FCC to Mandate Net Neutrality for the Web
mashable.com
mashable.com
As long as there is even a modestly competitive market for internet hookups (more than one firm), then ISPs will compete to serve the interests of the consumers. Comcast isn't going to shut off Hulu unless it's massively unprofitable. If there is not a competitive market, then that is the real problem that should be addressed. You shouldn't limit people's ability to enter into contracts to buy services. If we want bandwidth to expand, and if we want fast, low latency video and voice connections, cable companies will need to be able to charge premium prices, both to consumers and content providers. Instead, we are beginning the long process of binding the internet in a layer of legislative gray goo, despite there being no evidence of ISPs acting against the interest of consumers.
ISPs are free to charge premium prices for premium services, but it is dangerous to allow them to discriminate between sources of traffic when there are so few competitors.
Did you forget the governments attempt to break up AT&T already?
AT&T and Time Warner may be the only companies with cables running into your house, but why isn't there a viable market for satellite/wimax/local wireless mesh/cdma? Why can't other organizations that want to compete run new cables?
I hope at some point we'll stop making quasi-permanent decisions that affect the long-term development of a particular area of society based entirely on people's perceived fears about the status quo at the present instant.
Satellite? You have to launch satellites. You have to get spectrum allocations (which aren't going to disappear in any regulatory environment; the results would be chaotic and bad for just about everyone, except maybe the purely wired services). You have to either subsidize receivers, because they're going to be more expensive than most consumers will ever buy outright, or you have to manufacture millions of them to get the per-unit cost down. And, of course, you have the backhaul problem.
WiMax is probably the closest to being practical, along with cellular-type services, but it still has a very high natural barrier to entry: you have to get spectrum, you have to rent space on towers in the areas you want to serve, you have to somehow ensure that enough people are going to have WiMax equipment to be able to use your service at all. Again, lots of natural barriers to entry.
Wireless mesh networks have significant scalability problems if the content most nodes want to access isn't evenly distributed around the mesh. A lot of people put a lot of effort into getting community mesh networking working back in the late 90s, and nobody could really make it work. And this was using 802.11 equipment (mostly) that didn't have any regulatory burden at all.
3G and 4G cellular are competitive, at least in some ways, with wireline services, but in many markets they're owned by the same company that owns one of the wired services! (That'd be Verizon.) So even if you have the choice between cable, DSL, and 3G cellular, your choice of companies might still be Comcast or Verizon.
It's not regulation that's stopping these alternatives from existing, it's the inherent complexity and expense of offering high-speed data service. The regulatory burdens should certainly be kept to the bare minimum, but they're not to blame for the lack of choice in Internet access. Even in some sort of perfect, minimally-regulated market, you'd still be dealing with a very Hard Problem.
Call it a pet peeve, but I hate when people (especially technical ones talking about it in a technical context) forget that the Web is a subset of the Internet.
>The "biggest driver" for the more intense opposition to his administration's proposals, Obama told the network's "This Week" program, is more likely to be from people who are "passionate about the idea of whether government can do anything right."
The president similarly told NBC's Meet the Press program that it is an argument "that's gone on for the history of this republic – and that is what's the right role of government? How do we balance freedom with our need to look after one another?"
But you shouldn't read too much into that example either. The lesson here is that buzzwords aren't always useful for understanding the world. The word deregulation means different things in different situations. Airlines are still a heavily regulated industry: Health and safety regulations, security regulations, labor regulations, international treaties, state and local regulations. (You think you're going to be allowed to launch a jet helicopter from your suburban backyard? Your neighbors think otherwise.) But there was a moment when a few of those regulations were removed or changed in a useful way that permitted the market to work better, and that event was named "airline deregulation".
Which does not imply that every action called "deregulation" is going to be equally successful, or even that such actions are especially similar to each other. The devil is in the details. What matters is what the regulations are, and what the situation is.
You can't really do that if you want to be a modern ISP. (At one point, due to line-sharing rules, you could be a DSL ISP without too much infrastructure investment, but this is no longer true; the rules were gutted a few years back and with them went most of the small mom-and-pop DSL operations.) It's a hell of a lot harder to get investment for a fiber deployment---which won't be worth much of anything if the business folds---than it is to buy an aircraft, which at the end of the day will still be a valuable asset.
The industries in question have very little in common, so it should come as no surprise that strategies to induce competition within them look totally dissimilar as well.
I see your point about the problems of more regulation to solve past regulation and would prefer to see socialized broadband instead. The market is too screwed up for the private telecom sector to ever recovery even with lots of good regulation. Since it's quite expensive to build this type of infrastructure nationwide open/fair access policies are a step in the right direction. It's treating the symptoms, not the disease.
Sure, you'd have a level playing field (of sorts), but some of the players would have had years to practice: the result would be anything but a fair fight.
The only way deregulation would work is if it was accompanied by demonopolization. Since that is not politically feasible, it would be a mistake and probably lead to worse outcomes to go ahead with only the deregulatory part.