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

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.

[gstoddart]

Will someone please define "free market" for me?

Literally, one with as few rules as possible. A market scenario in which whatever happens in the market must be good, because the "invisible guiding hand" ensures that the market always makes the best decision.

In practice, nobody has ever had a free market. There's always some degree of regulation.

And, when the greedy bastards manipulate the system to get as much money for themselves and screw everybody else over, you get to see all sorts of reasons why the free market isn't such a good system. 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.

According to strict, laissez fair capitalism, the BP spill happened because that was the optimal market outcome, and in the long term if it is good business to prevent such things, and if not, it will keep happening. I would argue letting oil companies self regulate gives them no incentive to actually fix things if it might impact their bottom line.

It's about as brutally Darwinistic as you can get, and its proponents like to think that any form of regulation and rules placed on industry is an impediment to their proper role of making as much money as they can. Effects on society be damned since in the long term, society will vote with their dollars and get the optimal outcome.

In short, it's something people hold up as in ideal, which never actually produces the results and good things that people like to ascribe to it.

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.

[gstoddart]

Then I propose that we refer to it as a "hands-off market", since the term "free market" falsely implies a maximization of freedom.

There's already the term "laissez-faire", which loosely translates as "leave it be" or "let it happen". It means exactly what you propose, as does "free market" in this context.

The market isn't about maximizing your freedom. It's about maximizing the freedom of the market to conduct business how it sees fit.

Meaning, the 'market' is free to do whatever it likes without restriction. Eventually the consumers will decide what is best, and everything will naturally work out in a way that is best for business, and gives consumers what they want.

According to the free market people, the companies in the market aren't required to promote your freedoms and should be left 'free' to impose any rules they see fit.

So, forcing them to not throttle their networks to keep out packets infringes on their freedom to conduct business. You only get the freedom to buy, or not buy a product. All other 'value' decisions fall out of the results of the market, with an implicit (explicit?) assumption that the market will find the 'right' solution.

In this case, net neutrality says they'd like to apply regulations to industry, so that your rights are made more important that the rights of Comcast to say what you do with your internet connection.

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.

[Sir_Lewk]

Is a free market one in which Comcast controls everything b/c the government keeps its hands off?

You've got it wrong. Comcast controls everything because they enter into contracts with local governments that forbid other cable providers from coming in.

Effectively in this example, Comcast controls everything because the government can't keep it's hands off.

Re:yes, please.

[MBGMorden]

Yep. The free market, WHEN IT'S THERE, works very well. Do you guys remember the dial-up market in the mid to late 90's? It truly was very competitive. I remember early companies having insane rates like $40 for 8 hours of access. Within a year or two that was down the $20 for 40 of access. A few more years? $20 per month for "unlimited" access (unlimited in quotes because they didn't seem to care how long you really used it, as long as you didn't have a "keep alive" program pinging a server to make sure it never disconnected). Towards the end of the dial up era I'd literally found a company locally that offered unlimited dial-up for $99 paid annually.

It was truly easy to switch companies back then, as I went through almost a dozen different dial-up companies for my access. Now, I have DSL. It's a lot faster, but for speed at that rate, I have no others options. The DSL is bought from the local telephone company. No other provider has access to those lines so I can't get DSL from any other source. There's no cable out where I'm at so no option there either. My internet bill hasn't changed in price in 7 years now. About a year ago they did decide to up the speed of their bottom tier (the one I'm on), from 1Mbps to 3Mbps, but no change in price ($45 per month). They don't need to - they're the phone company, and no one else can compete.

As said, the free market works WONDERFULLY when it exists. But in this case it doesn't. IMHO, we should have a Federally owned universal ISP option. You can't tell me in this day and age that Internet access isn't as important as the postal system, which is federally owned.

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.

[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.

Re:It is Called Competition

[Pojut]

What about someone like me? I run a little website because I enjoy it and because there is a small cadre of people out there that enjoy reading what I have to say.

Now let's say Comcast says that unless I pay them $10 a month, they will slow down people browsing my site through their ISP. Then say Verizon tells me the same thing. And Cox. And Time Warner. Suddenly, my little $120 investment per year in my hobby is an order of magnitude bigger, and I can no longer afford it.

THAT is why net neutrality is important. It isn't to protect the big guys, it's to protect the little guys. ::generalization time:: I find it funny that republicans say they are always "for" the little guy, yet net neutrality is some kind of boogyman amongst them, waiting to come and murder their children.

It's really weird. And hypocritical.

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).

Re:New movie idea!

[eln]

This reminds me of something that really bugged me about this story on CNN. When CNN reported basically this same story yesterday, the link from their front page read "Former SNL Alum talks Net Neutrality" or something like that. Then you click, and it turns out they're talking about Senator Franken. It struck me as really disrespectful to refer to him that way. It would be like referring to the governor of California as "Former Body Builder Schwarzenegger" or our 40th president as "Former Actor Reagan".

Yes, Franken started out as a comedian, but he's now an elected United States Senator and should be afforded the same respect as any other Senator. Of course, the amount of respect we give to our senators tends to be vanishingly small (in most cases deservedly so), but we at least give them the dignity of referring to them by their proper title.

I'm probably overreacting, but I was surprised to see a supposedly serious news organization do something like that.

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:I take your point

[beakerMeep]

Oh I agree 100% (was just joking above). I always think the best example though, for explaining net neutrality to people unfamiliar with it is to talk about video on demand services. When I'm trying to teach them why a neutral net is important, I point to the fact that, for example, both Netflix and Comcast offer video on demand. But only one company is an ISP and in a position to affect the quality of the other's business by capping or slowing bandwidth. This tends to help people grok net neutrality faster than aligning it with the interests of facebook and flickr.

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.