FCC Favors Net Neutrality

dkatana writes: Yesterday, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said net neutrality is high on the agency's agenda, and a set of rules will be proposed beginning of next month. He also talked about reclassification of internet providers such as Google Fiber as Title II Telecom Companies. If Google and other fiber providers are given pole access, it could be the beginning of a race to deploy fiber-to-the-home to many cities and towns, where the cost of digging trenches has deterred many initiatives and protected the monopolies of the entrenched telecom providers. Advocates for net neutrality believe that Title II classification would allow the FCC to protect Internet services by regulating against paid prioritization. A related article suggests one side effect of the internet becoming a public utility will be higher costs for internet access.

Comments

Seriously? GOOD NEWS?

[MisterSquid]

Today is not 1 April!

Hard to believe what I'm reading here. I was starting to grow cynical.

Anyhow, just wanted to post to say this appears to be a good thing. Very, very exciting.

Re:Seriously? GOOD NEWS?

[beakerMeep]

It's all PR talk until they actually do anything about it.

Re:Seriously? GOOD NEWS?

[Luckyo]

That's the current situation in monopoly land of US internet. True that future may not change it, because it's not an anti-monopolistic action.

But nice red herring.

Re:Seriously? GOOD NEWS?

[clovis]

Be careful what you ask for.

Most /.ers probably are not old enough to remember the days when all telecommunications were regulated under title II. Let's just say that costs were higher, innovation was essentially prohibited, and service was even worse than you can get from Comcast today.

"So, the next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string? We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."

I'm old enough to remember. My families phone number was two letters and 5 digits, and I was a small child when the first direct-dial long distance call was made. I had relatives that were still on party lines.

You are correct in that phone service was expensive compared to today. Long distance calls back then cost far more per hour than almost anyone's hourly pay. However local land-line service was cheap and included in-home service for phones and wiring. Some people went for decades between outages. The primary cause was someone knocking down a pole and breaking the wires.

But today's lower costs are almost entirely due to technological advances and not to de-regularization.

When de-regularization happened, home phone rates went up as telco businesses sprang to to cherry-pick businesses to serve.
(home phone rates in the regulated days were subsidized by higher rates charged to businesses, much like electric rates are set)

However, the good thing about de-regularization was that those new telco businesses now competed on the basis of features, and business phone service competition drove innovation. After that, then home service rates went down (that is, down in inflation adjusted dollars)

But look at the things invented during the regulated phase by Bell Labs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... in the 50's, 60's 70's That is a list of eveyrthing. transisters, lasers, MOSFET, molecular beam epitaxy, Ritchie and Kernigan worked at Bell Labs.


As for "service was even worse than you can get from Comcast today", I do not think that is correct.
My only service requests (and my parents) had been establishing new service when moving, and it was always excellent.
My experience with Comcast (and my neighbors) was shockingly bad. Bad as in refusing to take service requests, bad as in not showing up at all for service requests that had been accepted.and worst of all bad as in having service failures at all.
I have never met anyone whose experience was the opposite of mine regarding telco vs Comcast service, or even modern AT&T vs old AT&T. Service was one thing they did right in the old days..

Re:Seriously? GOOD NEWS?

[Jason Levine]

No, the argument would be more along the lines of: Amazon pays UPS to ship a package. UPS hands it over to the local post office to deliver. The local post office calls Amazon and tells them that Amazon can either pay them money directly or the package delivery will get purposefully slowed down. Meanwhile, packages from Local Post Office Shopping Dot Com - which competes with Amazon - gets instant free next day shipping without needing to pay anything because the local post office wants to promote their services above competing ones and drive up the price of competing services.

Re:Seriously? GOOD NEWS?

[T.E.D.]

As for "service was even worse than you can get from Comcast today", I do not think that is correct. My only service requests (and my parents) had been establishing new service when moving, and it was always excellent.

Another oldster here, and that was my experience as well. Ma Bell's service was excellent. Those phones they gave us could survive a gas explosion too, and still worked when the power was out.

What you did not have was a lot of choice. You had the phone they gave you (identical to all your neighbors), and as few features as they could legally get away with providing. I'm sure everyone having identical equipment down to the actual phones was a large part of how their service was so good. There were only so many things that could go wrong.

Also, if you had some kind of disagreement with them, too bad for you. Your only recourse would be appeal to those government regulatory bodies that people here love deriding. Perhaps it wasn't much, but it was slightly better than the alternative (nothing).

Most of what people complain about with "government"-run stuff is actually a feature of monopolies. A company's ultimate accountability to its customers is their ability to throw that company over entirely for someone else. But if you are going to have a monopoly anyway, not making it accountable to the people in any other meaningful way (eg: making it government run or regulating it) will only make a bad situation worse.

"A related article suggests..."

[QuietLagoon]

The authors of that related article are not against Title II for ISPs per se, but, imo, are against the government doing anything to help consumers.

.
The authors of that related article: "Grover G. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform. Patrick Gleason is the organization’s director of state affairs."

Re:"A related article suggests..."

[Kryai]

Indeed. It's not a _related_ article but a OP ED by Grover Norquist. The most most right-wing anti-tax advocate out there, it's hardly an article where a journalist actually performed research on it independently. I'm very interested in understanding any tax consideration that may arise, but I automatically discount anything from the lunatic fringe that have their life agendas at stake.

Re:"A related article suggests..."

[T.E.D.]

Yes. I have no huge problem with providing links to opinion articles from ideologues. However, please label them as such, rather than just slipping it in as a "related article". Simply adding "from Grover Norquist" would be fine.

FWIW, Mr. Norquist is the guy who coined the phrase "shrink Government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub", and is famous for trying to get politicians to sign "no tax increases no matter what happens" pledges. He also once said in an interview that if it was a choice between everyone's grandmother being eaten by ants, and a tax increase for only the wealthiest 2%, "we console ourself with the fact that we have pictures". A joke answer to a joke question, but a pretty telling one.

So you know going in for sure and certain that he's going to be against the government involving itself in any way, and in particular against anything that might possibly raise a tax somewhere. It will really have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand outside of those two points. The only interesting part is how he gets there.

Re:"A related article suggests..."

[bigpat]

Devil is in the details. There are many many government regulations that stifle competition, do nothing for the consumers and simply serve to entrench lobbyists, big businesses and vested interests at the expense of customers and the public... In the history of government regulations it is right to be cynical that this is what you are going to get 99% of the time.

Then there are simple, focused, easy to understand and easy to implement government regulations that really can help create more choice in the market and reduce fraud.

If there were any other way but for government regulations to bring us back towards a free market in Internet Access providers, then I would choose that. But in this case we have to have government regulations to counter balance the government regulation of the rights of way along our streets and the government regulations and licensing of our EM spectrum which create local monopolies and reduce consumer choice in the first place and you can't simply open up the spectrum, our streets and our poles to whomever wants to run a wire or transmit a signal otherwise we would have chaos and nobody would have reliable service, so we are stuck with government regulation to try and fix the problem of local monopolies and an un-free market.

Hopefully, we get regulations that are really focused on making for a better free market and not just stamping the marketing label "Net Neutrality" on whatever we end up with. Best we can probably hope for is a compromise that gives us slightly more choice and a bit more competition, but the complexity of regulations will probably still mean that the days of small ISPs able to run some wires and connect to the Internet and compete on price and service are not coming back.

Re:"A related article suggests..."

[everett]

I don't know what your cable/internet bill looks like, but I'm already paying "bullshit utility taxes" on mine.

Internet as a public utility = higher cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm - really? Anyone recall the POTS Long Distance war??? Sure drove down pricing there, same thing will happen with Internet providers.

Re:Internet as a public utility = higher cost?

[Lunix Nutcase]

Nor are prices when you have next to no competition such as the current situation with ISPs in most markets.

This is a good thing....

[bleh-of-the-huns]

And as it relates to any topic, a person writing a story or an article can always find a slant one way or another to meet their own political views or agendas.

As far as new taxes, have you looked at your bill recently.. all those lovely below the line fee's disguised as taxes of some sort, or regulatory recovery fees, you know things that should be included in the price because they are the cost of doing business, but instead are disguised as creative taxes and fees which are not mandated by any gov (state local or federal) entity, just so the company can keep it's base advertized price the same and claim they are not raising prices.

Under regulation, this would hopefully go away. Also, the feds have said they do not have to apply all of the Title II regulations (and they specifically call out the tax portions) to ISPs.

Re:The future and its enemies

[dkatana]

Google is the one asking for it. It makes sense to reduce their cost of deploying fiber. In Europe Internet access is heavily regulated but FTTH is everywhere and much cheaper than in the US.

Re:The future and its enemies

[Lunix Nutcase]

If services like Google Fiber are made Title II, watch how fast those sorts of projects come to a screeching halt.

Oh really?

While Google's filing never specifically throws its support behind Title II, it does specifically point out how Title II rules could come with some significant benefits. Specifically, Google's director of communications law Austin Schlick argues that as a freshly-regulated telecom service under Title II, Google would gain access to utility poles and other essential utility infrastructure to aid expansion of Google Fiber. While the FCC has the right to forbear from these provisions, Google argues they really shouldn't if they value improved broadband services:

"In determining whether forbearance is consistent with the public interest, the Commission must consider whether forbearance would "promote competitive market conditions, including the extent to which such forbearance will enhance competition among providers of telecommunications services." Forbearance from allowing BIAS providers access to available infrastructure under Section 224 would have the exact opposite effect, maintaining a substantial barrier to network deployment by new providers such as Google Fiber, that telecommunications classification otherwise would remove."

Seems Google disagrees with your opinion of what they would think and do.

Public utilities cost more...WAHH!

[Chas]

Okay, currently Google Fiber is $70/month for Gig service.
Now, say it goes up that $67/year that was quoted.
That means it's going to be $76/month (call it $80 just to be outrageous).

So, oh NOEZ! I'm now paying more for service!

When, before, my other options were $125/month for Comcast's 50/10 service and $50/month for 3M/512K DSL?

Oh! The pain! The pain!

Re:Don't expect ISPs to bend over and take it

[Lunix Nutcase]

You, dear consumer, will be the one taking it in the shorts.

Riiight. Because the current mega-ISPs are such great companies to deal with and are always looking for ways to lower the prices of their service, increase data caps, etc. Oh wait...

Take a very close look at ANY of your utility bills and tell me how many fees you are paying that have nothing to do with the thing you are using (the actual electricity, the actual water, etc).

Ok, just did. Everything in my utility bill had to do with city services I use. Nothing was an extraneous fee.

ISPs are going to pass the cost on to the customers. Period.

So nothing new. But at least in this case the cost will be for good.

And you can kiss the small, local ISPs goodbye because they don't have the resources to deal with this.

Except that the small, local ISPs are mostly wanting the Title II regulations.

Re:Of course they did

[Lunix Nutcase]

This isn't regulating the Internet. It's regulating the people who provide access. There's a huge difference. And tons of Internet businesses and smaller ISPs are very much for this reclassification. The only people against it are the megacorps who seek to lose a lot of control and will no longer be able to extort money from competing content providers.

Re:public utility means higher costs?

[Shakrai]

If it was a truly regulated public utility it might work. Right now the system we have is the worst of both worlds. Take a look at what happened to wireline voice services. POTS is and always has been a tightly regulated product, with requirements for reliability, up-time, and a mandate to serve everyone regardless of how rural or unprofitable it might be to reach them. The result was affordable wireline voice service that's available virtually everywhere in CONUS. Service that is now being killed off by two factors:

1) The emergence of wireless.
2) The emergence of wireline competitors (the cable co) that don't have to meet any of the aforementioned "must serve" or reliability metrics.

Item #2 is the one that gets my goat. The cable companies market their voice product as "phone" service when it's really anything but. It doesn't meet the five nines of reliability that POTS has; they can't even keep it working during power outages. It's not available everywhere. They get to cherry pick profitable markets and swipe the very customers that the ILEC most needs to maintain their infrastructure, all the while delivering a considerably inferior service that leaves many consumers high and dry at the very time they most need reliable communications. Is it any wonder that Verizon and AT&T want out of the landline business so badly? Would you remain in a business with huge legacy costs and regulations that's forced to compete with outfits that have neither?

If you're serious about the "regulated utility" option then what you're really talking about is bringing back Ma Bell. That's the only way it's going to work. You can't have a marketplace where you have one or two regulated utilities that have to operate under onerous rules while more nimble competitors are allowed to swoop in without having to meet any of those same regulations. Google Fiber is a product that makes people around here salivate but they're cherry picking profitable markets one by one and leaving everybody else high and dry. Would you trade the ability to see exciting new upstarts like Google Fiber for a system where we have a regulated Ma Bell that's promised a small but steady profit and no competition?