My Response to Triumphalism over Turning the Internet into a Utility
Engadget is celebrating the fact that the Internet just got turned into Ma Bell. Here was my response in the comments:
This is utter madness. Since when has "free" ever meant "tightly controlled by the government"? Regulation like this always locks in current competitors and business models. Hate Comcast? You just guaranteed them their infinite existence and profitability. They will be the Ma Bell of your generation.
New competitive models and technologies will now have to be vetted by government bureaucrats who will soon be captured by the industry itself. It literally always happens this way. How much innovation did you ever see in the landline phone business? My telephone at my birth in 1962 was identical to the one in my dorm room in 1984. Power companies? Water companies? Cell voice service? What innovation have you ever seen? What new competitors have you seen pop up to challenge the old guys? Only in cellular data has there been any innovation, and that is to date the one place in phone communications the FCC has not regulated with this model.
I am exhausted with people justifying these heavy-handed government regulations based on the good intentions of their supporters rather than the actual facts of how these regulations always play out historically. We will look back on this day as the beginning of the end of the wild, open Internet we loved.
I will say that folks can really be rubes. Playing on the fear of one narrow issue that would have been easy to legislate (that broadband companies might block or limit access to certain sites), the government used this niche concern to drive through a total takeover of the Internet. Way to go sheeple.
Update: Some additional comments I made:
This problem of blocking web sites is almost entirely hypothetical, and to the extent it has been used at all it merely has been a negotiating tactic between big boys like Netflix and Comcast who can take care of themselves. It could have easily been fixed with a narrow bit of rulemaking but in stead we get this major regulatory takeover.
Doesn't it bother you that this is a problem that could have been solved with a fly-swatter but instead the regulators demanded they be given a 16-inch naval gun. Don't you worry why they need all that regulatory power to swat a fly? Aren't you at all suspicious there is more going on here?
In the 1970's I remember my parents having to pay over a dollar a minute, to talk to my grandparents a mere 90 miles away. That is the Telecommunications Act of 1934.
In 2015, I can talk to the in-laws who are 8,500 miles away for free, thanks to an unregulated internet.
Yes, I remember what I called the batphone, a red rotary dial phone. In the basement when I was a little kid throughout the 70's. At college with me in the 80's, and in my first apartment until I finally paid an additional fee per month to use a touch tone phone. That is truly how little service changed, through those years.
Future to the past.
"require equal access"
So my ability to purchase bulk shipping is "unfair" because not everyone else has the same rates?
What a bizarre world you live in.
Which one isn't getting that?
"Is there more going on?"
Follow the money or power within the govt. Who forced this through? Why are they not discussed?
CHUCK ROSS
1. Soros New Media groups. They are not shy about their controlled Open Society Agendas.
2. INSIDE THE FCC- A co-founder of a George Soros backed group, far far left and ironically named FREE PRESS,
The Free Press activist Robert McChesney has also proposed spending $35 billion on federal programs to subsidize the news.
“In the end, there is no real answer
******** but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles,” wrote Robert McChesney, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-founder of the pro-regulation organization Free Press, in a 2009 essay.
As the Media Research Center lays out in a new report, Free Press, which McChesney co-founded in 2002, has received millions of dollars from billionaire progressive George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
Free Press’ activism, and that of its allies, appears to have paid off. The FCC voted Thursday on a 322-page SECRET net neutrality plan.
Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai has been heavily critical of net neutrality and prominent supporters like President Obama.
“President Obama’s plan marks a monumental shift toward government control of the Internet. It gives the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works,” Pai said recently, while also slamming Wheeler’s refusal to publicly release the net neutrality plan ahead of its Feb. 26 vote. (RELATED: Republican FCC Commissioner Slams ‘Obama’s 322-Page Plan To Regulate The Internet)
McChesney welcomes such internet regulation, but his support of net neutrality appears part of his larger Marxist-socialist worldview — something he has not shied away from sharing in various writings and interviews.
In a March 2011 essay at the Monthly Review titled “The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism,” McChesney and co-author John Bellamy Foster laid out their Marxian argument in favor of more internet regulation.
“Our analysis in this article will focus on the United States — not only because it is the society that we know best, and the Internet’s point of origin, but also because it is there, we believe, that one most clearly finds the integration of monopoly — finance capital and the Internet, representing the dominant tendency of the global capitalist system,” McChesney and Foster wrote.
In a Feb. 2009 essay titled “A New, New Deal Under Obama,” McChesney and Foster wrote that societal gains “will only be made through an enormous class struggle from below.”
“If won, they will not, we underscore, eliminate the evils of capitalism, or the dangers it poses for the world and its people,” the pair wrote. “In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.”
In a 2009 interview with The Socialist Project, McChesney suggested that it may be necessary to eliminate advertising.
have govt fund ALL MEDIA AND CONTROL CONTENT.............
“Advertising is the voice of capital. We need to do whatever we can to limit capitalist propaganda, regulate it, minimize it, and perhaps even eliminate it. The fight against hyper-commercialism becomes especially pronounced in the era of digital communications,” he said. Was a Chavez good buddy.
“They did it with massive funding from giant liberal foundations, especially the Ford Foundation, will their portfolio’s benefit"
As the Media Research Center lays out in its report, like The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund did in a 2010 article, McChensey and Free Press have made surprising inroads into the FCC
and the Obama administration.
Add layers of lawyers and commies over consumers to fix a problem that does not exist? $$$
Looks like your comments were quietly disappeared. They are nowhere to be found. The brain-dead activists at Engadget clearly aren't interested in a rational discussion that includes alternate viewpoints.
Very interesting court cases upcoming: First amendment versus FCC regulation. Of course each one will take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even if the FCC eventually loses, each case will be a tiny circumcision of their entire rule. The vibrant and free internet is over and we all will lose something.
The rules will be released. The FCC's process requires that the majority respond to the minority's comments. The staff then have to produce a report for the response and edit the final rules. Only then can they be posted on the FCC website and published in the Federal Register, at which point everybody gets 60 days to comment. Plenty of people will be looking at the rules when they come out. If there's a problem in the details, people will make lots of noise.
"Notice and Comment" is not a requirement.
I think we can all agree the big providers did not help their case.
What's interesting to me is that NN supporters never tried to get rid of the local monopolies...we had Google Fiber getting in wherever it could, but instead of fixing that, we do this.
I will be curious to see if Google Fiber is kept or if its sold off.
76% have 3 or more providers.
My understanding is that they can't even get access to the easements and poles...otherwise Google Fiber would have been in more cities.
In my city we have 3 very high speed providers. Once this happens, you really don't care about "Comcast" as two other options are there - and without contract.
Someone on Reason.com said "Netlfix wants to provide an all you can eat video service for 8 bucks a month, but they don't want to pay for the infrastructure to bring that to you."
If you think about that, it makes total sense. Netflix wants to keep its price low, and not build infrastructure so it pushes net neutrality.
Its also hilarious to see idiots demand government intervention for their TV shows.
All it takes is more than one company in every city. Then no one dares "Slow down" Netflix. They might ask Netlfix to pay for some dedicated lanes for their convoy of mining trucks, though.
Then fix the "no competitor" problem.
For example, if South Korea Telecom is able to provide high speed internet at very low costs, why aren't they in America?
Google Fiber cannot get into major cities because monopolies have been given. Fix that.
Instead, the monopolies will be frozen in amber.
Did you notice that Google also likes NN? Why?
Maybe because they own YouTube.
Another tiny company without any clout, Google.
"by multiple ISPs refusing to provide adequate capacity to the point that the service was basically unusable for some customers"
Highway 80 is suddenly flooded by millions of Netflix Trucks.
Nobody says "hmmm, maybe Netflix needs to pay for its own toll roads."
Nope.. Highway 80 needs to invest in more lanes.
BTW, supposedly foreign countries with cheaper rates are due to this: they make the sender pay.
Also, for all of these claims of slow down, ATT Uverse has run my Netlfix flawlessly for many years. Why? Because they know I can switch to Consolidated or satellite or Comcast at any time.
p.s. Does anyone use Uverse streaming? Its based on Yahoo's system...that should tell you something. All of these theoretical uses of power, and yet no one uses Uverse streaming.
Your understanding is wrong. I worked for an Electric utility, they were quite willing to lease pole space to just about anyone, and the rates they charge for it are regulated by the state utilities board.
Google fiber is a different matter entirely, No one strings fiber on poles, it's way too fragile. All fiber is buried underground. They don't need easements from the utilities, they need easements from government or private land owners. Getting easements from private land owners is complicated and time consuming process, Easements from the government are simpler but still time consuming and hard to get.
Municipal easements means digging up the streets which means you're going to run in nimby opposition.
Burying fiber in dense metro areas also means you have added costs associated with locating and making sure you don't cut into existing utility lines and significant potential liability if you make a mistake and cut into buried electric, gas or water lines.
One more point, as to pole access. The vast majority of utility poles particularly in urban areas are owned by the local electric utility, not the phone utility. The phone utility itself mostly piggybacks on the electric utility poles. The FCC would have no authority do anything about ISP access to electric utility owned poles.
While the focus has been on the effects of regulation, and they will be disastrous, the reason for the administration's takeover is control. The internet has been a thorn in the side of liberals. The reliably liberal TV networks have ignored or spiked stories critical of Democrats while sliming Republicans. The internet leveled the playing field. The two classic cases were the Monica Lewinsky story where a sitting President gave false testimony before a federal judge. Newsweek had the story ready to go to press and spiked it at the last minute. The sources then went to Matt Drudge and the rest is history. And the other was Rathergate where CBS News anchor Dan Rather used phony documents to concoct a story to harm President GW Bush two months before the election. Rather was dumped as anchor 6 moths later and put out to pasture for the balance of his contract. His contract was not renewed.
Those two stories turned frustrated conservatives to the internet both as readers and writers. And this is what the administration fears. But there is hope. The airlines were deregulated. The trucking industry was deregulated. Natural gas was deregulated on a national level. And most importantly the railroad industry was deregulated after having forced the northeast railroads into bankruptcy. So don't lose hope.
A couple of potentially promising FCC actions concerning competition:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-votes-to-allow-municipal-broadband-overruling-two-states-laws-1424969156
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/12/31/google-strikes-an-upbeat-note-with-fcc-on-title-ii/
Title ii does have the benefit of giving GF and other new players access to existing utility infrastructure.
To all the rubes who keep insisting this action is sooooo destructive to the MSOs' nefarious plans to profit by restricting access: why did CMCSA close at a record high Friday? /thread
FCC Motto...
http://rightreactions.blogspot.com/2015/02/fcc-motto.html
Our local telephone company at this point is basically non-functional. Landline phones go down all the time, and it can take weeks if not months to have someone show up to check the line. Then when you get your monthly bill, you find it stuffed not with phone charges but with fees for subsidizing the underserved (Obamaphones) and the needy and this surcharge and that surcharge. People have largely given up landlines as a result. All brought to you by your local public utilities commission and the FCC.
Out in the boonies, if you want to call my 5 MPS DSL broadband, that's my option. No cable, no fiber, just copper wire. And we got DSL in 2013, 13 years after the local phone company promised it. Unless I want to pay enourmous bills for wireless or satellite internet after going over the 5 GB limit each month. And noone I know with satellite internet is happy with it. They use it because they have no other option.
I believe they have varying service levels and (look up Shannon information theory, the hard physics of bandwidth limitations) the bandwidth you get is very dependent on the distance between the "switch" (actually the DSLAM) and the home. So they at least need to have run fiber to your "street" (where the dslam will be in a telco cabinet/pedestal) to get the copper loop length short enough for the level of service they claim to offer. So what "uverse" means is going to vary by home. For my mother to get any improvement someone would have to run cable of some sort, either coax through the neighborhood or fiber to within 1000ft or so.
Uverse might actually be "fiber to the curb" in some places (like multi unit housing) but if they were planning to do fiber to the curb anywhere those plans have probably been scrapped.
"Yes, the same Congress who are about to make Homeland Security employees work without pay"
Well, since you're repeating that lie, I don't trust you on anything else.
What lie? Yes, Congress extended funding for seven more days, but they hadn't done so at the time I wrote my comment. It might well be more accurate to say that the workers would be working without immediate pay, as Congress has the option to grant backpay after the "shutdown" (in quotes, since the majority of Homeland Security wouldn't shut down at all) ended, but essential workers would still be required to work and wouldn't be paid on their normal schedule.
You'll notice I didn't blame Democrats or Republicans for this. I simply said "Congress" as a whole. This is accurate as, with the exception of the last minute one week reprieve, Congress has failed to pass an appropriations bill for Homeland Security.
My mother was looking into Uverse when AT&T first started to talk about it and signed up as soon as it was available locally. There was nothing ever mentioned in any of the early promotional materials about fiber to the curb.
"Uverse might actually be "fiber to the curb" in some places (like multi unit housing)"
If so it is only by happy accident.
"but if they were planning to do fiber to the curb anywhere those plans have probably been scrapped"
To judge from their.earliest promotional materials, no such plans ever existed.
5 can stream HD video, so yes, I do, and BTW - the majority (that means most) live in Urban regions.
The FCC even claims that only approx. 5 % of the US population is served by a single provider, so you'll pardon the rest of us if we question the need for a massive Federal intrusion.
BTW, exactly how does the new 300+ pages of regulations change your scenario?
Congress has the option to grant backpay "
List the times the various Federal workers have NOT received full pay...
Interesting that you ignore the other player in this - occupies a residence at 1600 Penn. Ave.
RTFA.
I just wanted to mention that Google has strung fiber on poles in my neighborhood. The fiber coming into the neighborhood is buried, but there are pedestals that take the fiber up the poles and then run on the poles throughout the neighborhood.
From the Google Fiber blog.
Perhaps I should have been more clear. I have but one option, and that's because of regulation. The 4G towers in my area could handle all the internet users without throttling and data caps without exceeding their capacity. That includes the two privately owned 4G towers providing contract commercial service to a single user that don't dare enter the regulated consumer market and thus be subject to consumer regulation. The 300+ pages of regulation ensure my bill will go up. And yes, 5MPS will stream video. And when a 2nd person starts to surf the web while viseo is being streamed, it's reset the DSL modem time.
At one time Bell telephone calculated that if they got rid of all their accountants and equipment used for measuring interstate calls, they could make the whole US local, as it is now. But, the regulators wouldn't allow it.
Metering for useage is what the telcos and cable companies would really want. But the simple fact is, once the infrastructure is in place, the actual transmussion of data costs virtually nothing. It's like the short period of time when wireless phones charged per message. Messages are apparently transmitted on the signals the phone is constantly pinging the tower with, letting it know it is there. Messages didn't figuratively cost the phone companies nothing, they literally cost them nothing.