I personally learned the importance of open networks the
hard way. In the mid-1980s I was president of a startup,
NABU: The Home Computer Network. My company was using new
technology to deliver high-speed data to home computers
over cable television lines....But NABU went broke while
AOL became very successful....While delivering better
service, NABU had to depend on cable television operators
granting access to their systems....The phone network was
open whereas the cable networks were closed. End of story."
A person can't go through an experience like this without having it fundamentally affect their worldview. I wonder why, with all of the coverage the lead-up to this decision has gotten, I have not read this story before.
I love HN, but the echo chamber here about how Wheeler was some crony of the NACTA was impossible to drown out.
If you look at the bottom of many of the previous Net Neutrality threads, there will be heavily downvoted posts (some of mine included) that Wheeler was previously an entrepreneur who was trying to disrupt traditional service providers, he was a VC who backed truly disruptive companies, and he had already been blocked from implementing very consumer-friendly rules at the FCC -- so he might be not be some mustache-twirling villain.
It is not ignorant to be sketical of a political appointee, on the contrary, anyone is wise to be skeptical. Observe the tremendous difficulty of either political party to find and appoint suitable people to these positions. Color me cautiously optimistic, but not yet ready to abandon all Wheeler/FCC skepticism. There are so many things in politics that are not what they appear to be; and, there has to be a tremendous amount of pressure on Wheeler from all sides. If Wheeler turns out to be a political appointee who manages to be a reasonable advocate for the citizenry despite the considerable pressure from all competing interests, I'll call him a remarkable exception.
It's ignorant to seize on one line of a political appointee's 40-year resume to insist they'll be corrupt when there is considerable evidence to the contrary.
Wheeler kept a blog for years about all of his thoughts regarding telecom regulation, but it's much easier to call him a dingo and assume he's evil than it is to do research and develop a true picture of his intentions.
Unfortunately, his blog has lapsed, but some of the posts are still available via Archive.org. Some Good posts;
The 2nd is particularly interesting since he explicitly supports the anti-SOPA movement:
The policy matter is not whether copyright holders
should receive recompense for their products (they
should), but whether legislation to protect that right
is aircover to perpetuate old practices at the expense
of new networks. There is no doubt there are honest-to-
God Web pirates operating in China, Russia, and
elsewhere who are stealing copyrighted product. These
pirates should be stopped. But SOPA’s effort to
accomplish this – which also just happened to strengthen
the hand of content companies in other regards – applied
concepts more applicable to the command and control
networks of yesterday than to the open access networks
of today.
The power of the Internet is its lack of centralized
control. Its distributed architecture means the network
functions at the edge rather than at a central point.
That edge activity, in turn, creates what the SOPA
supporters were trying to constrain: access they can’t
control. While its goal of stopping piracy is laudable
and important, SOPA’s practical effect was to
restructure through law the functionality of the
Internet.
Call it ignorance or call it lazy cynicism, but it's clear the blind Wheeler hate was completely unfounded.
Nice post. You're certainly right that the anti-Wheeler fervor was strong here on HN (probably almost as strong as the Anti Obama agenda presented by the comments on this article).
I think I fell for it myself and was pleasantly surprised when this announcement came. Now I know I had let a lack of diligence had prevented me from seeing that this announcement may have been far more likely than I ever thought.
It's easy to be swept up by the resounding chorus of comments here sometimes.
Alan Greenspan once championed the gold standard, that obviously didn't last forever.
>It's ignorant to seize on one line of a political appointee's 40-year resume
People are often defined by their most recent accomplishment(s) (unless a worse one can be dredged up from the past).
I try to keep myself informed of current events, but I'm not always as successful as I would like, and I've not got unlimited time to go digging through the Internet Archive to find and read Wheeler's old blog posts (of which I was unaware). If they were so central to Wheeler's philosophy why did they not receive more recent attention?
>it's clear the blind Wheeler hate was completely unfounded.
If to you, "blind Wheeler hate" == skepticism, then it's not clear at all, but I am starting to warm up to the guy. Thanks for the blog links.
PS, I also doubt that we'd be better off today without the enormous furore over FCC internet regulation.
> If they were so central to Wheeler's philosophy why did they not receive more recent attention?
I don't mean to imply that you're a lazy cynic, just that the easily digestible stories on HN (especially political ones) are often lazy and cynical.
"OMG, I just saw John Oliver, did you know Wheeler was a lobbyist for the cable companies!?"
vs.
Acknowledging that he was a lobbyist for the NCTA during the Jimmy Carter administration and realizing that his more recent lobbying work was for the CTIA - (Still over 10 years ago) - where they were trying to free up more spectrum to enable wireless broadband.
For the past 10 years, he worked with a VC firm that invested hundreds of millions into tech companies. Wheeler personally sat on the board of Earthlink, InPhonic, and Telephia...
I'm not sure why the narrative was so far off the mark but I gave up trying to correct it a long time ago. Rest assured though, there at least a few people that weren't surprised whatsoever about Wheeler's pro-consumer actions.
Not really. Its rare not to see multiple sides of issues represented here, and its not that uncommon to see people on opposing sides each claiming that HN is biased against their viewpoint in favor of the opposing one to the point of completely excluding their viewpoint.
HN isn't perfectly balanced -- there are certainly issues where the one-side or the other has substantially more support on HN. But its far from an echo chamber.
Stuff like that is pretty interesting to me too. It's also a nice real-world description of why there is little to no competition in the market.
The only reason Google accomplished it is by throwing money at the problem and laying new infrastructure, bypassing the existing in most cases. The barrier to entry of a competitor is so high from the infra cost alone.
It's said a lot that infrastructure cost is the barrier to entry but I don't think that's true. Tacking cable to telephone poles is not terribly expensive. There's no good reason a great many households couldn't have two or three different cables running past their homes. As I understand it the issue is the local governments that issue permits for such things are bought off by the providers. It's a problem of corruption, not infrastructure cost.
There may be corruption involved, but the infrastructure costs are not imaginary.
Modern cable infrastructure is not a big coaxial cable strung along telephone poles. It's often buried fiber with media conversion for a local loop. Either way it costs money to roll out, and where poles are involved there are ongoing leasing fees for those.
This is only part of the infrastructure anyway. You've still got all the routing, switching, media conversion, etc. to make that cable do something useful.
How many times can the same dollar of infrastructure costs be used to justify maintaining a monopoly where service is bad and never gets upgraded?
It is in the company's interest to flog that dollar for all it is worth, forever, as a justification to never upgrade and maintain a monopoly so that nobody can force them to reinvest in infrastructure and they can just sit around in maintenance mode, collecting the checks with the minimum possible outlay.
If the government owned the infrastructure outright, we could at least have the discussion about why service is shit, but with this reasoning, "it was expensive to build these cables" permanently shuts down any ability to get upgrades or break local monopolies.
Yeah but the right to use land they are building on was a granted Monopoly by the local governments. If you buy all the land, install all the poles and run all the cable, sure you should be able to do whatever you want with what you build. However, their system is built on billions of dollars of public infrastructure granted to them as a monopoly "in most cases".
>> This is only part of the infrastructure anyway. You've still got all the routing, switching, media conversion, etc. to make that cable do something useful.
Media conversion? Like taking HD signals, converting them to "standard definition" and putting those on the line too? So you can then charge more for higher quality "HD" signals which are still transcoded to lower bitrates? Yeah, we can do without that stuff.
That isn't what "media conversion" means at all. It is the conversion from one medium to another: for example, from fiber optic (light) to coaxial (electric).
>Like taking HD signals, converting them to "standard definition" and putting those on the line too? So you can then charge more for higher quality "HD" signals which are still transcoded to lower bitrates? Yeah, we can do without that stuff.
The cable company in my town does this. Ostensibly it was to maintain compatibility with CRT/low def. televisions as a convenience to people with obsolete equipment but the scheme persists. It seems to now serve the purpose of allowing them to advertise low prices for this subpar service and then upsell customers to much higher price tiers. Sure, that's a legal tactic, but it probably wouldn't work in a competitive market.
OK, so I got it wrong. Still, the cable in my neighborhood was laid before I got there 12 years ago. My bill has gone from $50 to over $100 and nobody has done anything locally - no digging. Sure they bumped me from 150kbps to 2meg many years ago, and I'm sure that was upgraded equipment somewhere. But even with 3 cables running down my street (yeah rare, wow, yippie) we still have relatively low data rates and high prices.
In some areas, that might be the case. But then there is routing, provisioning equipment, people to handle customer support, modems themselves, etc.
Not to mention all the old wiring in everyone's house, especially in the city.
Oh and if for some reason you actually do decide to invest in infrastructure, you get to fight local, city, county, AND state government for permits, taxes, etc.
Sometimes government good, sometimes government bad. Haha.
The point here is internet infrastructure is in no way a natural monopoly like sewage or water. The margins are plenty high and there's no physical problem having two or three competing physical networks most places. The only reason we don't have competing local networks is artificial entry barriers.
I wonder about that too. In my mind at least, there is a distinction between requiring neutral treatment of traffic routing through a network and requiring an operator to let a competitor hook up their equipment in your facilities and sell a competitive service using infrastructure you laid.
The latter IMO is a lot less fair, even though my personal experience is that I had more choices for service when it was done w/ DSL.
The latter makes sense for DSL, but most of the cable monopolies are not government-granted at the Federal level. Some localities have a cable monopoly, but the local government is responsible for that.
Yes, the cable companies have gotten government hand-outs to build out infrastructure, but teasing apart which of that was public and private money (and therefore which would be 'fair' to force open) would be a nightmare.
My point was mostly that the argument for doing so w/ DSL is more cut-and-dry in that most/all of the infrastructure was laid under a nation-wide government-granted monopoly. The Federal government weighing in on the matter makes sense.
