Tech firms write to U.S. FCC to oppose 'net neutrality' plan
reuters.com
reuters.com
It's a sad fact he with the biggest cheque book wins, especially when it comes to reform. Look at the whole music/movies piracy argument, it extends as far back as the late nineties; publisher groups, the likes of the RIAA suing people and skewing the legal system by throwing money at the right people who have the power to vote and act upon such decisions. It's happening all over again, except this time the repercussions will be far worse then any anti-piracy bill.
I'm not saying lobbying is the only solution, but if the entities on the wrong side of the argument are doing it, does it matter if Google, Amazon, Facebook and other companies issue statements and express concerns to congress if it will only fall on deaf ears or be brushed off as a selfish act?
It kind of reminds me of when Labor were in power in Australia before the recent election and were in the process of rolling out the National Broadband Network (NBN) which was a fibre to the premises plan the current party has basically scrapped. Google Australia issued a statement saying the current Government needs to understand the value of such a network, but they were shrugged off. If they opened up their cheque book and started donating to particular Government interests and districts, would they have been taken more seriously? Maybe.
I think it's time for the big tech companies to put their lobbying efforts into overdrive and supplement that with another public awareness campaign across their web properties, modeled on the SOPA/PIPA protest.
Throwing money at things sets a precedent; if they let things run as they are now, it's quite possible that the bill will fail (like SOPA did) due to public outrage, not due to money.
The fact that politics is powered by money in the US is terrible, and the more exceptions there are to that, the better. I think this can set another precedent.
I think the big tech companies should only toss money in if the current efforts fail, as a matter of efficiency, morality, and precedent.
This isn't just a matter of throwing money at the right people. Its part of a larger ideological debate about how to regulate the telecom industry. The trend over the last 20 years at the FCC has been rooted in conservative economic thinking. Deregulate the industry, use auctions to allocate spectrum, etc. The 1996 reforms didn't achieve everything it was billed to, but the fact is: 1) at the end of the day, Washington views it as largely successful; 2) the state of the internet in the U.S. is competitive with other large western countries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709948. The telcos certainly don't lack numbers to point to to show the competitiveness of the U.S. industry under the existing regime.
Net neutrality is a hard sell because it goes quite against the prevailing thought at the FCC. It has the support of many netopions, but not really among the mainstream/conservative economists that carry the most weight in these policy debates.
The internet companies need to lobby, sure, but they also need a "hook." And "openness" and "neutrality" which are words that resonate in Silicon Valley on their own are not ones that resonate in Washington.
To compare, look how the environmental movement has responded. Environmental groups don't talk about "conservation" and fuzzy ideas like that, not anymore, not in Washington. They talk about externalized costs and concrete economic phenomena that justify regulation. The tech industry needs to ground net neutrality in something like that.
Incidentally, this is part of a debate that has been raging for 30+ years. Telecom and wireless regulation has spawned thousands of journal articles and thesises. Politicians don't read these things, of course, but they're hugely influential to the technocrats that do the first draft proposals. At least to the extent they can back ideological viewpoints with a theory-based narrative.
What would you suggest they do?
[1] I think this is where tech companies pay a price for having to awkwardly straddle the ideological divide. You come in calling for more regulation to increase competition and entrepreneurship, and people have no idea what to make of you.
No. They are using public right-of-way, which is worth a lot (far more than the typical monopoly franchise fees paid to local governments). This isn't hard to calculate. Figure out how much right of way is found in a building lot, then multiply by the number of dwellings and the mean cost of leasing bare land in that city.
If they want a free market with "privatization" and "deregulation", let them actually compete in one.
You would see very, very different pricing and service models if (e.g.) cities put in underground conduits and let anyone with the money to pay a lease fee pull their cable.
And the cost of renting space on utility polls or underground doesn't come near the cost of the surface property rights. And cable companies pay billions a year in franchise fees. Though I'd be interested to see a calculation...
Cable franchise fees appear to be ~5% max (federal law), but ~3% seems to be more common (don't take that as solid -- it's based on a couple of minutes of Googling).
Figure a cable bill of ~$100/month. The city will get $3.00 of that.
It seems unlikely that property owners in general would let you run cables across their land for a measly $3.00/month. I wouldn't. And remember, that $3.00 only comes from the ones that are cable subscribers. The actual amount paid to the city is going to be somewhat less (it will vary depending on how many subscribers there are).
So, yeah, it looks like the cities are undervaluing the right-of-way access considerably.
Wouldn't cable companies just run trunk cables down all the city streets, and only run cables on your property (from your house to the trunk on the street) if you sign up for service?
I'm required by law to pay about 80 cents per foot, per year, for underground conduit in a right-of-way within the city's eminent domain. That's roughly $4,200 per mile, per year, per fraction of conduit. (That price doesn't even get you a whole conduit, just a fraction of an inch within one).
If each house is on a 80 foot wide lot down a residential road, it costs me a minimum $5.50 a month per house. And that assumes that every single house pays for that service. If I only have 10% saturation in an area (a 'best case' scenario) it's closer $55/month per house.
That also totally ignores state taxes (they take a few cents too, for every mile used, every single year, even though they have nothing to do with the process).
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I'd also love to know where this "5% max" you mention comes from. The rates I pay are fixed, regardless of the cost of service. (I could give internet connections away for free, I still owe at a minimum $4,200 per mile for right of way).
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Comcast may have some special deal that I don't get, but even if they have a guaranteed 100% monopoly, I have to imagine that they pay more than $3/month per home for right of way.
Note that this is for cable television. If you're just running an ISP, it doesn't apply.
Then again, we can make the same argument about utility providers. If a private electricity provider asks for a share of the payment of the video being served using the electricity that they supply, where should this stop?
I'm beginning to think that we'll eventually end ip with a middle ground where some usages of communication infrastructure are regulated (such as emergency response) and some others are in the market.
While folks are arguing about whether such a breakage of net neutrality will be bad for consumers, are there at least any reasonable market simulations that point out good/bad out omes for each party involved, includin consumers?
Additionally, it's got an incredibly harmful effect on free speech. As the Internet becomes the main means of all communication and discourse, if ISPs are allowed to regulate how content reaches their subscribers, what's to stop them from restricting access to particular news sources? Or even filtering political campaign website that haven't paid up?
Without net neutrality, the Internet will become just a network of toll roads patrolled by highwaymen trying to shake down travelers for what they can get. For us to get the full potential of the Internet, the tools and the highwaymen need to go.
"We've determined more Fords drive on this particular than any other brand of car, pay up or Ford vehicles will be intentionally limited or cut off from using this road" — Users (or in this example motorists) have already paid the appropriate entities; car registration, licence fees and insurance, now the road authority wants a cut from every car manufacturer because they're responsible for the roads being used.
When you put it all into perspective with those metaphors, it really highlights how damaging and ridiculous anti-net neutrality laws could be for the Internet.
Not a bet I'd want to make. Would you like being the ISP who only had limited access to all Google's websites because you wouldn't pay?
("This data encompasses connections from both residential and business connections, and as such, represents a blend of the observed connection speeds. (The report has never claimed to measure only residential traffic.) Having said that, we believe that the number of residential connections to Akamai's platform greatly outnumbers the number of business connections, so the potential skew caused by higher speed business connections should be minimized.")
Also, the U.S. does pretty well on Ookla's survey too, compared to similarly-situated countries: http://www.netindex.com. The U.S. average clocks in at 24.1 megabits. Canada and Australia, two similarly sprawl-y Anglo countries clock in at 21.8 and 14.4, respectively. Germany, France, and the U.K. beat us, though, at 25.4, 33.4, at 26.9 megabits, respectively.
However, drilling down, you can see that sparsely-populated central and western states drag down our overall average: http://www.netindex.com/download/2,1/United-States. In the densely-populated Northeast, speeds are generally above 30 megabits. Virginia is 30.3, Pennsylvania is 29.7, New York 30.2, New Jersey 38.2, Maryland 36.8, Delaware 36.0, Massachusetts 34.0, Connecticut 31.4. These are the places in the U.S. that are comparably dense and urbanized as continental Europe.
What about 'unleash competition in the ISP industry'? This seems like a really easy sell--the infrastructure business is a natural monopoly, but there is no good reason to allow the infrastructure owner to control who can serve bits over it. Our current situation is like your power company getting to decide what devices you can plug into your outlets (and trying to shake down device manufacturers for permisson to use the outlets).
Lobby on this one folks
> Our current situation is like your power company getting to decide what devices you can plug into your outlets (and trying to shake down device manufacturers for permisson to use the outlets).
Power (at least in my part of the US) uses metered billing (plus a flat cost). If some company starts selling a device which draws a large amount of power, anyone who uses it will pay larger power bills as a result, so the power company isn't left carrying the financial burden.
I suspect that if your ISP could convince you to pay $40/month plus $0.01/GB of up/down bandwidth then all these arguments would probably disappear, because people streaming lots of Netflix more would naturally pay more. And with the bandwidth caps of some providers, it is already heading in that direction.
(Of course subscribers have all sorts of reasons not to prefer such a system. Just because it would resolve the current political situation doesn't mean people would like it.)
Balderdash.
Level3's article about congested peers (AKA telco monopolies) is much more on topic. It should capture the hearts and minds of most rabid capitalists better than anything I can think of.
This is what rayiner is talking about. It's not a captivating argument to people outside of technical circles. You need to meet them on a common ground of understanding, and talking about peering arrangements and telco monopolies hasn't been very successful thus far.
The FCC's antiquated thinking is what opened the door for monopolies, and they don't look to be concerned about changing that, because it's easy to sell the current state of affairs as a success.
> A port that is on average utilised at 90 percent will be saturated, dropping packets, for several hours a day. We have congested ports saturated to those levels with 12 of our 51 peers. Six of those 12 have a single congested port, and we are both (Level 3 and our peer) in the process of making upgrades – this is business as usual and happens occasionally as traffic swings around the Internet as customers change providers.
> That leaves the remaining six peers with congestion on almost all of the interconnect ports between us. Congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfil the requests their customers make for content.
So I'm reading it with my republican hat on, and I'm thinking: why is this any business of the government's? This sounds like a contractual dispute between two network companies over upgrades. Why should the government get involved in this?
The "consumer satisfaction" angle at the end might be more compelling, but more to a Ralph Nader type than even a Bill Clinton type much less a George Bush type. And the Ralph Nader types raised these objections in 1996 in opposition to telecoms deregulation, and they lost over a bi-partisan effort.
You can raise the specter of "monopoly" but the fact is that the cable companies are by and large not legally monopolies (after the 1992 reforms), and nobody really wants to tackle the whole "natural monopoly" angle because it's hard and doesn't lend itself to any good solutions.
I think the tech industry's best play is to keep pushing Google Fiber-type competitors hard and complain to Congress if states put up hurdles. Because what Congress and the FCC have been willing to do is step on the states when they try and raise barriers to competition (which is what the 1992 reform embodied). But this might make investors unhappy.
ISDN is limited to just over 100Kbits/sec, which is a non-competitive joke.
Comcast is a monopoly.
The FCC keeps issuing regulations aiming to enforce net neutrality, keeps getting challenged by the ISPs in court, and keeps trying again after court set backs. The Google/Amazon/Facebook etc. letter is about reports (which the FCC Chair has denied) that a draft being circulated as the next iteration of that effort might weaken in a particular way, and urging the FCC to adhere to the principles it has repeatedly articulated in this area. Neutrality does not go "quite against the prevailing thought" at the FCC, it is the prevailing thought at the FCC.
> The internet companies need to lobby, sure, but they also need a "hook." And "openness" and "neutrality" which are words that resonate in Silicon Valley on their own are not ones that resonate in Washington.
They certainly seem to resonate with the FCC, whose actual efforts in this area are under the "Open Internet" banner and have generally been about enforcing the principles commonly labelled "net neutrality".
Unfortunately, politics.
These companies don't oppose Net Neutrality. They oppose Wheeler's anti-net-neutrality plan.
It needs to be renamed "internet speed bump bill" or something negative.
EDIT: kudos to Reuters mods for passing the comment.
That seems as a bit of a conflict of interest.
Most recently, he was a managing director at Core Capital Partners, which is a VC firm that invests in a bunch of internet/cloud computing early-stage companies: http://www.core-capital.com/portfolio.aspx.
Arguably, his strongest bias should be towards internet companies, not against them.
Can anyone spot any big names that are absent, other than Apple?
Also, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, and pretty much any of the major hardware companies.
By all rights, Cisco, Juniper, Foundry, etc. should be on there, since neutrality means more business for them, but they can't piss off their biggest customers.
It's an impressive list, but there are a lot more big names in American tech than that.
AT&T has been offering CDN services for a while, and Verizon already bought EdgeCast. It's not going to end there.
And no, I don't mean trivialities like copyright that they managed to get immunity from by passing the DMCA. IF they want demonstrate how strongly they control what is allowed through their network, then they must be the responsible party. There is not shortage of stuff on the net that - in the eyes of paranoid parent - "obviously" fails the Miller Test.
If Comcast/etc really wants to play hardball, this idea can be extended to include all the child pornography they are surely trafficking. I'm sure they will the strict liability being used in such cases by some judges.
There are a lot of reasons to want common carrier status, before you even get into the easy stuff like copyright and "streaming movies", and a giant line of people just waiting for just this kind of opportunity.
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/files/2014/05/Mozilla-Pet...
and the blog announcing it: https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2014/05/05/protecting-net...
Anybody think this is a bad idea? Seems to be a safer bet than the more dangerous brush strokes others are painting the issue with.
edit: formatting
That is not what i pay for.
I would assume in the bigger picture this would not be very good for ISP's
Fuck you Wheeler.