I think as has always been the case, money talks more then words ever could in a political system. If these 100+ tech companies each put in a few dollars, they would have enough lobbying money to swing the argument in the right direction. We are only at the current point in the anti-net neutrality argument because ISP's and telecommunication providers have been lobbying Washington rather successfully.
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.
You don't think Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc, lobby?
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.
> 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.
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).
I don't disagree with the rest of your post, but the power analogy doesn't quite work:
> 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.)
I just want to meta-comment how depressing it that people are attacking rayiner for explaining how Washington sees things. Many people feel it's wrong to sympathize with the pre-judged "bad guys", but the truth is seeing things from others' perspectives is 1) a valuable thing and 2) does not constitute endorsement of those perspectives. If you think otherwise, prepare to live a life lonely and full of disagreement.
Your source that US internet is competitive is not a reliable one, as it lumps together business connectivity and residential connectivity. The average residential connection in the US is a joke compared to any other developed country, in both performance and price.
I think you should ask the question of why? Looking at this from a connected population perspective, you might change your mind about calling the residential connection in the US a joke. My two cent.
("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.
That makes TOTAL sense because companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable represent innovation and technical leadership, growth and profit while companies like Google and Apple don't.
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.
> 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.
DSL is NOT reliable nor is it high speed, at least in my area - and I've heard the same from many others. In my case, DSL would swing from less than 1Mbps up to nearly 20 Mbps. But most of the time it was near the bottom the range (and virtually worthless), so I cancelled DSL and signed up with Comcast (my only other option for high speed broadband). CenturyLink (DSL) and Comcast are the only 2 providers in my area of the country (North Seattle, WA). And given the 5 months of DSL service we endured, it was more often unusable than useable. I had more service calls to them in that short period of time and nothing resolved the issue. Some other folks have better options (and maybe better DSL speeds), but your "small" number is more likely representative of the folks who do NOT have other choices when it comes to high speed broadband access. Comcast IS a monopoly when choices are between the lesser of 2 evils.
My experience with DSL is that it is not reliable, and you are bit-rate limited by your distance to the central office or DSLAM. The bit rates are quite low in comparison to coax-based modems.
ISDN is limited to just over 100Kbits/sec, which is a non-competitive joke.
> Level3's article about congested peers
> should capture the hearts and minds of most rabid capitalists
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.
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.
I haven't read any defenses of net neutrality that really tickle my telecom policy geek sensibilities (although plenty tickle my engineer sensibilities). Cable companies have the argument that its their private network, mostly built with private money, and Netflix, Google, etc, leverage it to reach customers. They should be able to do what they want with it. That's an almost slam-dunk argument for anyone who believes in deregulation and privatization. Their best play is to double down on the liberals. That means expanding the message. Yeah, without net neutrality cable companies could shut down startups, but that's really esoteric for your average liberal.[1] They want to hear about things like consumer protection, universal access, the digital divide, and assuring access of diverse viewpoints to media. These are people who will fight tooth and nail to keep public access stations nobody watches on the air, so figure out how to leverage those sentiments. A winning argument, if they could make it, would be: "Not having net neutrality would raise the price of everyone's Google and Facebook" or "lack of net neutrality would adversely impact rural populations" or something along those lines.
[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.
Network providers are asking to be paid twice for the same service though; it's like the Post Office charging you to send your mail, then charging your recipients again to receive it. It's like car makers charging the buyers once for the car, then charging the mall owner to let that brand of car park there.
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.
My thoughts exactly. This is one part favouritism and the other part double-dipping (a.k.a greed). Another metaphor adding onto your example is the local or state Government charging individual car manufacturers to use certain public roads like highways.
"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.
The other thing Comcast don't seen to have realised is that they're making a long term bet they'll be bigger than Netflix with this strategy. If they're not, what's to stop Netflix saying a major reason the subscribers are buying Comcast's service is to access them, so why should Comcast keep all the subscription? It's no less logical.
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?
But what use is that if they don't have the content to drive traction? Netflix and Youtube aren't unique but each have strong leads in their respective niches. Being 'the only ISP who can't do online video' is hardly going to be a winning business model for them.
"Cable companies have the argument that its their private network, mostly built with private money"
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...
Well, the alternative to using the city's eminent domain based right-of-way would be to negotiate with each property owner on an individual basis.
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.
Do you have a source for those numbers? I am actually starting an ISP myself, and the right of way fees I have to pay are notably higher than that.
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).
- - -
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.
Well, presumably most houses are accessible by public road, which is city-owned land, right?
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?
Agree with your "slam dunk" argument. Though net neutrality seems utopian in principle, from another perspective the providers with the infrastructure seem to be simply asking for the market to decide the use of their private infrastructure than some abstract principle.
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?
Call for an enforcement of a competitive internet environment. Abandoning net-neutrality would be highly anti-competitive and bad for nearly all businesses, except for the handful of residential ISPs.
> Net neutrality is a hard sell because it goes quite against the prevailing thought at the FCC.
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".
Not sure if anyone realizes this, but I re-read parent comment by replacing the word "lobbying" with "bribing" and it feels pretty awkward. But that's exactly what it is. If we stop using the word lobbying in actual communication, I think it's ill effects would really start to illuminate. Congress is there to protect public interest but its quickly becoming a proxy for lobbyists and apparently no one seem to think that this is just bribe in disguise.
Writing to U.S. telecom regulators and notifying the press about them _is_ lobbying. These letters do not write themselves so resources _are_ being spent. Not all "lobbying" takes the form of bribing congressmen.
Totally agree. If anything, the vested interests in this case are generally more obvious than they were/are with our ill-fated NBN.
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.
Here's an idea: Google, Twitter, FaceBook, Amazon, etc. all slow traffic to their sites, along with a clickable notice at the top suggesting they take action to prevent future slowdowns.
So they will lose god knows how much revenue, piss off their customers, and get a tiny fraction of people to 1) actually click the banner 2) read all those scary words 3) actually understand and get angry about the implications.
If it's a coordinated effort it will resonate. It's risky, but the best way to bring attention to the issue. In the long-run, it would cost less than allowing Comcast and others to practice legal extortion.
On the contrary, I'm glad they aren't throwing money at this.
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.
Sure, I think throwing money at it is bad for the country as a whole, but I also don't want my interest group to unilaterally disarm. There has to be some other plan for carrot and stick to decide to not lobby.
I read the story twice and was none the wiser... Who was FOR net nutrality, and who was against? From previous knowledge I knew, but from the text it was impossible to say!
Everyone is for "net neutrality". The monopoly ISPs would like to redefine it as they don't mind who gives them money to avoid deliberately degraded connections.
I came here to say this. It isn't the first time I've been completely confused by headlines surrounding net neutrality. The general public must be completely baffled. Neutral sounds good right. Why oppose it?
It needs to be renamed "internet speed bump bill" or something negative.
How about "the internet tollway". If you want to get fast speeds between locations, you'll have to pay the toll(s). Otherwise, you'll be taking side streets to your destination.
For cable, he was president of a major industry trade group that did lobbying, but that was from 1979 to 1984, which I believe predates the existence of cable ISPs. The internet then was still for research and military use.
Right. He was a lobbyist for the NCTA up to the year I was born, back when cable networks were just basically coax wires carrying OTA signals.
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.
No, nobody can make that argument. And you're leaving out where he was CEO of the CTIA for 12 years until 2004. I encourage you to look at the patents for companies where he has a board seat. He's extremely biased to network operators.
Adobe, Valve, game companies in general, Akamai, Salesforce.
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.
I would imagine that an absence of neutrality is still well within Cisco's interests — its an opportunity to design and sell a whole new class of products and services specifically around throttling and limiting traffic.
Not necessarily. The current brand of neutrality violation seems to be an ISP allowing its peering connection(s) with transit providers to languish while charging large content providers like Netflix a fee to get a separate uncongested connection to their customers. That doesn't require a lick of packet inspection hardware and it involves the ISP buying less Cisco gear because they no longer need to carry packets from all the smaller content providers who wouldn't/couldn't pay and either went bankrupt or saw less usage as a result of the degraded performance.
Akamai stands to be either acquired by or crushed under the boot of the oligopoly. They're a big fat target. The ISPs will squeeze them for ridiculous fees, or just plain cut them off, while pushing content providers toward their own CDN offerings.
AT&T has been offering CDN services for a while, and Verizon already bought EdgeCast. It's not going to end there.
True, but it's also worth noting that there were rumors a month ago that Apple is trying to broker an anti-net-neutrality deal with Comcast whereby Apple traffic will get priority treatment: http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/24/apple-comcast-and-net-neutral... .
Easy fix - just let the anti-porn faction of the religious-right go after the carriers. If they don't want to be "common carrier", then they can be responsible for the content, too.
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.
You think the people in politics understand the idea of "net neutrality" LOL. I'd be surprised if most Senators/House members knew the difference between USPS and email. Now if you were to tell them that the internet would go away unless they contributed $100mil maybe they'd open an IE6 window to Wikipedia to understand whats going on.
Since this has been dragging on for about a decade now, what has been the effects in the US? Also, will net neutrality force cable companies to unblock port 25?
While I'd do the same, due to the monopolistic nature of ISPs in the US they wouldn't have much choice beyond moving to a new location. As much as I'd like to think everyone else is like me and able to relocate easily I know that isn't the case for the vast majority of people.
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.