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Civil Rights Groups Divided On Net Neutrality
HughPickens.com writes: Edward Wyatt reports at the NY Times that the NAACP, the National Urban League and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition have sent representatives, including the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, to tell FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler that they think President Obama's call to regulate broadband Internet service as a utility would harm minority communities by stifling investment in underserved areas and entrenching already dominant Internet companies. "We got a lot of poor folks who don't have broadband," said Jackson. "If you create something where, for the poor, the lane is slower and the cost is more, you can't survive." "I think we're all on board with the values embedded in what President Obama said, things like accelerating broadband deployment and adoption," says Nicol Turner-Lee, vice president of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council and a member of the group including Mr. Jackson that met with the F.C.C. chairman. "The question is, will we be able to solve these issues by going so far with stringent regulation?"
Some of the groups that oppose Title II designation, like the Urban League and the League of United Latin American Citizens, have received contributions from organizations affiliated with Internet service providers, like the Comcast Foundation, the charitable organization endowed by Comcast. But those organizations say that the donations or sponsorships do not influence their positions. "We get support from people on all sides of the issue, including Google and Facebook," says Brent A. Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. "We don't let any of them influence our position." For it's part, the NAACP says its formal policy position is that the NAACP neither endorses, nor opposes the formally defined concept of net neutrality but supports the need to particularly focus on underserved racial and ethnic minority and poor communities, while highlighting the importance of protecting an open internet.
Some of the groups that oppose Title II designation, like the Urban League and the League of United Latin American Citizens, have received contributions from organizations affiliated with Internet service providers, like the Comcast Foundation, the charitable organization endowed by Comcast. But those organizations say that the donations or sponsorships do not influence their positions. "We get support from people on all sides of the issue, including Google and Facebook," says Brent A. Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. "We don't let any of them influence our position." For it's part, the NAACP says its formal policy position is that the NAACP neither endorses, nor opposes the formally defined concept of net neutrality but supports the need to particularly focus on underserved racial and ethnic minority and poor communities, while highlighting the importance of protecting an open internet.
Give Jackson money and he'll go away.
Thankfully no one is proposing 'strict regulations'. The modest and reasonable regulations (which already apply to not-insignificant chunks of Verizon's FiOS network) being pushed for by Title II advocates would cut off things such as paid prioritization schemes and providers favoring their own paid services by exempting them from technologically unnecessary bandwidth caps, however.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
I'm all for less government intervention in most things, but let's be real -- the government has helped create the ISP monopolies that currently exist, and "Net Neutrality" strikes me as an intrusive shell game... Hoping I'm wrong. How do we get back to real competition and value for our money? .
What problem will be solved RIGHT NOW by passing strict regulations for ISP's to abide by?
The fact that the United States is something like 26th of industrialized countries in average internet bandwidth, AND more expensive than even those that have far better service.
The big ISPs haven't been investing in infrastucture, because they haven't had to. They don't compete. In 80% of the United States, people have only one real choice for low-latency, modern broadband.
Instead, they've just been pocketing their insane profits.
You can't expect free market forces to fix a situation in which there is no free market. The obvious answer is Title II Common Carrier status.
It worked just fine for landline telephones. It can work for internet.
(PS: before anybody yells that it didn't work for landline telephones, yes, it did. Ma Bell wasn't broken up for lack of service and high service fees. It was different reasons altogether.)
Basically, content owners: read the United States Media Monopoly (90% of what you read, watch on TV, learn in school and so forth is made by 4 companies, look up a book by Ben Bagdikian) want control over content distribution as well so they can snuff out competition. And that means taking control of the last mile and forcing everyone else, specifically anyone competing with them such as pirated TV channel or bit-torrent traffic, or netflix or youtube, or Khan academy, to die by making it artificially too expensive to compete. Fact is movies and television are, increasingly, becoming an outdated, outmoded form of content.
Before those mergers, ISP's did not complain about bittorent; sure some caps existed, but they viewed it a selling point.
That is their stated objective, and everyone knows it.
What Title II does is force that separation back in place hard and fast, and in a way they can never effectively take over content distribution networks. They become like the power distribution company or AT access to the lines gets sold at the same price to everyone and is regulated by local government. And to be honest, these guys are not just co-coordinating with the government to execute psychological warfare operations on the public this time around; they are very seriously looking to do some things that will have a very serious impact on the viability of some business operations and the ability of internet commerce and innovation to continue. It won't stop there; it'll go to shopping and business sites next, and it doesn't need to. In 2000 you needed racks of computers to host a few hundred thousand hits a day website; now you need two or three boxes, it's a different ballgame.
Of course they pound the table like insolent children every chance they get but in all reality, it's time to forcibly divest the internet from these content producers.
The only reason for an "internet fast lane" is because of the need to real-time communications to go over the internet; 911, voice, data. QOS\COS is here, it's been here for a long time, you can buy transport in a metropolitan area and get it to work, and most SS7 hook-ups work that way anyway.
Sure there's some socialism mixed in here, but fact is we're rapidly approaching an internet where a national hundred megabit a second network with extremely low latency is feasible, and the content producers don't want a world in-which users can download a high-definition movie in 10 minutes.
I think these guys don't know what they are talking about. How about 1mbs for $10. That is not net neutrality just a crappy connection. I don't think that anyone disagrees with various speed connections in that it is the end user who makes the choice as to how much speed they want, not some backroom strongarming where they screw the upstream providers out of business.
It has lost all of the original meaning and has become a buzzword with a generic "don't do things that I don't like" meaning. Look at all the Netflix shakedowns for instance. Is it neutral for ISP's to accept a caching server from Netflix? Not unless they would be willing to take servers from everybody else. Is it neutral to leave a link saturated? It's bad for users but it is neutral to the data as long as you aren't purposely forcing routes to only use that link. Does anyone care what neutrality is in this case? No, they just want Netflix to be faster.
We're never going to get anywhere by trying to put a bandaid on our current ISP clusterfuck in America. If we want real change then we have to break up the monopolies again and split the physical infrastructure from the service providers. We need competition in order to fix the plethora of problems with ISP's which go far beyond whatever version of "net neutrality" you believe in.
As far as I know, most minorities have access to electricity, water, and telephones. But treating internet like a utility will somehow keep it out of the inner city? And the free market will soon be bringing low-cost internet to the poor that's just as good as the overpriced connection I pay for? What planet do these guys live on?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Just give us the dumb pipe. *Sheesh*.. When are we going to stop with the bullshit?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Well, nobody's complaining. Why should they provide better service? Where's the incentive? I mean, yeah, people blabber about it all the time, but when it comes to action? Poof! Where did everybody go?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This is both cynical and genius on Comcast's part. For no good reason, people still listen to race hustlers like Jesse Jackson. Feed him some money and watch the protester buses and media circus roll into town. Facts will no longer matter.
Because we can only solve one issue at a time, and must focus on just one thing with monomaniacal devotion until it is completely solved, and only THEN move on to other issues.
Am I doin' it rite?
What you are saying is in effect "We have local monopolies. That's bad. Let's add regulations to make sure that the local monopolies wont' do bad things." That is putting a lot of faith in regulation. How did that work in other markets?
The only thing that will help is breaking up the local monopolies. That is where poeple should put their lobbying efforts. ANything else is a fool's errand.
The problem here is one of marketing. The parties interested (read: Telcos) are big corporations with millions of PR budgets. They've managed to create terms like two-tier Internet and "fast lane" and all the other PR bullshit. They've created a story to sell, that what they want would be good and has many advantages. It's really text-book PR work.
Some people didn't see the thing being built and are falling for the smoke and mirrors. The simple truth they need to be told is that yes, the story sounds compelling, maybe even convincing. But the reality is that anything that can be abused for profit will be abused for profit, and it will look nothing like the story they're being sold now.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The fact that the United States ...
This is not a USA topic. European governments are already falling in line and falling over themselves to lick the telcos boots as well. It's disgusting, really.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And then let the incumbents try to explain, rather than having to dispute every negative claim about Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality would, instead of being tiered, would allow and has allowed each community to be treated equally. It would allow the Internet to be treated more like a utility. It is like how you receive water in your community now, everyone pays the same rate. If these guys think that the water company will allow them to get their water for little or less money and that somehow someone else would foot the bill for them because of a tiered structure, would you believe the water company? No they would probably only invest money that they were getting back from the community. If water was declared a right, then the company providing might be forced into providing set water. I can think of ways a person or a company can benefit from Net Neutrality. I will give three examples: Google and Facebook and Paypal. Mark Zuckerberg only had a few thousand in cash to start his first server farm, and I doubt the founders of Google had that much more. When Elon Musk came to the United States he had little cash and received $300 million from his part the sale of Paypal to Ebay. Where would Google, Facebook, Tesla and countless others be today without Net Neutrality? They depended on access of various users to be consistent when they were small and when they became large. Try explaining to poorer neighbourhoods that they could create a startup based upon money to pay and not being in a slow lane. The Internet is part of the American dream, we are not done yet. The results are plain to see.
Society use your Sciences
>competition
wake up to the real world please. competition does not work with less than 4 sellers.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
"We'll give your community 'internet service', but you're only allowed to use MSN" Isn't my idea of of improved service.
If you want to improve service, then stop banning communities from putting together their own ISP's. If AT+T doesn't want to service the South Bronx, then the South Bronx Community Association should be able to run it's own community internet service.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
> big companies don't want to deliver to poor communiies
They don't want to deliver to anyone which proves your argument wrong. I live in downtown Seattle, and my building is still stuck with ISDN. Yes, we still pay per minute charges to connect to the Internet. Comcast can't offer service because the Director's Rules prevent them from installing equipment, and we're too far from the CenturyLink CO for DSL. It's not that the phone and cable monopolies won't provide service to poor areas. They don't want to provide service at all.
Well, you're all over the place. There are one or two good points buried in there, but the bottom line is, take your racism and Jew baiting and SHOVE IT, you sad excuse for a human being.
You ask "who decided". Well, as a society and historically speaking, it's poetic justice, isn't it? I mean Americans were so goddam sure they had a right to own slaves, and that having those slaves was a win, the chickens have come home to roost, right? Who to blame but themselves? Their own white asses. The fact that all those slaves just happened to be selected by color gave them an identity and brotherhood to go with their rage.
It's sad, because there are, and always have been, many Americans who are truly color blind.
You can't expect free market forces to fix a situation in which there is no free market. The obvious answer is Title II Common Carrier status.
It worked just fine for landline telephones. It can work for internet.
(PS: before anybody yells that it didn't work for landline telephones, yes, it did. Ma Bell wasn't broken up for lack of service and high service fees. It was different reasons altogether.)
Title II very obviously DID NOT impose a free market, because the company it regulated for most of its existence HAD TO BE BROKEN UP BECAUSE IT WAS A MONOPOLY.
Title II would also not impose actual competition. Unless there are multiple providers capable of serving an address, it's not really a free market. Land line telephone service (currently regulated under Title II) pretty much has one option per area. (Two if you count phone service from the cable company, which is really VoIP rather than an actual land line.)
Net Neutrality is a simple concept, some groups of people and muddling the words and meanings. Who are these people and why are they doing this. I presume these people are not in jail yet, and have families and hope for a bright future for their families, even if they want to screw the futures of the rest of us.
The NAACP is completely, utterly wrong about this. They have it completely backwards. We already paid the phone company to extend the DSL network to all subscribers, they were supposed to be done with that back in 2000, how's that coming along? Oh, fourteen years behind schedule, and still not done, and never going to happen unless we force it. And we aren't in the habit of forcing AT&T to do anything.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I hate to have to point this out but Rainbow/PUSH isn't a "civil rights organization" by any stretch of the imagination. It's Jackson's personal vehicle for racialist shakedowns like this:
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.c...
He has about $10M in the bank:
http://www.celebritynetworth.c...
The only "civil rights" he cares about are those of his bank account.
Do you have ESP?
What problem will be solved RIGHT NOW by passing strict regulations for ISP's to abide by?
The fact that the United States is something like 26th of industrialized countries in average internet bandwidth, AND more expensive than even those that have far better service.
The US has between 10 and 1000 times the land area of other "industrialized countries".
And, so fucking what? Not being able to watching Netflix at 4X HD seems to be somewhat of a first-world problem...
The big ISPs haven't been investing in infrastucture, because they haven't had to.
Yep, that AOL dialup everyone's using sure has stagnated...
They don't compete. In 80% of the United States, people have only one real choice for low-latency, modern broadband.
Cherry-picking. What's a "real choice"? What's "low-latency"? What's "modern"?
Gee, you seem to have really limited things with your choice of words. Now WHY would you do that?
Oh, yeah, because you had to constrain things so you could have an argument.
Ooops.
Instead, they've just been pocketing their insane profits.
You left out "1%!!!", "EVUL CORPARASHUNS!!!", and a few paeans to Marx.
You can't expect free market forces to fix a situation in which there is no free market. The obvious answer is Title II Common Carrier status.
Let's see - Jesse Jackson, the Urban League, and Comcast don't agree with you. That's quite the diverse collection of people from all over the political and ethnic spectrum
Yet you have the unmitigated ARROGANCE to claim the proper course of action is "obvious".
Not only that, your response to a situation made bad by government regulation is MORE GOVERNMENT REGULATION. Why don't you go ask Eric Garner if picayune government regulation is a good thing.
It worked just fine for landline telephones. It can work for internet.
(PS: before anybody yells that it didn't work for landline telephones, yes, it did. Ma Bell wasn't broken up for lack of service and high service fees. It was different reasons altogether.)
Pathetic attempt to deflect arguments related to the breakup of Ma Bell unleashing innovation in telecommunications is pathetic.
What's the color of the sky on your planet? In the 100 years before Ma Bell was broken up, we went from rotary-dial telephones to rotary-dial telephones.
In the few decades since Ma Bell was broken up, we went from rotary-dial telephones to smart phones that can surf the internet, do video chats, take HD videos.
Yeah, no innovation there.
What you are saying is in effect "We have local monopolies. That's bad. Let's add regulations to make sure that the local monopolies wont' do bad things." That is putting a lot of faith in regulation. How did that work in other markets?
Well, today you are allowed to connect non-approved devices to your telephone line, and telcos have common carrier status. So it worked beautifully.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The only action with a company with a monopoly is to go without. Most people can't go without their Netflix and Facebook, so you have the problem where the company has no incentive to change. In markets where the local municipality or CO-OP does the internet no one has commercial service, why pay more? In places that have the choice of google fiber or FIOS, Comcast takes a huge hit. That's the reality, no competition for what has no become essentially a need/utility like electricty or gas or oil has created a vacuum between what the customer wants and what is provided.
Regulation is what kept airlines profitable, regulation is what got phone service to rural parts of the country. Regualtion can be good, in can also be bad in the case of long distance service because of the illusion of "natural monolpolies" in services that don't really have natural monopolies. Regulations are also why city water is cleaner than bottled water.
The Irish were sold as slaves too. Hmmmm....
The fact that this is even being brought up should tell everyone that it's not about making sure that all traffic is treated the same. Nope, nope, move along, nothing to see here.
I have Verizon as my telecommunications provider here in Maryland. I had DSL Internet and phone with Verizon until I met with Verizon's marketing engine following the big FIOS rollout. My Internet/phone bill combined was $75 prior to FIOS. Verizon convinced me to switch to FIOS Internet and phone with a 3-year agreement; my bill initially went down to $68/month, but would rise to $113 in the third year. I was assured that there would be "another deal" that would make the price lower as long as I committed to another term of service. A little over four years later, and Verizon is charging me $125/month for Internet and phone, insisting that this is the "best price" I can get. Color me a sucker.
I was recently upgraded "for free" to 15 Mbps up in addition to 15 Mbps down. This happened after I was heavily marketed to buy this not-so-valuable (to me) capability 2 months earlier. Funny thing - the same day that I received the glossy postcard from Verizon announcing the "free" upload speed upgrade, I received that month's bill from Verizon, complete with a $7 cost increase for FIOS Internet (which took my bill from $116 to $125). Just how stupid does Verizon think I am? The message is clear - I will buy whatever Verizon wants to sell me, and if I don't, I'll get anyway, and Verizon will increase the cost of my service.
The real kicker is the way that the cost is divided up. FIOS Internet service is $75/month; my phone is $30 (the balance of my bill is various fees and taxes that Verizon has broken out separately over the years to obfuscate their rate increases). Of the two (Internet and phone) I believe that I could do without Verizon's phone service much more easily than the Internet. I have a cell phone, and I can subscribe to a broadband VoIP service for about $3/month and operate it over my Internet service. I can't cut out Internet at this point and run it over my phone service. My job, my wife's job, my kid's school work, and access to a myriad of necessary on-line services (banking, investments, my grad school, Amazon for purchasing, etc.) all depend on my Internet service. Hardly anything depends on my phone. If that isn't a clear sign of a utility service, I don't know what is.
Its long past time for Internet service to be classified and regulated as a utility - the Verizons and Comcasts of the world have clear demonstrated how they will reap a fortune in fees from people who have to use their services left unregulated. With regulation will come other encumbrances, such as the ability for the FCC to enforce (or not) "Net Neutrality". So be it. The big communications providers have gobbled up all of the Internet access services and combined them under a very small number of companies, while at the same time the public's use of Internet for practically every aspect of work, school, and commerce as grown by leaps and bounds. Internet access is a utility. Let's declare it so.
Yes, such a wide spectrum, consisting of Comcast and political activists funded by Comcast...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
None of which will really do much good. All the cable company has to do to get around those regulations is to ensure that only traffic to Netflix goes through a particular link using routing rules, then decide to never upgrade that link. It's just as anticompetitive whether Netflix is paying them to upgrade the link or not, but with this pretend version of net neutrality, the poor are screwed even harder, because they lose Netflix as an alternative to the cable company's extortionate video on demand service. At least the wealthy have the resources to sue if things get bad enough.
What we actually need are strict regulations. Specifically, we need a very simple addition to the Federal Communications Act:
That one paragraph will do more to ensure net neutrality than all the other proposed regulations put together. It would apply to all technologies, whether cable, fiber, wireless, or something yet to be invented, and would have the effect of permanently creating competition in the Internet service market, by making the wire providers be a regulated utility, and the actual ISPs be able to compete by leasing their lines.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It works acceptably in power delivery, though government-owned nonprofit corporations work a lot better. And Internet service is pretty similar in terms of the costs involved, minus the generation part. The nice thing about nonprofits is that they have no incentive to cut corners on infrastructure improvement, because the money has to go somewhere. and it can't go into the pockets of investors.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
There's no reason one approach has to block the other.
If there is a monopoly, it should be regulated as a common carrier.
If they don't want to be regulated as a common carrier, they have to let the competition in.
Let the ISPs themselves choose. Would you rather be a regulated common carrier monopoly or free to do as you like in a highly competitive market?
Either way, the users win.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
It's not cherry picking. "Real choice" means a choice that meets the legal definition of broadband, and has low enough latency that normal use of the Internet isn't painful.
The most critical word was "broadband", which has a strict legal definition. Going forward, that definition is 10 Mbps down, 2.9 Mbps up. AFAIK, only one satellite service can provide that (just barely), and DSL can only provide that (just barely) in a few rare places that support ADSL+ with Annex M, and even then, only within about 1,000 feet of a central office or specially configured remote terminal, if memory serves. So the vast majority of DSL and satellite service no longer qualifies as broadband.
Low latency typically means "not satellite". Satellite adds approximately half a second of round-trip latency. At such high latencies, the Internet does not work very well:
Most consumers have only one usable choice that qualifies as broadband. In a few areas, folks have two. Even that isn't enough competition to provide real choice, because duopolies tend not to compete more than absolutely necessary unless one of them is a newcomer, and even then, only for a short time (after which the entrenched monopoly usually runs them out of business, but if they don't, then competition still invariably settles down).
Now if you'll think back to high school economics, with supply and demand (a free market), if the supply gets too low and the demand stays high, the price goes up, and once it gets to a certain point, it becomes profitable for another player to enter the market and compete, and supply increases, and the price drops back. However, that can only happen when the barriers to entry are low enough to allow other players to feasibly enter the market.
When you have a per-household cost of $2,500–$5,500 for fiber service, even if you're a monopoly, it is going to take you well over a decade to pay off the infrastructure costs, assuming typical service prices. A business considering jumping into such a market has to ask themselves, "Can I steal 50% of the customers in this market, and then hold out against an entrenched monopoly for 20 years without them undercutting me so much that they bury me?" I think you'll find the answer is always "no".
For this reason, you'll never get the steady stream of market disruption required for supply and demand to function properly as long as each ISP has to provide its own physical infrastructure. It is simply a non-starter.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The only action with a company with a monopoly is to go without.
Nonsense, you stop protecting their monopoly. That probably means you need to stop reelecting politicians that are owned. I see that as the principle problem.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Split the difference, glass between your house and one or more central points is a utility. Layered networks a switched/vlaned muni network that can get community services, lifeline internet, emergency services, startup ISP's, local patching, or whatever people can think to do with it. Now bigger providers can take a pure optics handoff as well. The muni is only taking care of glass and potentially it's own swtich network. The muni potentialy has the long term view to put the glass underground.
No sir I dont like it.
Great comment. Do you have a newsletter? :-)
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I like your idea. Back in 1997 or so I speculated about the "information utility" that towns/cities could provide based on ATM. The town provides the basic data "pipe" and anyone who wants to sell you a service over that pipe can do so.
Perhaps local jurisdictions need to take the existing cable/optics infrastructure by eminent domain and use it for the benefit of the public. That court case from Connecticut where the Supreme Court held that private property (houses) could be taken by the city so that a developer could build more financially-remunerative structure on them seems to set the groundwork in place. What could be more of a benefit to the public than to have an information utility service, especially since Verizon effectively dismantled the highly-survivable communications infrastructure that they were originally entrusted with (well, ATT was entrusted with ...)?
The nice thing about an all optical solution is no active devices are needed at the muni level. Passive mux and management of cwdm channels is all that is really needed. Other bits like macsec can help keep the muni's honest.
No sir I dont like it.