by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer, Progress Snapshot 5.11 (PDF)
Ten years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman lamented the “Business Community’s Suicidal Impulse:” the persistent propensity to persecute one’s competitors through regulation or the threat thereof. Friedman asked: “Is it really in the self-interest of Silicon Valley to set the government on Microsoft?” After yesterday’s FCC vote’s to open a formal “Net Neutrality” rule-making, we must ask whether the high-tech industry—or consumers—will benefit from inviting government regulation of the Internet under the mantra of “neutrality.”
The hatred directed at Microsoft in the 1990s has more recently been focused on the industry that has brought broadband to Americans’ homes (Internet Service Providers) and the company that has done more than any other to make the web useful (Google). Both have been attacked for exercising supposed “gatekeeper” control over the Internet in one fashion or another. They are now turning their guns on each other—the first strikes in what threatens to become an all-out, thermonuclear war in the tech industry over increasingly broad neutrality mandates. Unless we find a way to achieve “Digital Détente,” the consequences of this increasing regulatory brinkmanship will be “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) for industry and consumers.
New Fronts in the Neutrality Wars
The FCC’s proposed rules would apply to all broadband providers, including wireless, but not to Google or many other players operating in other layers of the Net who favor such broadband-specific rules. With this rulemaking looming, AT&T came after Google with letters to the FCC in late September and then another last week accusing the company of violating neutrality principles in their business practices and arguing that any neutrality rules that apply to ISPs should apply equally to Google’s panoply of popular services. In particular, AT&T accused Google of “search engine bias,” suggesting that only government-enforced neutrality mandates could protect consumers from Google’s supposed “monopolist” control.
The promise made yesterday by the FCC—to only apply neutrality principles to the infrastructure layer of the Net—is hollow and will ultimately prove unenforceable. Continue reading →
Precursor LLC released a study that claims to have calculated Google’s total bandwidth use declaring “Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for.”
The study is an attempt to foil Google’s pursuit of Net Neutrality as a federal policy by claiming that Google is already a kind of free-rider and its policy goals will only allow it to mooch more.
The study estimates the total bandwidth “used” by Google in a circuitous way. It calculates the bandwidth Google-originating data uses while traveling around the web, adds that to bandwidth used by search bots sending data back to Google, then assigns a dollar value to that bandwidth, and then compares that to an estimate of Google’s total outlays for bandwidth (a number which had to estimated as Google does not disclose this number).
The result: Google doesn’t pay for all the bandwidth used by data flowing in and out of its servers.
But this is true for any site on the web!
Continue reading →
Tim Lee’s long anticipated Cato Institute Policy Analysis has been released today.
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation is a must-read for people on both sides of the debate over network neutrality regulation.
What I like best about this paper is how Tim avoids joining one “team” or another. He evenly gives each side its due – each side is right about some things, after all – and calls out the specific instances where he thinks each is wrong.
Tim makes the case for treating the “end-to-end principle” as an important part of the Internet’s fundamental design. Tim disagrees with the people who argue for a network with “smarter” innards and believes that neutrality advocates seek the best engineering for the network. But they are wrong to believe that the network is fragile or susceptible to control. The Internet’s end-to-end architecture is durable, despite examples where it is not an absolute.
Tim has history lessons for those who believe that regulatory control of network management will have salutary effects. Time and time again, regulatory agencies have fallen into service of the industries they regulate.
“In 1970,” Tim tells us, “a report released by a Ralph Nader group described the [Interstate Commerce Commission] as ‘primarily a forum at which transportation interests divide up the national transportation market.'” Such is the likely fate of the Internet were management of it given to regulators at the FCC and their lobbyist friends at Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and so on.
This paper has something for everyone, and will be a reference work as the network neutrality discussion continues. Highly recommended: The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation.
The Progress & Freedom Foundation has just launched the new Center for Internet Freedom. CIF offers an alternative to the proliferation of advocacy groups calling for government intervention online by offering timely analyses and critiques of proposals that diminish the vital role of free markets, free speech and property rights. We aim to drive the Internet policy debate in new directions by emphasizing a layered approach of technological innovation, user education, user self-help, industry self-regulation, and the enforcement of existing laws consistent with the First Amendment. Such an approach is a less restrictive—and generally more effective—alternative to increased regulation.
Here are some of the issues I’ll be working on as CIF’s Director in conjunction with my esteemed colleagues Adam Thierer, Adam Marcus, and adjunct fellows:
- Defending online advertising as the lifeblood of online content & services, especially in the “Long Tail”;
- Emphasizing market solutions to problems of privacy protection, especially regarding the use of cookies and packet inspection data;
- Protecting online speech and expression both in the U.S. and abroad;
- Defending Section 230 immunity for Internet intermediaries;
- Opposing online taxation and legal barriers to e-commerce and digital payments, especially at the state and local levels; and
- Ensuring that Internet governance remains transparent and accountable without hampering the evolution of the Internet.
“Buzz Out Loud,” one of my favorite podcasts, disappoints me from time to time, specifically when the good folks at CNET decide to bash broadband companies and call them “jerks” and “evil.”
So goes Episode 809 of Buzz Out Loud. Molly Wood, Jason Howell, and guest host Don Reisinger declare AT&T’s decision to throttle U-Verse (as reported by Ars-Technica) to be just another dumb thing that stupid broadband companies do.
One of their reasons for saying so is that AT&T’s U-Verse is fiber, but that’s not true. U-Verse uses fiber to feed VRADs, or Video Ready Access Devices, that take that fiber and feed its signal out over legacy copper wires, in a sort of DSL adapted-to-video hybrid.
When you get the facts wrong, your analysis is bound to be bad.
Continue reading →
None other than Sci-Fi author, civil libertarian, blogger, activist, and TLF commenter Cory Doctorow drops in at the Bureaucrash Podcrash (that’s a podcast for “crashers”) to discuss his new book Little Brother.
Austin Grossman’s review of the book for the New York Times remarks:
An entertaining thriller and a thoughtful polemic on Internet-era civil rights, “Little Brother” is also a practical handbook of digital self-defense. Marcus’s guided tour through RFID cloners, cryptography and Bayesian math is one of the book’s principal delights. He spreads his message through a secure network engineered out of Xbox gaming consoles, to a tech-savvy youth underground (we are now post-nerd, I learned — hipsters and social networking experts have replaced the unwashed coders of yore).
We at TLF may disagree with Mr. Doctorow on a number of policy issues, but I must admit that he’s a talented writer. I bought Cory’s
Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, a collection of short stories, at Capital Books here in DC and read it cover to cover by the end of that weekend. A great read available free in digital form at Cory’s Craphound.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.