It's the Architecture, Stupid

Thanks to Lawrence Lessig for sending us a filing that he and Mark Lemley have put before the FCC. The filing, also in PDF, deals with open access as well as principles of network design. It's a long piece, but well worth reading.Thanks to Lawrence for another link.

Comments

Infrastructure vs. ISP's

[Robin Hood]

Let me try to explain the terminology... Infrastructure is the physical wires going into your computer, whether they be connected to a POTS modem, a cable "modem", or a DSL "modem". Presumably you would pay a monthly fee for the maintenance of those, just like you pay the local phone company extra for a second phone line into your house. An ISP uses the existing physical network to deliver Internet traffic: you get an IP address from your ISP, not your infrastructure provider. ISP's pay the infrastucture providers for the cost of using their networks, and pass on that cost to you in your monthly ISP fee -- want more bandwidth, pay a higher fee. If you're dissatisfied with your ISP's service, well, there are several others with local POP's (Points of Presence) near you, so you can easily switch.

The concern here is that AT&T, an infrastructure provider, is merging with MediaOne, an ISP to provide a bundled infrastructure + IP address commercial package. Sounds fine, right? Well, stop to think about it.

Say your ISP blocks port 6667 (the most common IRC port) for some reason -- say liability concerns about the legality of IRC activity. Or say they don't want you connecting to any USENET servers but their own, so they block port 119 (the NNTP port) connections to all servers except theirs. You'd soon ditch them and move to another ISP, wouldn't you? And you'd stop paying the first ISP, because you weren't using their services anymore.

And there's the rub.

If AT&T is allowed to bundle its infrastructure service with MediaOne's ISP service, you'll be paying for MediaOne whether you use it or not. It would be like bundling an OS with your new computer so that you paid for the OS whether you wanted it or not (<sarcasm>which I'm sure has never happened...</sarcasm>). Say MediaOne starts blocking the ports used for IP telephony -- after all, that's a direct competitor to AT&T's primary business. Suddenly, millions of MediaOne customers are forced either to switch to another ISP or give up using IP telephony. And if they switch to another ISP, they're still paying for MediaOne! Don't want to pay for MediaOne? Sorry -- it comes with your DSL connection; if you don't want MediaOne, you're going to have to find another DSL service. What? There aren't any other DSL providers in your area? That's just too bad. At least with the Wintel hardware/OS bundling, you had other choices -- you could buy a Mac, or an Amiga, or a Sparc, or... But with this situation, you'll be forced to pay for MediaOne -- and how many people will choose to pay *extra* for another ISP? Very few -- most, in the scenario I describe, would choose instead to give up IP telephony.

And that's what the concern is. If AT&T is allowed to bundle ISP services with infrastructure services, it can kill any use of the network it doesn't like, by doing things like I just described. That's why this paper is important, and why infrastructure needs to be kept separate from Internet access.
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The real meaning of the GNU GPL:

Time for an econ lesson....

[itachi]

Businesses such as telco, gas, electric, etc are called natural monopolies, because it is inefficient and stupid for competing firms to lay redundant power/gas/telco lines through an area. Think about it - five different gas pipelines running under a given street, all maintained by different people. One day, there's a leak. You call all five, and they each say there's no trouble on their line, must be the other utility. Or phone poles with lines for all 43 local telcos? The way that natural monopolies are dealt with in free market economies is heavy govt. regulations or govt ownership. Look at your local utility companies, if you live in such a nation. The only way around natural monoploies that makes sense is requiring companies to lease out infrastructure for a fair price. So let's get some examples:
*Montgomery County, MD gas utility - (DC suburbs) gas is provided by one utility. There is no competition. However, the local govt. has pricing and quality of service restrictions on the utility to ensure that the monopoly power that they have granted the utility isn't abused.
*Cell Phones - Cell companies build cell infrastructure, and that isn't a natural monopoly. However, most local telcos are, so when you make a call on a cell phone to a local landline, what's happening is that the cell co. uses up some bandwidth that it has leased from the local telco. (this is assuming that the local telco is a natural monopoly)
*Long distance telco - no monoplies anymore, but the flexible infrastructure is very important and used in the same manner. Joe Bob and Peggy Sue start their lond distance service, but have no infrastructure. They lease a portion of some AT&T lines. AT&T wants to oversubscribe the lines, so it's in their interest, Joe Bob and Peggy Sue get some infrastructure space, and there's another long distance provider trying to bring lower prices to the market than its competition.

The reason these professors are rightly concerned is very clear. I would suggest that anyone who doesn't get their point should re-read the article, the whole way through. If one company controls the infrastructure, has no competiton, and goes unregulated, the consumer gets screwed. The FCC should NEVER hand a firm unregulated monoploy power. Would anyone here suggest that MS should have been handed its monoploy power by an agency of the federal govt?

itachi