Al Franken's Warning On Net Neutrality

An anonymous reader writes "Democratic Sen. Al Franken weighed in on Net Neutrality over the weekend at the Netroots Nation conference of liberal activists in Las Vegas, calling it 'the First Amendment issue of our time,' and warning against Republican plans for less regulation. More from a blog post on CBSNews.com: 'Speculating on what the Internet could morph into under the Republicans' preferred lack of regulation, Franken asked the audience of bloggers how long it would take before the Fox News website loads significantly more quickly than the Daily Kos website. "If you want to protect the free flow of information in this country, you have to help me fight this," he said.'"

Comments

how many web 2.0 companies

[Presto Vivace]

understand that their whole business model is dependent upon a neutral net?

Re:how many web 2.0 companies

[managerialslime]

Why do ISPs not have the right to run their networks however they want?

If an ISP built their business without special advantages over their competition, your point would be valid. However, in the U.S., most high-speed ISP's successfully lobbied for monopoly or duopoly positions as utilities where competitors were prohibited from stringing their own wires on utility poles and tunnels. In return for this advantage, they agreed to operate as regulated entities.

Perhaps as 4G and other high-speed wireless companies come to market, there will be more competition and those original companies can then lobby for removal of the regulatory environment. Until then, we will hear a lot of screaming from both sides.

Re:how many web 2.0 companies

[PopeRatzo]

Why do ISPs not have the right to run their networks however they want?

Because the lack of a Justice Department Anti-Trust Division worth a damn has created a situation where there are only a few ISPs left. That's why. And now that the ISPs are also involved in content creation and delivery, they're creating a "horizontal monopoly" that threatens all free enterprise on the web. You must see the danger of allowing a few corporations to own the means of delivery and then allowing them to compete with their own customers.

Net Neutrality doesn't expand the government's role in anything. It just enforces the role the government have had since the early 1900s.

And "bonch", your bit about Internet access no being a constitutional right is a strawman. Net Neutrality doesn't guarantee anyone Internet access. It just guarantees that once you're on the Internet your communications aren't artificially limited by an ISP that is also trying to be your competitor in content creation.

We've had laws against creating this kind of horizontal monopoly for a long time. If you really thought net neutrality through instead of just buying the corporate FUD, you'd see how important it is. Personally, I believe broadband internet access should be treated as a public utility, but that's not what net neutrality is about.

yes, please.

[Pojut]

This is one of those areas where I WANT the government to intervene. "But they fuck up everything, what makes you think they can get this right???" How about the fact that ISPs already fuck with us, and if left unchecked, they will just get worse anyway.

We should at least TRY to get things under control. The "free market" theory is obviously worth as much as tits on a bull when it comes to ISPs.

Re:yes, please.

[spikenerd]

The "free market" theory is obviously worth as much as tits on a bull when it comes to ISPs.

Blasphemy! Are you suggesting that the "free market" might not be able to solve all our problems?!

Will someone please define "free market" for me? I'm serious, I really don't know what you mean when you say it? Is a free market one in which Comcast controls everything b/c the government keeps its hands off? Or is a "free market" one in which I am free to choose among competitors, because they are free to do business, b/c the government breaks up monopolies? Obviously one of these is more "free" than the other. Has a "free market" ever even been tried in this domain?

Re:yes, please.

[imamac]

I have yet to see a "Free market" as far as ISPs go.

Re:yes, please.

[SatanicPuppy]

The free market could solve our problems, but given that ISP's are granted local monopolies by the fricking government, there is no free market.

The solution is to actually CREATE a free market, and let fair competition solve the issue.

Re:yes, please.

[mcgrew]

The crowd that maintains that "all government is incompetent and all regulation is bad" are composed of liars and the people who swallow their lies. I, for one, am exceeding glad there's an EPA and an OSHA, because I've lived in a time when they didn't exist. You young people can disbelieve me if you want to, but workplaces are far safer thanks to OSHA meddling, and the air and water are far cleaner than they were before EPA meddling.

There is such a thing as too much regulation, and such a thing as too little regulation. In the case of net neutrality, the fact that most ISPs who offer high speed access are monopolies demands that they be tightly regulated. There is no free market in regards to any monopoly. Anyone who thinks monopolies should not be regulated shouldn't take so much oxycotin.

Re:yes, please.

[eldepeche]

When did liberals start listening to comedians for their politics

About 40 years after conservatives started listening to a shitty actor for theirs.

Re:yes, please.

[BassMan449]

Actually I think making the lines themselves public property is not a bad idea. I am very conservative and generally favor avoiding government intervention, but in this case the lines themselves form a natural monopoly. If the lines were a publicly owned commodity that was leased wholesale to anyone, we could get much better competition and would ultimately improve the system for everyone.

Re:yes, please.

[SatanicPuppy]

Exactly.

Infrastructure is one of those places were government intervention is most useful. No one wants local competing water and sewer service, but we tolerate competing, privately maintained information infrastructure?

In many communities there is a push for the local governments to pay for high-end infrastructure with bonds and/or penny taxes, and communities are usually in favor of this.

Telecoms, on the other hand, usually resort to lobbying and aggressive push-polling to try and keep this from happening. In my mind, that they don't like it, is the best argument that it's the right thing to do.

Re:yes, please.

[natehoy]

RE: Dial-up... Only in the beginning.

After a while, economies of scale ensured that only the "big boys" could afford enough modems to keep their subscribers happy, because they got big enough to just buy trunk lines. The small ISP was pretty much shoved out of business or bought out.

At the peak of the dial-up ISP, you could see this happening at an increasing pace. It's just the advent of high-speed Internet that made the entire issue largely irrelevant.

In an unregulated (freedom for the business) market, competition will ensure a race to the bottom and the one who offers service the most cheaply or makes the highest profits can then destroy or buy the competition. Then that one business can set the price to their liking, buy out competitors, and has no reason to add anything new except zeros to the amount it charges. You tend to get fast innovation followed by consolidation followed by monopoly, cash-cow mentality, and stagnation.

In a regulated (freedom for the consumer) market, competition will be regulated so it continues to exist. You'll tend to get lower levels of sustained innovation, no consolidation, and it takes longer to reach the stagnation point, because there's room for new entries into the market. Companies that own expensive or unique resources are forced to share those resources to lower the cost of entry for a newcomer (or, in some cases, unique resources become a public resource).

What we generally have now in most cases is a "regulated monopoly". You get great efficiencies of scale - one company, but you lose innovation because the company (a) has little reason to innovate since it's ensured monopoly status, and (b) has to run any changes by the Government or its regulatory body.

But the regulation does, by and large, allow a company to install HUGE infrastructures and mitigates their risk, and forces the company to operate at a "reasonable" (as defined by the regulatory agency) profit while meeting minimums of service. Obviously not the hotbed of innovation you really want, but the phones work.

So, which "free market" do you want to go to? If you own a decent-sized business who will either become the bear that eats everyone else or make a profit by being "eaten by the bear", or if you're sick and tired of the assholes in Washington DC telling you what you can and cannot do with all that pesky mercury you have when there's a perfectly good river next to your factory that flows "away" quite nicely, obviously your idea of a "free market" is one that any company can do anything they damned well please.

If you are a general consumer, a smaller business, or a person downstream from that plant, you might want some level of regulation.

Re:yes, please.

[Sancho]

This is fantastically analogous to Net Neutrality. Right now, we have lots of websites competing for our attention. If ISPs are allowed to block/slow down websites, suddenly we won't be the ones deciding which websites we get to go to. Competition decreases, the customer loses.

Re:yes, please.

[nschubach]

I never said the financial and banking industry was unregulated. I said they're as close to unregulated as they've been able to manage, and they're usually lobbying to have existing regulations removed.

Actually, you said:

The entire banking fiasco of the last few years is what happens when the financial industry has as close to a free market as they can get.

As close as they can get is not the same as "as close to unregulated as they've been able to manage." The banks have had to manipulate the market (with government assistance for which you blame the bank when it was the SEC that defined it) to continue doing business because they were practically forced (by the government) to give loans to people who they knew couldn't pay them back. If the government came up to you and said, "Give money to this person even though you'll probably never see a dime back" how would you react? That's exactly what happened with the housing industry and they are trying to do it again. With all these requirements, people were deceived as well to think that they could extend the equity in their homes to "pay off" debt through a HELOC. This was defined by the SEC as acceptable lending. And I don't know if you know this, but the SEC is a federal agency.

Re:A big fat idiot

[Pojut]

Typical elitist liberal agenda.

Ensuring that ISPs can't discriminate against the little guy (such as myself) is elitest?

What the fuck are you smoking?

Quite possible

[twoallbeefpatties]

Franken asked the audience of bloggers how long it would take before the Fox News website loads significantly more quickly than the Daily Kos website.

The more likely model of what will happen is not that the internet companies will favor conservatives over liberals, but rather that they will favor companies by size. The cable companies will say that companies need to pay their fair share for bandwidth, and so they'll announce that any internet hosting that doesn't pay a certain amount of usage fees to the ISP will be throttled. So yes, it's likely under this model that Fox News will load faster than DailyKos - and that MSNBC will load faster than the Drudge Report - because those large media organizations will have the cash to give kickbacks to Comcast to make sure that they get full speed downloads, while the smaller bloggers and indie organizations may find themselves unable to meet the ISPs' demands.

Oh puhlease

[MikeRT]

Franken asked the audience of bloggers how long it would take before the Fox News website loads significantly more quickly than the Daily Kos website. "If you want to protect the free flow of information in this country, you have to help me fight this," he said.

If this were RedState warning the exact opposite, it would never make front page. It'd be written off as right-wing paranoia.

Here's a little interesting bit of news: the Republicans aren't the majority party. Here's another one: the Democrats are at least as much in bed with the telecoms as the Republicans. Franken's own damn party is as likely to create a pro-telecom, anti-everyone else regulatory environment as the Republicans if their past behavior on... pretty much any issue that concerns Democratic donors is any indication.

The FCC is, at this point, a textbook example of regulatory capture. Like it or not, that's what it is. Stridently defending what could be is not even remotely compatible with what currently is and likely will be if the FCC is given the power to act. The odds are much greater that the FCC will end up fucking Google, Apple, etc. up the ass than maintaining a policy of genuine openness.

No competition

[elrous0]

The main problem is that the pro-business argument here (mostly Republican, but plenty of Dems too) tries to predicate this on "free market" principles. But there is no real free market in the ISP sector, because there is no real competition. You have a handful of large broadband ISP's (AT&T, Verizon, Time-Warner, and Comcast alone probably represent about 80%+ of the entire market). And most consumers have all of two (three if they're lucky) choices for ISP. In my area, you can choose between Comcast (cable) and AT&T (DSL) and that's it. If both those companies degrade or block a particular website, that's it. There is nowhere else to go for decent performance (and even AT&T's DSL is inferior to Comcast, so there is really only ONE place to go for anything above 3Mbps).

Ideal versus Reality

[Jason Levine]

In an ideal world, we wouldn't need the government to intervene. If my ISP suddenly started loading their "preferred" sites faster, I would simply leave them and go to any of my dozens of other choices. Information on which ISPs were mucking with speeds would be public and well documented for everyone to access in order to make informed purchase decisions.

In the real world, however, most people have only one or two broadband ISPs. If my cable company mucks with site speeds, I might be able to go to my phone company. If they muck with the speeds also, I have no options. (Actually, I'm stuck after the cable company as Verizon doesn't have FIOS where I live.)

Network Neutrality opponents argue that "the market" will fix any problems, but how can "the market" fix the problem when you have a monopoly or duopoly? I'm not a huge fan of government regulations, but there are places where they should be and this is one of them.

Re:It is Called Competition

[VShael]

To the Republicans, the "little guy" is Enron. The Big Guy is the government.

You are not the little guy. You are less than nothing.

Re:"the First Amendment issue of our time"

[sammy baby]

If the two events were to be truly compared, then the First Amendment should have made anyone with a printing press unable to refuse to print and distribute whatever someone else wants based on content, and that includes the major newspapers of the time - the First Amendment did no such thing, but network neutrality will do if it were to be implemented as trumpeted on Slashdot.

Your analogy is deeply, misleadingly, and vexatiously flawed. Net neutrality legislation doesn't enjoin people attempting to produce content, as do the printers of your example. It enjoins people attempting to take part in a public infrastructure which transmits that content to would-be consumers. As it happens, the founders did have an opinion about that, and the US Postal Service was established in an attempt to give equal access to that service.

For a lot of reasons that should probably be obvious, I don't think that the USPS makes a very good point of comparison with the Internet. But your analogy is simply ludicrous, unless you think that the passage of Net Neutrality is going to force, say, HBO to produce my four part special on toe cheese.

Intentional Confusion

[BlueStrat]

There has been much confusion regarding "Net Neutrality". Much of it, I contend, deliberate on the part of politicians and government bureaucrats.

I'm all for "Net Neutrality" if it's defined as fair practices in traffic shaping, throttling, routing & etc, PERIOD. A bill to accomplish that would only need to be a few pages long at most.

The problem (and the reason I oppose the current iterations) is that what Congress is contemplating is a (relatively) huge piece of legislation that expands government control over the internet using "Net Neutrality" as cover for a power grab.

Those like Franken are hoping people are stupid enough to not look past the title to see what is actually in the bill and what it actually accomplishes.

Don't be as stupid as those in Congress think you are. There's too much at stake.

Strat