This was decided at the level of the supreme court - the brand x decision. scalia's dissent is pretty excellent (it's rare that I agree with him for what that's worth) - he talks a lot about pizza. "When all is said and done, after all the regulatory cant has been translated, and the smoke of regulatory expertise has blown away, it remains perfectly clear that someone who sells cable-modem service is 'offering' telecommunications," (AC, on behalf of the 3 dissenting justices). http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-277.ZD.html
But that was the dissent, and the majority ruled (Thomas was the opiner) unbundling requirements under the 1996 act do not apply because the service (broadband over cable) is an information service (nee enhanced service). The FCC quickly followed this up with a ruling saying fiber-based end-user broadband should be treated similarly (not so for wholesale fiber trunks).
But (and this is a sir mixalot sized but) - VOIP was not considered; they just ruled on if the pipes should be regulated as pipes.
"By contrast, the high-speed transmission used to provide cable modem service is a functionally integrated component of that service because it transmits data only in connection with the further processing of information and is necessary to provide Internet service." (Thomas decision) - no reference to regulation of voice being provided inside that information stream.
The comcast argument moving forward will likely be based on the idea that packets are just packets until they're processed elsewhere but this begs the question why are they prioritized at all?
At it's core what I don't understand is why Comcast thinks the FCC won't reconsider on this point - some (any?) front other than the regulation of the pipes themselves.
The court in brand x defers to (while softly agreeing with) the FCC's "understanding of the nature of cable modem service" - which sets up for what is called Chevron deference to the FCC's area of expertise on technical subjects. Should the FCC simply rule on VOIP service, on which there is no court language, the court's ruling on if the FCC was right to find the regulation of the pipes and the provision of information services over them could quite easily go out the window.
Given the likelihood of demonstrable harm to a VOIP provider of being blocked, I would not be surprised to see this issue decided quickly by the FCC and then by the courts.
Martin has never been particularly happy with cable providers, had I been Comcast I'd've asked ATT to do this first.
Telcos are regional companies in the US. what they are controlling is access to "their" customers (that means us). It wouldn't matter if Qwest didn't play this game, because they don't compete against AT&T.
This is an interesting issue in DC at the moment. The house is ready to move already on this issue, and will give the telcos everything they want (and the cable guys get what they want too). The senate is moving more slowly, luckily.
The main concern seems to be ultimately do property rights of network owners trump the economic growth of the edge entities. Common carriage isn't the issue here because the Internet is not common carriage (as a term of art) but neutral to the content that travels on it (as a design element).
This point was rather well made by Vint Cerf at the hearings. The other really interesting speaker was Internet2 CEO Gary Bachula - his statement that effectively undercut the "network management" argument was "we have most cheaply solved the packet prioritization issues by simply increasing the bandwidth, rather than prioritizing packets" - the fact that the network owners are trying to prioritize packets at greater expense than simply increasing the overall available bandwidth to everone is exactly the point: the creation of scarcity is the key to profit.
It is in the network owner's interests to compete on price on the bottom end of the "bandwidth spectrum" to gain customers then charge content providers to access "their" customers.
Competing with each other on increasingly fast bandwidth is as profitable for network owners as the digital camera market is for manufacturers - namely not at all.
What we will see in the absence of real net neutrality rules is increasingly long broadband contracts with very low teaser rates (AT&T now offers 12.95 for the first three months) then an increase in monopolistic rent extraction from content providers.
We'll end up seeing something that looks like Google's adwords strategy which is "we'll let anyone get priority access to our customers, but it will go to the highest bidder" The only problem with that is that it's bad for the economy when it applies to all possible content rather than the subsection of content that's sold through one of many redundant marketplaces.
Phone companies to have similar issues. They are not mandated to provide access if a carrier refuses to pay termination fees. The fuzziness is in exactly what fees are paid (it's different for different kinds of traffic (local v. inter or intra state long distance, international, etc.) for different kinds of carriers (small rural phone companies, urban competitive carriers, etc.)
The area that's interesting is how small competitive carriers interact with the big boys - no different from tier 1 and tier 2 networks in the IP world, except that there's this underlying notion of Universal Service glommed onto the top of it - meaning we have traditionally offset the cost of networks by charging for access to them. This is different than charging for the incremental cost the network bears per unit of traffic.
All of this combines into a big ugly mess where people game the system one way or the other and it falls apart. (basically this is the fault of the way the FCC and congress treated VoIP as a disruptive technology) - no judgement on my part if it should have been treated that way or not.
There is a world view that says the network is better the more people that are on it, then there's the competing view that says the network is better when it's controlled by one entity to ensure maximum efficiency. Either one is an imperfect market - one lets the Cogents cream for profitable traffic (this is called arbitrage), the other lets monopoly pricing occur as a result of market power. Part of the concern about the acquisition of worldcom and at&t is that a very large network of unique endusers (think DSL consumers) coupled with a huge chunk of the IP backbone are going to be able to leveraged by some very, very savvy people with market power (with a lot of regulatory experience related to the termination of certain kinds of traffic) and the IP community isn't gonna know what hit them until they're crying uncle.
The US uses a similar system, currently under review - particular attention being paid to the termination fees for rural telco providers (which have higher per line expenses). Larger carriers are moving to a system called bill and keep, where even traffic flow cancels out any termination or origination fees. Peering is a bit different on the IP side of things owing to it already being a bill and keep environment for tier I providers. This issue gets particularly messy where IP and telephony interact.
Look at the CEOs, they're coming from different places but clearly working in the same space - media companies are generally about adverstising (yes, even content providers) - the question is which company will be fast enough to eat the other's lunch? (I've already written of MS, which is probably not fair given they will have to react differently than they have been at some point).
The advantage that I think Google has over Yahoo is that the tech-centric folks they hire are generally interested in things that have real world applicability - especially in the business world - yahoo doesn't focus on that market at all really (at least to me knowledge).
Probably the most insightful (to this point) response why NOT to. Of course, little things like cracks for custom start up logos or passwords for would be easier...
also: nice sig.
There's a WNBA player named Ivana Mandic.
for real:
"mandic brings size and experience to Charlotte"
http://www.nineronline.com/vnews/display.v/ART/200 2/11/08/3dcb3b515dd9b?in_archive=1
My highschool had two bball coaches Dick Burning and Dick Peining.
Didn't the late great Johnny MF Cash sing a song about doin' yr children wrong by names
How about funding it by inserting keyword triggered ads for clients that pay flat fee to have access to the gmail insertion and then charging a $.25 surcharge per click?
since they store it all they could search for strings that occur repeatedly (e.g. 1000X) and zap them all, or point to a single piece of spam body while keeping the header intact (as if there's any validity to the header to begin with).
If this is an April fool's joke it's the best i've seen in a while. bill gates must be sitting in his own sh-t right now one way or the other. if it's not, it's about time someone stepped up to the plate and knocked this kind of homer.
I personally find the "not available here" argument pretty weak from a legal standpoint. The fact that there is a market for the games here is indicated by the fact that folks are moding their boxes to play them. Just because a company hasn't ponied up the cash to license those games for a particular market doesn't mean that the potential market is being manipulated (negatively I'm sure sony would argue) by using mods to work around geographic restrictions. Each person who buys an out of region game is a person who would have but no longer will buy an in region game. the way marketing and licensing works, that means bad things for the in region market.
there are (or were if you believe the guy who was convincted for lying to congress while under oath) no opportunities for leveraging in this market so you really can't get rich. I think the idea is/was to start with $100 (which they give you) and see how things pan out. The problem I see with the system (from a practical rather than moral standpoint) is that $100 that's been given to you isn't much of a risk - it's probably not until you've won some money that the opporunity costs start to matter. I think a more responsive system would be one that included losses unrelated to the market regardless of if you choose to put money into the futures market, then you'd get, well, the bush administration give or take some oil interests.
I've looked into this technology for folks that have access to neither cable nor dsl internet access (these people do actually exist, in fact there a quite a number of them out there). As has been pounded into the ground above, this technology isn't anything fancy. it essentially passivly compressy html, word and excel documents. for the average user pretty much everything else is compressed already. What this means to anyone unwilling to spend a few extra bucks for broadband is it's not worth it. what this means to anyone unable to spend any amount of money for broadband (because it doesn't exist in their area) is it's probably not a bad option for folks already spending 23 bucks a month for their aol account. unless all they do is look at porn (or anything else that's image heavy) or download audio (as if any large number of people do this anymore). On to the regulatory part: Now that RBOCs don't have to share DSL and would have to compete against cable on price I think we're going to see almost NO growth in the geographic areas where DSL or cable are offered. That means a chunk of folks out there are never going to do better than this. If I was one of them (and thank my lucky stars I am not) for five extra bucks I'd say why not?
Slashdot Mirror
This was decided at the level of the supreme court - the brand x decision. scalia's dissent is pretty excellent (it's rare that I agree with him for what that's worth) - he talks a lot about pizza. "When all is said and done, after all the regulatory cant has been translated, and the smoke of regulatory expertise has blown away, it remains perfectly clear that someone who sells cable-modem service is 'offering' telecommunications," (AC, on behalf of the 3 dissenting justices). http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-277.ZD.html But that was the dissent, and the majority ruled (Thomas was the opiner) unbundling requirements under the 1996 act do not apply because the service (broadband over cable) is an information service (nee enhanced service). The FCC quickly followed this up with a ruling saying fiber-based end-user broadband should be treated similarly (not so for wholesale fiber trunks). But (and this is a sir mixalot sized but) - VOIP was not considered; they just ruled on if the pipes should be regulated as pipes. "By contrast, the high-speed transmission used to provide cable modem service is a functionally integrated component of that service because it transmits data only in connection with the further processing of information and is necessary to provide Internet service." (Thomas decision) - no reference to regulation of voice being provided inside that information stream. The comcast argument moving forward will likely be based on the idea that packets are just packets until they're processed elsewhere but this begs the question why are they prioritized at all? At it's core what I don't understand is why Comcast thinks the FCC won't reconsider on this point - some (any?) front other than the regulation of the pipes themselves. The court in brand x defers to (while softly agreeing with) the FCC's "understanding of the nature of cable modem service" - which sets up for what is called Chevron deference to the FCC's area of expertise on technical subjects. Should the FCC simply rule on VOIP service, on which there is no court language, the court's ruling on if the FCC was right to find the regulation of the pipes and the provision of information services over them could quite easily go out the window. Given the likelihood of demonstrable harm to a VOIP provider of being blocked, I would not be surprised to see this issue decided quickly by the FCC and then by the courts. Martin has never been particularly happy with cable providers, had I been Comcast I'd've asked ATT to do this first.
Telcos are regional companies in the US. what they are controlling is access to "their" customers (that means us). It wouldn't matter if Qwest didn't play this game, because they don't compete against AT&T.
This is an interesting issue in DC at the moment. The house is ready to move already on this issue, and will give the telcos everything they want (and the cable guys get what they want too). The senate is moving more slowly, luckily. The main concern seems to be ultimately do property rights of network owners trump the economic growth of the edge entities. Common carriage isn't the issue here because the Internet is not common carriage (as a term of art) but neutral to the content that travels on it (as a design element). This point was rather well made by Vint Cerf at the hearings. The other really interesting speaker was Internet2 CEO Gary Bachula - his statement that effectively undercut the "network management" argument was "we have most cheaply solved the packet prioritization issues by simply increasing the bandwidth, rather than prioritizing packets" - the fact that the network owners are trying to prioritize packets at greater expense than simply increasing the overall available bandwidth to everone is exactly the point: the creation of scarcity is the key to profit. It is in the network owner's interests to compete on price on the bottom end of the "bandwidth spectrum" to gain customers then charge content providers to access "their" customers. Competing with each other on increasingly fast bandwidth is as profitable for network owners as the digital camera market is for manufacturers - namely not at all. What we will see in the absence of real net neutrality rules is increasingly long broadband contracts with very low teaser rates (AT&T now offers 12.95 for the first three months) then an increase in monopolistic rent extraction from content providers. We'll end up seeing something that looks like Google's adwords strategy which is "we'll let anyone get priority access to our customers, but it will go to the highest bidder" The only problem with that is that it's bad for the economy when it applies to all possible content rather than the subsection of content that's sold through one of many redundant marketplaces.
Phone companies to have similar issues. They are not mandated to provide access if a carrier refuses to pay termination fees. The fuzziness is in exactly what fees are paid (it's different for different kinds of traffic (local v. inter or intra state long distance, international, etc.) for different kinds of carriers (small rural phone companies, urban competitive carriers, etc.)
The area that's interesting is how small competitive carriers interact with the big boys - no different from tier 1 and tier 2 networks in the IP world, except that there's this underlying notion of Universal Service glommed onto the top of it - meaning we have traditionally offset the cost of networks by charging for access to them. This is different than charging for the incremental cost the network bears per unit of traffic.
All of this combines into a big ugly mess where people game the system one way or the other and it falls apart. (basically this is the fault of the way the FCC and congress treated VoIP as a disruptive technology) - no judgement on my part if it should have been treated that way or not.
There is a world view that says the network is better the more people that are on it, then there's the competing view that says the network is better when it's controlled by one entity to ensure maximum efficiency. Either one is an imperfect market - one lets the Cogents cream for profitable traffic (this is called arbitrage), the other lets monopoly pricing occur as a result of market power. Part of the concern about the acquisition of worldcom and at&t is that a very large network of unique endusers (think DSL consumers) coupled with a huge chunk of the IP backbone are going to be able to leveraged by some very, very savvy people with market power (with a lot of regulatory experience related to the termination of certain kinds of traffic) and the IP community isn't gonna know what hit them until they're crying uncle.
The US uses a similar system, currently under review - particular attention being paid to the termination fees for rural telco providers (which have higher per line expenses). Larger carriers are moving to a system called bill and keep, where even traffic flow cancels out any termination or origination fees. Peering is a bit different on the IP side of things owing to it already being a bill and keep environment for tier I providers. This issue gets particularly messy where IP and telephony interact.
Look at the CEOs, they're coming from different places but clearly working in the same space - media companies are generally about adverstising (yes, even content providers) - the question is which company will be fast enough to eat the other's lunch? (I've already written of MS, which is probably not fair given they will have to react differently than they have been at some point). The advantage that I think Google has over Yahoo is that the tech-centric folks they hire are generally interested in things that have real world applicability - especially in the business world - yahoo doesn't focus on that market at all really (at least to me knowledge).
Probably the most insightful (to this point) response why NOT to. Of course, little things like cracks for custom start up logos or passwords for would be easier... also: nice sig.
There's a WNBA player named Ivana Mandic.0 2/11/08/3dcb3b515dd9b?in_archive=1
for real:
"mandic brings size and experience to Charlotte"
http://www.nineronline.com/vnews/display.v/ART/20
My highschool had two bball coaches Dick Burning and Dick Peining.
Didn't the late great Johnny MF Cash sing a song about doin' yr children wrong by names
How about funding it by inserting keyword triggered ads for clients that pay flat fee to have access to the gmail insertion and then charging a $.25 surcharge per click? since they store it all they could search for strings that occur repeatedly (e.g. 1000X) and zap them all, or point to a single piece of spam body while keeping the header intact (as if there's any validity to the header to begin with).
If this is an April fool's joke it's the best i've seen in a while. bill gates must be sitting in his own sh-t right now one way or the other. if it's not, it's about time someone stepped up to the plate and knocked this kind of homer.
I personally find the "not available here" argument pretty weak from a legal standpoint. The fact that there is a market for the games here is indicated by the fact that folks are moding their boxes to play them. Just because a company hasn't ponied up the cash to license those games for a particular market doesn't mean that the potential market is being manipulated (negatively I'm sure sony would argue) by using mods to work around geographic restrictions. Each person who buys an out of region game is a person who would have but no longer will buy an in region game. the way marketing and licensing works, that means bad things for the in region market.
there are (or were if you believe the guy who was convincted for lying to congress while under oath) no opportunities for leveraging in this market so you really can't get rich. I think the idea is/was to start with $100 (which they give you) and see how things pan out. The problem I see with the system (from a practical rather than moral standpoint) is that $100 that's been given to you isn't much of a risk - it's probably not until you've won some money that the opporunity costs start to matter. I think a more responsive system would be one that included losses unrelated to the market regardless of if you choose to put money into the futures market, then you'd get, well, the bush administration give or take some oil interests.
I've looked into this technology for folks that have access to neither cable nor dsl internet access (these people do actually exist, in fact there a quite a number of them out there). As has been pounded into the ground above, this technology isn't anything fancy. it essentially passivly compressy html, word and excel documents. for the average user pretty much everything else is compressed already. What this means to anyone unwilling to spend a few extra bucks for broadband is it's not worth it. what this means to anyone unable to spend any amount of money for broadband (because it doesn't exist in their area) is it's probably not a bad option for folks already spending 23 bucks a month for their aol account. unless all they do is look at porn (or anything else that's image heavy) or download audio (as if any large number of people do this anymore).
On to the regulatory part: Now that RBOCs don't have to share DSL and would have to compete against cable on price I think we're going to see almost NO growth in the geographic areas where DSL or cable are offered. That means a chunk of folks out there are never going to do better than this. If I was one of them (and thank my lucky stars I am not) for five extra bucks I'd say why not?