Court strikes down FCC’s net neutrality rules
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The FCC is free to make this choice (right?[1]), and it means they can regulate broadband companies the same way as they do phone companies now - it will have some penalty (which is why they've avoided doing it up to now), but hopefully they will have the guts to fight back.
(note, I'm in the UK, so this doesn't affect my home internet speed, although it could affect any of you 'mericans trying to read my rather obscure blog.)
[1] I don't actually know, so by all means correct me.
I'm not saying it's a good thing - it's a very bad thing to have no NN law! - just that my browsing will be largely unaffected.
So yeah, creators in other parts of the world will be largely unaffected, but -- not to be xenophobic -- how much of the internet is created by Americans?
Obviously, without net neutrality this is not guaranteed. That's the entire point to all of this.
I did give a speech in opposition to it/him once[1], but unfortunately Lib Dem conferences are not the place to make a difference here (sadly).
No, the ruling specifically found that the problem is that the FCC has: 1) declared that broadband providers provide an "information service" (on which common carrier requirements can not be imposed) rather than a "telecommunication service" (on which they can be imposed), and 2) imposed the kind of regulations that are essential to treatment of common carriers.
I.e., that the FCC has both declared that ISPs are not common carriers but than regulated them (in some respects) as if they were.
There's obviously two ways to resolve this contradiction.
Legislation granting regulatory authority to the FCC came up for a vote in Congress, and it came close to passage: it was reported favorably out of a Senate committee but was defeated in a House floor vote in 2006: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1028_3-6081882.html
Even if you adore the principle of Net neutrality, it's reasonable to demand that federal regulatory agencies stick to what Congress authorized them to do. Otherwise you have illegal regulations and bureaucratic turf-grabbing that will not treat the Internet well. Remember Hollywood's successful efforts to lobby the FCC to impose "broadcast flags" on computers by bureaucratic fiat? A federal appeals court correctly struck it down as exceeding the agency's legal authority, as I wrote here in 2005: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1030_3-5697719.html
If Net neutrality violations become an actual problem, there's no shortage of publicity-hungry politicians in Congress (hi, Ed Markey!) who will hold hearings and push legislation forward. Obama will happily sign it. Until then, other government debacles including NSA domestic surveillance and Obamacare should make us wary of federal agencies exceeding their legal authority -- especially after Congress considered and rejected a law that would have given it to them in the first place.
Net neutrality violations had become an actual problem (and source of case-by-case FCC issues) before the FCC set out its open internet principles, much less issued the Open Internet Order.
> there's no shortage of publicity-hungry politicians in Congress (hi, Ed Markey!) who will hold hearings and push legislation forward.
There's more money-hungry politicians that are in bed with the entrenched interests that oppose neutrality that will act to prevent any net neutrality action.
> Obama will happily sign it.
Which would be significant, if it would ever get through Congress. Which it won't, particularly the House.
The reality is that Net neutrality became politicized long ago. It was embraced by pro-regulation left-leaning groups, who were in part funded by Silicon Valley companies who seeking a competitive advantage through the political process. And yes, AT&T and Comcast and other providers played defense by funding advocacy groups on the other side. You may remember that I was the first to disclose some of this dodgy stuff, back in 2008: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10016960-38.html
Once that politicization happened, rational thought in DC ended and it became something that a certain subset of politicians said "WE MUST HAVE," no matter what the law actually allows, which is a dangerous precedent. So welcome to today's state of affairs. On HN, however, I'd hope that we can be a bit more rational about this.
PS: If you think that a bunch of Tea Party conservatives in the House are going to defend AT&T, Comcast, VZ, etc. if they start blocking web sites, etc., you're badly mistaken. Also remember antitrust laws still apply even if the FCC vanishes tomorrow.
They'd have to reclassify broadband as a telecommunication service instead of an information service to regulate broadband providers as common carriers.
This would be reviewable by the courts under the definitions of those terms in the Telecommunications Act, but looking at the definitions, it seems that this would likely be reasonable. (Most ISP provide some components of service that are clearly more like an "information service" than a "telecommunication service", but the basic of internet access seem to be more like a "telecommunication service", and regulating different components of packaged services differently is something that the FCC has done other places before.)
Thank you for reminding me to "Stay on Target"
Consider the basic streaming transaction: consumer tunes in to watch an episode of their favorite show on some streaming service. Several companies are involved in the transaction: the streaming service, the broadband provider, and the content company that made the show. But the consumer doesn't really care about any of that, he's willing to pay $X for the experience of watching that episode.
How that $X is split up amongst the companies in play is the subject of a lot of legal wrangling. Each party has an incentive to try and turn the contributions of the other parties into a commodity. The streaming service and the broadband provider have an interest in weaker copyright protections, so the content company has less leverage. The streaming service and the content company have an interest in net neutrality, because that prevents broadband companies from differentiating their services from each other, and forces them to compete only as "dumb pipes."
It's not clear what the "proper" division of that $X should be. Arguably the content creation is the least fungible from the consumer's point of view. If they want to watch "House" that's what they want, not some substitute. The broadband provision is arguably the most technically complicated and the one that involves the greatest capital expenditure. Distribution is, in my opinion, relatively simple. Computing power and commercial bandwidth are commodities thanks to AWS and the like. So all that differentiates Netflix from Hulu from Youtube is the software. The software isn't easy per se, but it's easier than making a blockbuster movie or building a fiber network. That's why streaming sites are a dime a dozen but it takes the likes of Amazon or Netflix to even attempt to compete with NBC, etc, in developing AAA content.
That's almost certainly why Netflix is getting into the content business, and why Youtube has always been in the content business (through user generated content). That's what's hardest to turn into a commodity.
The ulterior motives of the opponents of net neutrality bother me much more. I can't help but imagine a world where companies like Comcast have complete control over the internet. They pick the winners, whether it's the next Google, Facebook, or Netflix. With, of course, Comcast receiving a hefty percentage for allowing said winner to succeed if they don't have complete control over the winners outright.
This should in theory, drive down prices and increase the quality of the product offered to customers.
If the Googles and Facebooks of the world don't want to abide by the terms set by the Comcasts of the world, they should build their own networks. If there are regulatory barriers to doing that, those should be the target of regulatory reform.
Because its not a freely competitive market. They didn't acquire the infrastructure and access -- particularly the last mile access -- by freely negotiating with property owners, nor, even if they had, is there unlimited capacity for new competitors to do so. Incumbent major broadband providers all got the basic access essential to provide infrastructure as CATV and telephone providers, as locally or regionally regulated monopolies, and there is pretty much no way for direct competition with fixed broadband providers on equal footing.
Fixed broadband providers aren't an ideal market for the same reason "road providers" or "sewer service providers" aren't.
> If the Googles and Facebooks of the world don't want to abide by the terms set by the Comcasts of the world, they should build their own networks.
Google's been working very hard on that for many years, because they knew that their preferred regulatory framework wasn't something that they could count on.
OTOH, I don't see why the Comcasts and AT&Ts of the world now ought to be free to capture all the profit from business done over the internet any more than the AT&Ts of the telephone age were allowed to do so for all business done over the telephone.
The monopoly condition and the public position they had with it is how they acquired a lot of the permanent property rights (easements, etc.) necessary for the infrastructure. That advantage doesn't ever go away, even if the regulated monopoly status does.
And it doesn't change the fact that wireline broadband, because of the physical access requirements, is inherently not a kind of service for which a real competitive free market is possible, for the same reason that it isn't with road networks or sewer systems or electric power delivery.
The value is a substantial barrier to entry to competition -- why even Google Fiber, backed by the vast stockpiles of cash at Google, is often seen as a risky proposition against the entrenched providers and why you see very few providers of actual connections (as opposed to resellers) to those who have access developed as CATV or telephone monopolies.
Exactly this. To me, it ceases being a property rights issue when the rights given to the carriers were not granted under market conditions to begin with.
Does that give the government the ability to impose on the carriers whatever it wants in an arbitrary fashion? No. But it does mean that there should be some elasticity in terms of regulatory structure.
How so? Buying a big ISP and expanding it seems like an odd way to do so.
The ARPANET project was great, but expanding it to homes was never in the plans.
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And sure, everyone has an agenda, the companies arguing for net neutrality aren't doing so out of the goodness of their hearts. That doesn't make them wrong.
1) I pay for the dumb pipe to give me all the internet fluid I care to pay for, regardless of its makeup.
2) I pay either one of or both of the content provider and service for the content.
All of these pieces have to work together. The internet is nothing without content, and the content is ungettable without the internet. A Mutually-assured destruction relationship between these three elements should be quite sufficient.
You're assuming that broadband networks should be a dumb pipe to begin with. Why can't Verizon just decide to get out of the "dumb pipe" business, and say that they won't sell you a dumb pipe, but a pipe with whatever restrictions they want to impose?
Why couldn't AT&T do that when they provided pre-internet landline telephone service?
Your hidden assumption that X is constant is what clouds the picture. It's easy to see that maximizing competition at every stage is in the consumer interest.
For instance Google was all about NN when they were sued by AT&T after they set up Google Voice. Then, when they got into the broadband game, all the things they were for with NN, instantly went out the window.
It appears companies are usually for something until they're against it. The FCC isn't much help either, since they really don't have any muscle to enforce the NN existing rules anyways.
It's not the whim of the carrier. It's what the carrier can negotiate. Why should the US Gov't be part of that negotiation?
If society considers it a real priority, should an actual public ISP be built, instead of forcing rules onto others'?
There was a time when these online companies had to pay other companies to develop applications for their networks. Now they get them for free and want to charge the companies on top of that.
Maybe Facebook's new business model could be charging $$ for "access to their pipes" from ISPs.
Why should the US gov't be involved in this business negotiation between two companies?
Sure, but applications are easier and cheaper to build than pipes. That's the nature of such systems. The step in the chain that's hardest to build with the greatest capital expensive required will have the least competition and thus make most of the profits.
But you are right, an internet without net-neutrality sucks balls.
"Create the sickness, sell the cure" is the business model I see being most profitable in this scenario. The contract you negotiate will be to avoid throttling, not to access speeds that would be unavailable in a parallel universe with net neutrality. Choice != control when someone else writes the rules.