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How Big Telecom Tried To Kill Net Neutrality Before It Was Even a Concept
An anonymous reader writes This opinion piece at Ars looks at the telecommunications industry's ability to shape policy and its power over lawmakers. "...as the Baby Bells rolled out their DSL service, they saw the cable industry's more relaxed regulations and total lack of competition and wanted the same treatment from the government. They launched a massive lobbying effort to push the Clinton and Bush administrations, the Federal Communication Commission, and Congress to eliminate the network sharing requirement that had spawned the CLEC market and to deregulate DSL services more broadly. Between 1999 and 2002 the four companies spent a combined $95.6 million on lobbying the federal government, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, which would rank them above such trade group lobbying behemoths as the Chamber of Commerce and the American Medical Association in total lobbying expenditures for the years. The companies also spent millions to lobby the public directly through aggressive advertising and public relations campaigns."
Now we're so far along you literally have to BEG to cancel your service.
... instead of spending that money to improve their infrastructure...
I mean.. is this really a surprise?
Fellow readers, beware of astroturf comments.
We know that the big companies hire agencies to send fake letters of support to government agencies, letters purported to come from everyday people in support of whatever the big company wants to do at the time.
We also know that the big companies hire agencies to send fake letters of support from politicians that support whatever the big company wants to do at the time. We know that political campaigns do the same thing.
I've been interested in ghostwriting/astroturfing for awhile now. It seems reasonable that if a company has enough money to mount a fake grassroots campaign, then some of that money would be put towards shaping public opinion on public boards.
Especially a highly popular board frequented by all the smart people in the country.
Looking at one previous article about network access I can't help but get the impression that people are reaching around backwards to make their point. The plight of all those poor, twisted arguments brings a tear to my eye.
Really - watch the commentary on these articles and see if any of the arguments seem weak or contrived.
We may be infested with astroturfers.
Between 1999 and 2002 the four companies spent a combined $95.6 million on lobbying the federal government, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics...
When done in other countries, my government calls it corruption. When done here, it's called lobbying.
Question is: Who is lobbying on behalf of Joe Six Pack and family?
Question is: Who is lobbying on behalf of Joe Six Pack and family?
Lots of groups!
Here's a list:
The National Smoker’s Alliance
The 50 Cent Party
Center For Consumer Freedom
Al Gore’s Penguin Army
Microsoft
Save Our Species Alliance
Working Families For Wal-Mart
The Big Ten Network
Comcast
GOP
(NB: The companies listed come from an article titled: "Ten Horrible Examples Of Astroturfing")
http://www.freepress.net/sites...
This image tells all you need to know about Cable/Telco promises.
Once you have a monopoly that has no competition there is no reason to improve service or product quality and every incentive to drive it down to as low a level as you can without people rioting outside your offices.
I hate the concept of having the US government regulating the Internet any more than it already does. The FCC is a PoS, last thing I want is it getting between me an my path to the Internet. Regulation ends up hurting small business as bigger companies lobby to have regs set that push out little guy, look at the relationship between the big banks and government. When the banks fucked up and were set to fail, what did the US government do? Gave them tax payer money to survive. In return the banks give the government citizen records on transactions and deposits all the time
Question is: Who is lobbying on behalf of Joe Six Pack and family?
Congress is supposed to represent Joe and his family in the first place. "The People" was never intended to be a special interest group.
Hmm, $95.6M in lobbying over three years...
That's $31.9M per year, spread across four companies.
Or an average of about $8M per year each.
Let's see. Annual revenue for those companies averages in excess of $50B each (two of them managed to make >$210B, so I didn't even bother checking the other two, just used the revenue for those two averaged over four companies).
So, they're spending an average of 0.016% of their income on lobbying.
Frankly, given the power of the federal government, spending that LITTLE to buy favourable legislation is surprising.
Do remember, the more power the government has, the more worthwhile it is to just buy laws that favour you.
No, that would be graft, not corruption. There is a difference, though it's pretty much hairsplitting....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This seems like the place to ask - have there been fearmongering campaigns against Net Neutrality in the USA? I was having a discussion about it on a business web forum and copped some brutal flames for speaking in its defense; people on that forum are making it out to be some kind of communist gulag that will destroy future internet innovation. Every time I made a point in favour of net neutrality, they would scream "Don't you believe in property rights, you TROLL?"
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
People tend to think of "lobbying" as a dirty word, but keep in mind that lobbying also works on behalf of ideals and organizations you believe in. The EFF is involved in lobbying, for instance, and organization that many of us here appreciate and support. Or, pick an organization you care about, and you can bet they're doing some lobbying of their own. That's not inherently a bad thing.
The word essentially has it's roots in ordinary citizens waiting in the capitol lobby to bend the ear of their representative, telling them how they felt about specific topics. Eventually, it was understood that it's more efficient to hire someone to collectively represent your interested and present them to your representatives, because it's impractical for a politician to meet individually with every single citizen of their district.
The corruption comes in, of course, in the wining and dining of said politicians - when it moves beyond simply trying to convince them and instead giving them subtle or even outright monetary rewards, such as promises of lucrative employment after a term of office is served, etc. That's not lobbying - that's just bribery. I'd be curious to see what exactly all that "lobbying" money is spent on.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
That's why it's very important to wealthy people that money be equated with speech under US law, that way the richer you are the more free speech you have. It's also why they almost universally support regressive taxation (they call it "flat" or "fair" tax), and want to dissolve pension funds. Pension funds were the way everyday American had power over corporate America. Pension funds owned voting shares of corporations and used that power for their members. Public employee pension funds still do the same (like when CalPERS forced a shareholder vote on Wells Fargo's foreclosure practices, or a shareholder vote on Walmart execs). THIS is the reason wealthy conservatives want to get rid of the last large pension funds - to take away what little remaining power Joe Sixpack has in the corporate world.
Being sarcastic.
That looks like a very very good return on investment :)
There are many such organisations.
Be careful though as many have many more than one side to them. The lobbying is not necessarily what joe public thinks it is and is not necessarily what the companies paying into it think it is. The NRA is a prime example.
Why do politicians get good pensions and health care and if high up security for decades after they have left office? Hrmm.
So, they're spending an average of 0.016% of their income on lobbying.
Revenue is not profit.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The only possible way to counter these bastards is with an absolute avalanche of public backlash. It worked in turning Wheeler around; now we need to turn up the heat on our so-called 'representatives'. To hell with big cable and telecom. Burn their crops and salt their fields. Rip their monopolistic power from their hands and savour the sound of them kicking and screaming the entire way.
it was understood that it's more efficient to hire someone to collectively represent your interested and present them to your representatives, because it's impractical for a politician to meet individually with every single citizen of their district.
You can do that for free, or at least the costs should be separate and related directly to rallying the troops and forming your group so it can be heard above the crowd. That is not what is happening with lobbying. The currenct state of liobbying is giving money to a political party so they will "listen to you". That is CORRUPTION because the money is not needed for them to listen, it is used by the party to buy commercials and send out flyers for them sop they can get elected again. No company would ever just give politicians or anyone for that matter money just because. They KNOW the money will get them what they want, that is a bribe plain and simple. Those same companies spending money on politicians are NOT giving it to their customers or giving it to the voters so they can push the politicians and there is a good reason they don't.
I wanted Net Neutrality. I did not want a 300+ page regulatory clusterfuck that essentially is the opposite of Net Neutrality.
Annual revenue for those companies averages in excess of $50B each (...)
So, they're spending an average of 0.016% of their income on lobbying.
Revenue and income are different things.
Also of note, the pro "NN"/Title II crowd did a lot of lobbying and a lot of supporting Obama's election in 2012. TFA only tells half the story. Like everything else in politics, "lobbying" is only bad when people who don't agree with you are the ones doing it.
The real issue - the elephant in the room which the net neutrality debate serves to dance around - is lack of effective local competition.
The USA professes free trade, etc, etc but is actually one of the most restrictive countries to do business - and (possibly illegal) state/regional sweetheart deals on local loop mean there is no effective competition for broadband services (A duopoly is as bad as a monopoly and in most areas there is a legislated monopoly on local loop).
With effective competition, net neutrality is a non-issue. There's a reason that this is only popping up in the USA and that's because the vast majority of consumers face a market with either only 1 or 2 broadband providers.
Meantime in Europe, I sit on a 100Mb/20Mb VDSL circuit - unthrottled - getting full bandwidth - and knowing that if my ISP plays stupid games with access to Netflix I can switch to another one with 2 phone calls. They know it too, so they actually provide good customer service instead of the surly service commonly encountered Stateside.
The Fed appears to be propping up the legacy copper telcos and entertainment industry -- courtesy of a myriad lobbyists.
Does the Fed version of net neutrality make sense? Some say that net neutrality is a meaningless concept, given enough bandwidth.
Perhaps stronger efforts to light up the $ 200 B. of dark fiber that We the People funded in the 90s, and moving the telco and TeeVee wiring over to fiber, should be done first.
Encouraging the executive branch to reinterpret a 1996 telephony law and apply it to the Internet sounds uncomfortable up front, given their track record of favoring large, entrenched players over raw bandwidth to We the People.