Recently Bert has been dredging up articles from last spring, when the FCC
started the proceeding that set the Internet on fire. That “deplorable” FCC
Chairman Ajit Pai and his Republican cronies were going to revoke the decision
by the Obama FCC to regulate Internet ISPs as Common Carriers under the Title
II provisions of the 1934 Communications Act.
And they DID.
So I decided to dredge us some history too. I came across a three part series
published by Wired during the week of June 23, 2014, shortly after John Oliver
incited the Millennials to bombard the FCC with e-mails in support of “Net
Neutrality.”
I encourage those who are interested to read all three articles - the second
written by none other than Tim Wu. I have pulled out some choice paragraphs and
analyzed the entire series as it relates to the ongoing debate today.
Here we go...
Part One:
https://www.wired.com/2014/06/net_neutrality_missing/
Even Sunday night HBO watchers are worried the Federal Communications
Commission will soon put an end to net neutrality.
Earlier this month, on the HBO comedy news show “Last Week Tonight,” host
John Oliver went on a 13-minute rant against the new set of internet rules
proposed by the FCC. He warned that the rules would lead to a world where
internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon can sell special
treatment to web companies like Google and Netflix, charging extra fees to
deliver their online videos and other content at fast speeds, and he urged
viewers to bombard the FCC website with protests, saying the rules would end
up hurting smaller web outfits that can’t afford to pay the fees. The next
day, the FCC site buckled under the traffic and went offline.
“The time has come for the FCC to recognize that broadband service is of the
same importance and must carry the same obligations as so many of the other
vital services do. To do that, I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer
broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act — while at the
same time forbearing from rate regulation and other provisions less relevant
to broadband services. This is a basic acknowledgment of the services ISPs
provide to American homes and businesses, and the straightforward obligations
necessary to ensure the network works for everyone — not just one or two
companies,” Obama said.
It was just part of a sweeping effort to squash the proposed rules. When the
rules first leaked out in May, protesters camped out in front of the FCC’s
Washington offices. Big tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Netflix
signed a letter asking the government communications agency to bar internet
providers from discriminating “both technically and financially against
internet companies.” And last week, two big name Democrats on Capitol Hill
unveiled a bill that seeks to undermine the new rules. Nearly everyone, it
seems, wants to prevent the FCC from allowing some companies to have internet
“fast lanes”while others toil at slower speeds.
The only trouble is that, here in the year 2014, complaints about a fast-lane
don’t make much sense. Today, privileged companies—including Google,
Facebook, and Netflix—already benefit from what are essentially internet fast
lanes, and this has been the case for years. Such web giants—and others—now
have direct connections to big ISPs like Comcast and Verizon, and they run
dedicated computer servers deep inside these ISPs. In technical lingo, these
are known as “peering connections” and “content delivery servers,” and
they’re a vital part of the way the internet works.
Even Tim Wu, the man who coined the term net neutrality, will tell you that
the fast lane idea isn’t what it seems. “The fast lane is not a literal
truth,” he says. “But it’s a sense that you should have a fair shot.” On the
modern internet, as Wu indicates, the real issue is that such a small number
of internet service providers now control the pipes that reach out to U.S.
consumers—and that number is getting even smaller, with Comcast looking to
acquire Time Warner, one of its biggest rivals. The real issue is that the
Comcasts and Verizons are becoming too big and too powerful. Because every
web company has no choice but to go through these ISPs, the Comcasts and the
Verizons may eventually have too much freedom to decide how much companies
must pay for fast speeds.
We shouldn’t waste so much breath on the idea of keeping the networkSpeech on HBO is not regulated by the FCC...
completely neutral. It isn’t neutral now. What we should really be doing is
looking for ways we can increase competition among ISPs—ways we can prevent
the Comcasts and the AT&Ts from gaining so much power that they can
completely control the market for internet bandwidth. Sure, we don’t want
ISPs blocking certain types of traffic. And we don’t want them delivering
their own stuff at 10 gigabits per second and everyone else’s stuff at 1
gigabit. But competition is also the best way to stop these types of extreme
behavior.
Though the network will never be neutral, we can find ways of promoting a
vibrant market for fast internet speeds that’s open to everyone. At the end
of his rant, John Oliver actually comes pretty close to the real issue.
Advocates, he says, “should not be talking about protecting net neutrality.
They shouldn’t even use that phrase. They should call it preventing cable
company f***ery, because that is what it is.”
We envision data traveling from Google and Yahoo and Uber and every other
online company into a massive internet backbone, before moving to a vast
array of ISPs that then shuttle it into our homes. That could be a neutral
network, but it’s not today’s internet. It couldn’t be. Too much of the
traffic is now coming from just a handful of companies.
Craig Labowitz made this point last month, when he testified before a
Congressional committee on the proposed Comcast-Time Warner merger. Ten years
ago, internet traffic was “broadly distributed across thousands of
companies,” Labovitz said in his prepared statement to the committee. But by
2009, half of all internet traffic originated in less than 150 large content
and content-distribution companies, and today, half of the internet’s traffic
comes from just 30 outfits, including Google, Facebook, and Netflix.
TIM WU SAW firsthand how people can mess with the internet.
Fifteen years ago, he landed a marketing job with a network equipment maker
called Riverstone Networks. Riverstone made network routers, among other
things, and it sold many of these to Chinese internet service providers who
then used them to block traffic on their networks.
After about a year, he left Riverstone, disillusioned but wiser. And today,
Wu says that the time he spent there helped cement the idea that has made him
famous: net neutrality. First proposed in a June 2002 memo, net neutrality
decreed that internet service providers must treat all traffic equally, and
let users do what they wished with their bandwidth. This led to FCC rules
that not only prevented ISPs from blocking content, but barred them from
discriminating against traffic in other ways.
The debate over net neutrality is extremely complicated and highly charged,
but for Wu, it all boils down to one thing: ensuring that individuals and
businesses–especially small players–get fair treatment on the net.
‘I've been there and I've watched it first-hand in net neutrality. We have a
problem with an invisible government.'
His inspiration: Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party of a century ago. "If
you go back to the 1912 platform of the Progressive Party, they say that the
number-one problem with this country is an unholy alliance between a corrupt
government system and big business," he says, arguing that this is today's
biggest problem too. "I've been there and I've watched it first-hand in net
neutrality. We have a problem with an invisible government."
Thanks to widely available home broadband connections from ISPs such as
Comcast and Verizon–and indeed, thanks to net neutrality rules—operations
like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Netflix have flourished. But with the
rise of their online empires–which now involve such enormous amounts of
bandwidth-sapping video—the Googles and the Netflixes have been forced to
rewire the internet, building their own fast lanes to our phones and laptops.
These fast lanes are a necessity on the modern internet, but they also mean
that the old notion of net neutrality—which insists that all traffic be
treated equally—doesn't really make sense.
The ISPs say that light regulation has given them the freedom and financial
incentives to build our their infrastructure, but Wu believes that there's
been a decade-long campaign to stigmatize the concept of common carrier
regulations. "I think it's an attempt to repeal by stigma the law," he says
of the big ISPs. "They don't like the law, so they'd like to appeal it by
stigma."
BARBARA CHERRY WAS working at the Federal Communications Commission when theIt took a few more years, but the 2002 decision did fundamentally change the
agency gave away the internet.
At least, that's how she describes it. And she certainly knows the ins and
outs of U.S. telecommunications policy. Before joining the FCC, Cherry was a
governmental affairs staffer with AT&T, which means she spent her days
negotiating with lawmakers and lobbyists on behalf of the telecom giant.
While she was at the FCC, the agency decided how to classify the companies
that provide broadband internet access over cable TV lines and DSL phone
connections. Instead of viewing them as common carrier "telecommunications
services" networks—which are more strictly regulated and must provide certain
levels of service to all customers—the FCC would treat them as the
more-lightly regulated "information service providers." The year was 2002,
and the decision would completely change the internet landscape.
You can bet that the Comcasts and the AT&Ts will fight hard–and fight
shrewdly–to retain the status quo. Now a telecommunications professor with
Indiana University, Cherry took away some important lessons from her decade
in AT&T's legal department. One of the most important was that companies like
AT&T treat working with lawmakers and regulators as a core competency–a vital
game of chess that Silicon Valley's tech companies are still coming up to
speed on. "It's an in-house long-term expertise," she says. "If you have to
go up against them, you have no clue what they know. They have a long-term
playbook." That, she says, is what Google and Netflix and other internet
pioneers are facing as they battle AT&T and other communications giants over
the idea of net neutrality.