet at all, and both companies throttled content, then the public is really left without a choice.
Most complaints about throttling are not net neutrality issues. Net neutrality is about making sure ISPs don't try to extort money from websites like Google and Yahoo to deliver their content without throttling, redirects, or other shenanigans.
Net neutrality is not about making sure you are allowed to use 98% of the bandwidth on your block using bittorrent while others who share the same line suffer the consequences of your actions. If you are using a significant portion of the ISP's resources, as a subscriber you should expect to pay more than others. If you have a beef with being sold 'unlimited' internet and then being throttled/capped, that is a false advertising claim. That is not a net neutrality issue.
was, yes we can!, now, yes icann
in too late to get mod points
Don't you love the whoosing sound jokes make when they fly over people's heads? I do.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Conservatives love to point fingers at the CRA, because then they can blame liberals and poor people instead of the rich assholes on Wall Street, but the fact is that it had almost nothing to do with the current crisis. Here's what BusinessWeek has to say about it:
From http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives/2008/09/community_reinv.html
Fresh off the false and politicized attack on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, today we're hearing the know-nothings blame the subprime crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act -- a 30-year-old law that was actually weakened by the Bush administration just as the worst lending wave began. This is even more ridiculous than blaming Freddie and Fannie.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
That's where you and libertarians are ideologically out of touch. Markets can't be free without the proper regulation. Even 'bubbles' Greenspan admits it now. But there are still fanatics of the cult long after the comet has passed.
> "Boobies" are always reasonable. They are quite easy to find [snip]. The "Boobies" are in most every community. Hence based on the standards of the community in your area, boobies are indeed acceptable.
There, fixed that for ya.
"Conservatives love to point fingers at the CRA, because then they can blame liberals and poor people instead of the rich assholes on Wall Street, but the fact is that it had almost nothing to do with the current crisis.
And liberals love to cover their asses, when they were at fault of the core of the greatest economic collapse since stagflation in the 70's. BTW, you guys were responsible for that one too. The rich did trade the toxic paper, but Democrats in Congress covered for them because it suited their political goals. But if there are no subprime loans, then there is no subprime crisis. Subprime loans were the product of your beloved CRA. In order to open bank branches in poorer neighborhoods, the CRA mandated that those banks had to give a percentage of home loans regardless of creditworthiness. You may think that's great social policy, but it's horrible economics.
And your BusinessWeek quote is from a commentary, not an analysis. It was his opinion. His opinion is flatly wrong, and I'll get you one hundred more qualified opinions saying so. Deep down, you know it. Even Barney Frank now admits those loans shouldn't have been made, though he denies any personal culpability. Just like the rest of you, apparently.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It has nothing to do with a Democrat vs Republican thing. Both parties have been obsessed with encouraging home ownership for decades. "Encouraging home ownership" is a euphemism for intervening in the market such that people who would otherwise not purchase homes due to normal market forces end up purchasing homes. This has been done in a lot of ways, one of which certainly is the CRA. Others are: cutting interest rates below what the market would have it, allowing the interest on a first home purchase to be deducted from taxes, allowing penalty free withdrawals from tax sheltered accounts if used to purchase a home, etc. All of these things inflate the housing market beyond where it should be.
It was a fatal mistake for government to encourage home ownership. It's one of those things that plays well with voters who don't understand market economics.
Now, aside from that issue, there is the credit default swaps issue. This is a problem because the government intervenes all over the place in the financial markets, but this one area was not regulated like equivalent financial products with a different classification were regulated. The problem isn't really that credit default swaps need regulation. The problem is that everything else was regulated. Consider two identical products A and B. A is encumbered by government regulation. B is classified differently and is not regulated. The market for A will shrink to an unnaturally small size and the market for B will balloon to an unnaturally large size. This is exactly what happened with credit default swaps. Whether you think there needs to be more regulation of CDS or less regulation of everything else is really a matter of opinion, not fact.
The Glass-Steagal act, which was a regulation; was mostly repealed. That's a DEregulation.
An example of regulation would be: "you can not lie on your IPO advertisement"
An example of regulated market would be: "copper will now have to be traded at $10 a kg"
An argument can be made that the repeal of Glass-Steagal made the effects of the crisis ripple further through the market, but it certainly did not cause the crisis itself.
Want to give it another shot?
So now you admit this was a regulation.
But it appears you have changed the question, and therefore my answer isn't appropriate anymore. What is it you want this time?
The purpose of my question was in the context of the implication that deregulation is at fault for this financial crisis. Does that help clarify?
Susan Crawford doesn't "get" the Internet. It was intentionally designed NOT to be a "utility," but rather a loosely federated collection of independent networks bound together by a common protocol. In fact, its original designers made much of the fact that it was to be very different from the Bell System -- in other words, not a public utility with big monopolies and regulators (who would then be subject to "regulatory capture"). No one could "own" the entire Internet, but anyone could own a piece of it -- and impose acceptable use policies for that piece as he or she saw fit (just as the universities and companies that were first on the Internet did at the beginning and still do today).
But Crawford isn't a technologist; she's a lawyer. And lawyers are ensured of full employment by regulation, because they can make millions representing clients before regulatory bodies, interpreting regulations, filing lawsuits based on regulation, etc. -- and so, naturally enough, they are biased toward it, even if it's very bad for the public.
The regulation that Crawford favors (and she has argued for it by making false statements to Congress) would be horrible for the Internet. It would ensure that no independent ISP could survive; everyone would HAVE to get Internet from a telephone company or a cable company. You couldn't pay more for more bandwidth if you needed it (even though it's natural, because more bandwidth costs the provider more money)... somehow, that's not egalitarian enough. Crawford isn't a realist; she's a lobbyists. And woe betide us if we give lobbyists control of our country....