Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 11:22:20 -0600
From: SuitWatch 
To: suitwatch@ssc.com
Subject: SuitWatch - May 17

                            SuitWatch -- May 17

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  Localizing the Broadband Battle

   "Congress shaping telecom law in private", reads the headline in the Austin
   American-Statesman. "While most conference negotiations are closed to public
   view, lobbyist continue to influence the members and their staffers", the
   story says.

   On May 1st, Susan Crawford commented on Senator Stevens' telecom bill draft,
   which presumably forms the base material for whatever legislators and
   lobbyist are cooking up. She begins, "It's 135 pages long, and the first
   Title is: 'War on Terrorism.'"

   You can bet "Net Neutrality" will be neutered in whatever comes out of these
   meetings.

   I've been one of the voices engaged in the fight for Net Neutrality -- or at
   least for some of the concepts it represents. Saving the Net, Net Neutrality
   vs. Net Neutering and Imagining the Maximum Net all took a pro-Neutrality
   stand.

   Net Neutrality basically says the Net's packetized goods are inherently
   "neutral". Meaning that the nature of the Net itself does not favor one
   source of bits over another. It just delivers the goods. In David Isenberg's
   immortal words, the Net is "stupid" in this respect. Like the Earth's
   gravity, Neutrality serves an equally simple (and "stupid") purpose for
   everything it supports.

   Tim Berners-Lee puts it eloquently:

     Twenty-seven years ago, the inventors of the Internet[1] designed an
     architecture[2] which was simple and general. Any computer could send a
     packet to any other computer. The network did not look inside packets. It
     is the cleanness of that design, and the strict independence of the
     layers, which allowed the Internet to grow and be useful. It allowed the
     hardware and transmission technology supporting the Internet to evolve
     through a thousandfold increase in speed, yet still run the same
     applications. It allowed new Internet applications to be introduced and to
     evolve independently.

     When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask
     anyone's permission. [3]. The new application rolled out over the existing
     Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work
     very hard still, to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal,
     neutral, platform. It must not discriminate against particular hardware,
     software, underlying network, language, culture, disability, or against
     particular types of data.

     Anyone can build a new application on the Web, without asking me, or Vint
     Cerf, or their ISP, or their cable company, or their operating system
     provider, or their government, or their hardware vendor.

     1. Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and colleagues
     2. TCP and IP
     3. I did have to ask for port 80 for HTTP

   I found that post through Richard Bennett, who characterizes it as "flying
   off to socialist Neverland". Richard, like Tim, is a techie. Seems to me Net
   Neutrality should be, at its base, a technical issue. But it isn't. It's a
   political cause.

   On the one hand, it is good for geeks to get interested in how politics can
   screw up something they value. Larry Lessig has been urging this loudly ever
   since his famous Free Culture speech at OSCon in the summer of 2002. On the
   other hand, Net Neutrality may be a failed political strategy from the
   outset, because it attacks carriers directly. No matter how lame or
   irrelevant the carriers may be in the long run, they buy votes in Congress
   by the boatload. Attacking them is bound to backfire.

   Sure enough, the carriers are reframing Net Neutrality as a way for
   government to mess with business. NETcompetition.org slickly applies the
   cable industry's ample lobbying and public relations muscle. And they are
   joined by right-leaning techies such as Richard Bennett, who engages TBL in
   a long debate in the comments section under the post quoted above. At one
   point Richard summarizes,

     The big issue here is that the choices that need to be made between good
     practices and bad are very hard to make in legislation, which tends to be
     more like an ax than a scalpel. Anti-competitive practices are hard to
     identify until we have actual markets in which to measure them. So at this
     point it seems that the prudent thing is to ban only the most egregious
     abuses in law, and wait and see what really comes to pass as the new IMS
     networks are rolled out.

   This is echoed by Randolph J. May of the Progress and Freedom Foundation,
   arguing against Net Neutrality in CNET: In a competitive marketplace, the
   government usually does not require that vendors treat all customers and all
   suppliers alike for all purposes. Very often such differences in treatment
   in a competitive marketplace reflect economic efficiencies to be realized
   from that result in cost savings, and these cost savings enhance overall
   consumer welfare. Avoiding broad prohibitions on such differential treatment
   gives operators the freedom and flexibility to invest with confidence in new
   facilities and innovative services consumers may value.

   On the other side is David Weinberger, with whom I co-wrote both The
   Cluetrain Manifesto and World of Ends. David wrote Why Net Neutrality
   Matters on April 22. He begins,

     Net neutrality (formerly known as the end-to-end principle) means that the
     people who provide connections to the Internet don't get to favor some
     bits over others. This principle is not only under attack, it's about to
     be regulated out of existence.

   Here we see how a technical issue is being re-cast as a political one. And,
   though we may be An Army of Davids (as right-leaning and Neutrality-favoring
   law professor and superblogger Glenn Reynolds calls us in his book by that
   title), the Goliaths still own the votes. Which is why Net Neutrality is
   losing in Congress. Jonathan Peterson sums up the prospects:

     The reality is that this is a battle that we are going to lose. The telcos
     are going to be allowed to implement special carriage pricing to pass to
     content and service providers - perhaps the Supreme Court will strike it
     down, perhaps not. But just as no one burned down Washington DC when the
     decisions that made our cellular infrastructure and services fall so far
     behind were made, no one will burn down DC as our internet goes the same
     way. (Which doesn't mean that you shouldn't go to Savetheinternet.org and
     sign their Save Network Neutrality Petition).

     So it's time to put on a strategic planning hat and start figuring out
     what a post-network neutrality world will look like. Only companies with
     deep pockets will pay the fees for fat content.

     I've read that YouTube is burning through $1M/month in hosting fees. That
     can't continue in a rational world, even without bandwidth surcharges from
     ISPs. This means that Google and Yahoo will be able to afford to host
     amateur video content, but most of the other players will die or be
     purchased by the big guys for their content.

     Google and Yahoo are great companies, but an end of network neutrality
     actually helps them out by locking out new competitors who won't get the
     best rates for fat pipe carriage. That's a deal with the Devil that's hard
     to ignore.

   To pass, Net Neutrality need bipartisan support. Toward that end, it
   probably hasn't helped to have Moveon.org, a partisan organization on the
   left, come out with a petition to save what it calls "the Internet's First
   Amendment". Partisanship breeds sportscasts in the media. So, predictably,
   Net Neutrality became what CNET called "a hotly contested Democratic bid to
   enshrine extensive Net neutrality regulations in the law books", when it
   failed in House committee by a 34-22 vote, mostly along partisan lines.

   So. What next?

   In Comparative Broadband Ideas, Susan Crawford says there's a simple reason
   why the U.S. is falling farther and farther behind in broadband access,
   while Korea and Japan lead the way:

     The primary reason that Japan and Korea do so much better than the U.S. on
     any measurement of broadband (availability, penetration, price, speed) is
     that there is fierce competition in the market for broadband internet
     access in these countries.

   Here in the U.S. access is controlled by monopolies and duopolies. Here in
   Santa Barbara only one cable company, Cox Communications, reaches nearly all
   the homes and businesses in town. One reason we moved here in 2001 was that
   Cox's offering was far better than the lousy 100Kb IDSL we were getting at
   our old house in Silicon Valley. Since then Cox has improved services in a
   few ways, but in others has cut back. There is some competition from
   Verizon, which now offers faster upstream speeds at lower prices than Cox,
   but not for the whole town. Where I live the best Verizon offers is "Up to
   768 Kbps/128 Kbps". But I just tested my Cox connection via DSL Reports
   (http://www.dslreports.com/stest) and got 4.371Mb down and 331Kb up. That's
   not bad, but in Japan and Korea customers are getting 100Mb service for a
   fraction of what I pay to Cox. And I have no choice: Cox has to be my
   provider. They have a functional monopoly. Competition is the key. Broadband
   markets need to be opened. Susan Crawford again:

     There are three routes towards increasing competition in broadband access:
     (1) "local loop unbundling," which means requiring the incumbent to
     physically open its facilities to new entrants, who then find new ways to
     provide services to end-customers; (2) "wholesale access," which means
     requiring the incumbent to sell a wholesale broadband access product to
     all comers; and (3) encouraging other kinds of broadband access
     ("facilities-based competition"), which means helping new entrants have
     their own networks without having to deal with the incumbents at all.

   I vote for #3. This is what we have in Utah with UTOPIA , where a consortium
   of 14 cities built out fiber infrastructure that they're wholesaling back to
   the incumbents who didn't want to make the effort. Loma Linda, CA is
   mandating 5-15Mbps to premises. Other efforts are going ahead in Burlington,
   VT, Lafayette, LA and many other localities. Why? People want it. Save Muni
   Wireless reported last summer:

     After the passage of a law in Louisiana requiring a public referendum for
     municipal broadband, voters in Lafayette approved a $125 million
     fiber-to-the-home project by a 62% to 38% margin.

   Yet here in Santa Barbara a Cox official told me a few months back that too
   few people are interested in better broadband. This was after a meeting of a
   local "broadband coalition" (of which I am a member), where customer after
   customer talked about their need for exactly that. At another meeting a Cox
   representative said she didn't "see the problem", adding that customers
   could get all the fiber they want, if they'll just pay for it. When pressed
   on costs, estimates ran up to $50,000.

   Of course, the carriers will fight the municipalities (and the companies
   that the municipalities grant rights to string fiber on poles and pull fiber
   through buried conduits). Read the Lafayette Pro Fiber Blog for a running
   account of the fight between citizens (and municipalities on behalf of
   citizens) and carrier-controlled state legislators.

   But with citizens backing, there isn't much they can do. We might not be
   able to work around Congress, or even all the state legislatures. But we can
   work locally to find solutions that work for both vendors and customers. We
   need to enlist the participation of independent companies that are
   accustomed to real competition in real markets, and are not just inhabitants
   of what Bob Frankston calls "The Regulatorium".

   In the long run, that's the only way.
     _________________________________________________________________

   Links:

   Congress [2]shaping telecom law in private.

   Susan Crawford on Stevens' [3]telecom bill.

   Susan Crawford on [4]Comparative Broadband Ideas.

   Larry Lessig's [5]Free Culture speech.

   Tim Berners-Lee on [6]Net Neutrality.

   David Weinberger's [7]Why Net Neutrality Matters.

   Glenn Reynolds' [8]Instapundit blog.

   Glenn Reynolds' [9]An Army of Davids.

   Bob Frankston on [10]buggy whips.

   Bob Frankston's [11]Telecom is Just a Phase We're Going Through.

   Saving the Net: [12]How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the
   Tubes.

   Imagining the [13]Maximum Net

   [14]Net Neutrality vs. Net Neutering

   [15]MoveOn petition

   [16]CNN story

   [17]Utopia

   [18]Lafayette Pro Fiber

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References

   1. http://www.epmoreinfo.com/spikesourceq2proseventreg/?utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=nlsuitwatch/
   2. http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200605/msg00059.html
   3. http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/5/2/1928428.html
   4. http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/5/7/1938922.html
   5. http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/
   6. http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4
   7. http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/why_net_neutrality_matters.html
   8. http://instapundit.com/
   9. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595550542/102-3940455-8901710?n=283155
  10. http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=22390869
  11. http://www.frankston.com/Public/Default.aspx?zz=xcs&Script_name=/default.aspx&name=TelecomPhrase
  12. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8673
  13. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8929
  14. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8910
  15. http://www.civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet/index.html
  16. http://news.com.com/Democrats+lose+House+vote+on+Net+neutrality/2100-1028_3-6065465.html
  17. http://www.utopianet.org/
  18. http://lafayetteprofiber.com/
  19. http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf
  20. http://conf.phpquebec.com/en/
  21. http://www.usenix.org/usenix06/lin
  22. http://www.ssc.com/mailing-lists