This week's guest at Heritage was FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, ready to give an answer to one of my biggest questions: what's a responsible conservative to do when an oligopoly makes real competition impossible?
"Net neutrality," Commissioner McDowell pointed out, is something of a Rorschach term. (No, not that Rorschach.) Depending on who's using it, and in what context, it can mean anything from nationalizing internet infrastructure to a simple requirement for content neutrality.
McDowell discussed his dissent in the FCC's ruling on the Comcast/BitTorrent affair. His argument was accurate, so far as it goes: peer-to-peer file transfers use a lot of bandwidth, and the FCC's decision requires service providers to treat all content equally. At heart, McDowell said, it's really just a network management issue: "For the first time, unelected bureaucrats are making engineering decisions for the Internet."
It's tempting to fall back on our old friend Let The Market Decide. After all, if Comcast throttles BitTorrent traffic, the BitTorrent folks use a different ISP, Comcast loses market share, and eventually it changes policy. Voila: market signals triumph, seed rates soar, and everyone gets a pony.
But it's not a free market.
Most Americans are confronted with a duopoly (at best) when choosing broadband providers, and the infrastructure is so expensive that it's hard to break into the market. Without meaningful competition, consumers can't push for better service. I can get my high-speed Internet from Comcast, with all its attendant issues, or I can use dial-up.
The FCC made the right decision, ultimately, writing in its press release:
The Commission concluded that Comcast’s network management practices discriminate among applications rather than treating all equally and are inconsistent with the concept of an open and accessible Internet. Indeed, the Commission noted that Comcast has an anticompetitive motive to interfere with customers’ use of peer-to-peer applications.
If the concern is bandwidth usage, that's easily solved. ISPs have begun to charge extra for more bandwidth, and Vint Cerf, grandfather of the Internet, suggests transmission rate caps. This is a fine idea, and would let ISPs prevent bottlenecks without compromising users' data.
Call it "net regulation" if you want -- I suppose it is, technically -- but mandated content neutrality protects the customer without hurting competition. Although FCC Chair Kevin Martin acted as though the agency had the power to enforce content neutrality, it's not entirely clear that it does. Commissioner McDowell certainly doesn't think so.
Where am I in this mess? All I want is a Congressional clarification that the FCC does have the authority to enforce content neutrality. Give me that and I'll man the anti-regulation barricades with my ideological brethren. I'll even bring the tricolour.
Comments
Agreed!
"Where am I in this mess? All I want is a Congressional clarification that the FCC does have the authority to enforce content neutrality. Give me that and I'll man the anti-regulation barricades with my ideological brethren. I'll even bring the tricolour."
Dead on. Dial-up is not the answer and we have plenty of reasons to distrust the duopoly. This is actually one of my biggest issues this election season and I'll happily sing the praises of any of our fellow Republicans who come down on the right side of this issue.
Thanks for keeping an open mind about this!
Bandwidth Usage or Transmission Rate Caps Anti-Competitive
The problem with your thinking re Caps is that if a cap is set by a company like Comcast, and they exempt their own Pay-Per-View movies from the cap, while charging for downloads from NetFlix or others, it kills the competition in another fashion. So it still accomplishes for them in a different way what blocking bittorrent does.
The simple fact is that only in separating out the content provision from the network access provision can true neutrality be achieved. We need to go back to the ONE regulation that makes sense, and write it in such a way that the courts can't overturn it market by market this time-- Local Loop Unbundling. It's working in all the countries that are beating our butts in fiber and other broadband deployment, speed, pricing, and TRUE COMPETITION. And considering how much dough US Telecom and Cable Companies have robbed from the US Taxpayer to build out the network that never got built (the promise in '96 was that all homes would be wired in 10 years) it's high time these corporations had some meaningful oversight. That's OUR spectrum they're using. It doesn't belong to them.
A mess of contradictions...
Your post is sort of a mess of contradictions. You say you want explicit Congressional clarification on content neutrality. You say you agree that it is not at all clear that the FCC had authority to act. Then in the next breath you say they did the right thing by acting.
How exactly is a federal agency overreaching and claiming authority it doesn't have regarding enforcement of the agency equivalent of a non-binding resolution "the right thing?"
How can you claim to be a Republican and support a federal agency power grab using a "rule" that has never actually been through a rule making procedure?
But let's ignore that for now. Instead, let's tackle this section:
I don't even know where to start on this. Let's begin at the end and work backward.
First, this idea of a duopoly is ridiculous. There are a minimum of three broadband services available to almost everyone - cable, telco, and satellite. The trouble is nobody advocating net neutrality wants to acknowledge satellite because it's inconvenient to their hyperbole. Satellite is available just about everywhere and gives you downloads between 1 and 3 mbps. It's more expensive than cable or telco service, yes. It's upload speed is also slow, but given most people consume more downstream content than up, it's workable for the vast majority of consumers.
The fact that cost and upstream speed don't meet your needs doesn't disqualify satellite as an option for everyone.
Second, it doesn't sound like you have ever used BitTorrent or are even passingly familiar with the case. The BitTorrent "folks" don't change ISPs. You do. They are ISP neutral and it is a matter of customer defection that would impact Comcast.
When people talk about the market working, they're not talking about BitTorrent changing ISPs. What they are talking about is "consumer" defection. If your ISP does something that makes you unhappy, you vote with your feet.
Where do you walk? Well, you walk from cable to DSL (which is available almost everywhere now, so it's not a matter of cable/dial up as you suggest). If you doubt that broadband is available almost everywhere, you should visit my in-laws ranch. It's located 15 miles from Corona, New Mexico (population 165), but they have a DSL line and it works quite well. Admittedly, though, they don't have access to cable.
Again, DSL is slower than cable and satellite doesn't offer fast downloads, but fortunately, the vast majority of broadband customers aren't heavy P2P users - thus the problem.
The few who are heavy P2P users are the ones who are causing congestion and the ones network management attempts to address.
That brings us to the third point you make - infrastructure is expensive. That's about the only thing we are in complete agreement on and the one part of your post I think you got right. Once you've acknowledged that the infrastructure is expensive, though, you have to ask the obvious question - how do broadband providers monetize that network to recoup the investment?
The last I heard an estimate of Verizon's cost of acquisition for a new FiOS customer, it was betwen $3000 - $5000 dollars. The one person I know who had it installed tells me that Verizon sent five technicians to his house and they were there for almost eight hours. That's just the labor cost. Add to that the fiber optic cable run to his door, and all the equipment back up the network, and you're talking about an incredible expense. That customer, at $40 per month, would need to remain a customer for about six years to break even - assuming no other infrastructure investments were made in that time. Fortunately, there is economy of scale and each additional customer costs incrementally less.
However, the network provider must be able to explore business models to figure out how best to a) meet customer needs and b) make money off the network. While it's great that you think the Internet is some sort of inalienable right, the fact is the people who provide your connection are in business. They're concerned with things like making a profit they can reinvest in new technologies and growing the business.
You have proposed a government restirction on what business models they can pursue to meet the two goals above simply because of some imagined horror your ISP may visit upon you. Yet the two most recent examples of ISPs engaging in a practice their customers found questionable - Comcast/BitTorrent and Charter/NebuAd - were both resolved by public pressure. Comcast and BitTorrent had settled their issue and begun working together long before the FCC reached a decision. Charter and other ISPs that had explored NebuAd partnerships changed course without a single bill or FCC complaint. That is the free market that you claim does not exist.
To paraphrase Everett Dirksen, companies, like politicians, are simple. When they feel the heat, they see the light.
Finally, you also neglected to mention one of McDowell's major points.
There are a dozen times a day that I see something I find to be completely ridiculous and think to my self, "There ought to be a law against that." But I know deep down I don't want a government big enough to make all those laws and micromanage my life.
That's the entire basis of the Republican party.
First of all Satellite
First of all Satellite Internet Access usually has horrible bandwidth caps. Go over your allotted bandwidth and you are stuck with an expensive dial up connection. Combined with high costs, terrible upload speeds, and generally inferior download speeds compared with Cable and DSL Satellite internet is being waved off by the market.
About Comcast, in some respect this is a network management issue and there are very likely technical solutions to it. But the problem with Comcast is they were impersonating their subscriber and sending reset packets on their behalf in order to disrupt bittorrent. All this they did in secret until some reporters caught onto what they were doing. They should be free to put whatever caps and limitations they want, but they should disclose what they are doing so their customers can leave if they don't agree.
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