Articles by Adam Thierer 
Senior Fellow in Technology & Innovation at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC. Formerly a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, President of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Director of Telecommunications Studies at the Cato Institute, and a Fellow in Economic Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
Well I apologize if I’m starting to sound like a broken record by asking this question yet again, but what would be wrong with metered pricing for broadband pipes? I have asked that question several times before, most recently in my post earlier this week on wi-fi piggybacking. I pose it again today in light of another article about a handful of customers apparently having their broadband connection cut-off because of excessive downloading.
According to a front-page article in today’s
Washington Post entitled “Shutting Down Big Downloaders“:
As Internet service providers try to keep up with the demand for increasingly sophisticated online entertainment such as high-definition movies, streaming TV shows and interactive games, such caps could become more common, some analysts said. It’s unclear how many customers have lost Internet service because of overuse. So far, only Comcast customers have reported being affected. Comcast said only a small fraction of its customers use enough bandwidth to warrant pulling the plug on their service.
Continue reading →
The Times of London recently reported that a London man had been arrested “on suspicion of illegally logging on to a wireless (Wi-Fi) broadband connection.”
Two officers saw the 39-year-old man sitting on a garden wall outside a home in Chiswick, West London. When questioned he admitted using the homeowner’s unsecured broadband connection from his position on the wall. He was arrested and the case was passed to the Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit. He was bailed to return in October and faces a fine or a jail term of six months, or both.
Detective Constable Mark Roberts gave warning that anyone caught illegally “hitching” or “piggy-backing” on to another’s wireless broadband connection could face arrest. “This arrest should act as a warning to anyone who thinks it is acceptable to illegally use other people’s broadband connections,” he said. “To do so potentially breaches the Computer Misuse Act and the Communications Act, so computer users need to be aware that this is unlawful and police will investigate any violation we become aware of.”
[The
Wall Street Journal’s excellent business technology blogger Ben Worthen wrote about the case here and there are some really excellent comments following that story that you should check out.]
Our own Tim Lee has written about this issue here before in an essay entitled “In Defense of Piggybacking.” In that piece, which he later turned into a New York Times editorial, Tim argued that:
“…there’s absolutely nothing wrong with connecting to an unprotected network. True, it’s rude to saturate someone else’s pipe with massive downloads. But for casual Internet use—web browsing, email, or instant messaging—the bandwidth used is trivial. While it might seem weird or creepy to people not very familiar with the practice, once they become more familiar with it, I think people will realize how harmless it is.”
While I don’t believe anyone should be arrested for wireless piggybacking, I’m not sure I agree entirely with Tim’s view of things either since there may be some real harms that come to both users and service providers from uninhibited piggybacking / wireless squatting. Let me explain.
Continue reading →
I’ve spent a great deal of time this year writing about the market for parental control tools. (Archives here). Eventually, all that writing gets plowed into my book, “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods.” And that book, which I update online regularly, just keeps growing longer and longer thanks to announcements like the one AT&T made today.
AT&T announced an expansion of its excellent “Smart Limits” parental controls service that will provide parents with state of the art monitoring tools. Beyond restricting access to inappropriate content, AT&T’s new service lets parents set customized limits for each child according to age. Parents can also manage how and when kids use their phones, including limitations on the overall minutes used for messaging and downloads. They can even restrict who the child can contact with their phones.
The innovative new set of tools costs $4.99 per month. All the details about AT&T’s new service can be found here.
This is great news for parents who have been wary about getting their kids mobile phones, especially younger children. With tools like these, parents can feel confident that their kids are both safe and in touch at all times.
Continue reading →
My former PFF colleague Randy May points out that the FCC just got around to deregulating the rules governing the provision of long distance service by Bell operating companies (BOCs). The FCC’s new order concludes that:
“The old framework included requirements that the BOCs separate their local telephone and long distance operations, which is at odds with a market environment where local and long distance services increasingly are marketed and provided on a bundled basis. The new
framework replaces those more burdensome regulations with less intrusive measures that protect important customer interests while allowing the BOCs and their independent incumbent LEC affiliates to respond to marketplace demands efficiently and effectively.”
This all should have happened a decade ago. The rules were just as intrusive and unnecessary back then as they are today. Apparently, however, it takes a market almost completely disappearing before the FCC will deregulate it. But hey, better late than never, I guess.
We’ve talked about muni wi-fi problems here before. (Here, here, here, and here). Here’s another one to add to the list. The Chicago Tribune reports today that:
Chicago is curtailing its digital dreams, deciding to back away from municipal Wi-Fi service after failing to reach agreement with either of two companies that sought to build a wireless Internet network in the city. The move comes as municipal broadband wireless projects around the country face difficulties, and EarthLink Inc., a major player in the field, is re-evaluating its future in municipal Wi-Fi.
And here’s the key line from the piece:
[T]echnology is advancing and the cost of online access for consumers is declining so dramatically that Chicago has other avenues to promote more use of the Internet. As a result, the Wi-Fi deal lost luster when negotiations bogged down, according to sources close to the matter.
In other words, markets are working.
I thought I’d continue the conversation Tim started a few days ago about utility trenching and libertarian property rights theory by starting a new post since this issue is quite interesting to me and I’d like to keep the conversation going.
In response to Tim’s essay I argued that: “Property rights are flexible at the margins… They have to be to ensure a well-functioning society,” and that… “Similar flexibility is necessary to ensure that various types of networks get built (sewage lines, sidewalks, gas and power lines, and even communications systems).” Thus, we allow occasional trenching in people’s yards to ensure that that happens.
In response, Tim says:
I’m having trouble seeing a principled difference between that and the “open access” regimes we libertarians criticized in the 1990s. The only difference I can see is that the open access regulations of the 1990s infringed on the property rights of the ILECs rather than the property rights of millions of homeowners. It’s not clear to me why one would be less objectionable than the other.
My response: There is a world of difference between a utility (or a city) digging up one’s yard, sidewalk, or street corner every once and awhile and the open access regimes of the 1990s and the present, which demand the full-time surrender / confiscation of private property to achieve the hubristic goals of economic central planners. The former (trenching) is a short-term inconvenience with significant long-term benefit. That latter (forced access regulation) gives rise to a massive regulatory regime that requires ongoing policy interventions and price controls. Forced access destroys the incentives to innovate and invest in new networks or network expansion. Trenching–and the momentary inconvenience is causes–does not. It
allows for network expansion. Forced access regulation discourages it.
When we were both at Cato, Wayne Crews and I wrote an entire book about these issues entitled “What’s Yours Is Mine: Open Access and the Rise of Infrastructure Socialism.” We go into these issues in greater detail in that book.
Why is the the Wall Street Journal my favorite paper in the world? Because right there in the middle of page A1 today is a story about the expanding market for Beer Pong equipment and contests! This is important stuff people! And just take a look at the sophisticated graphic they had one of their artists put together to explain the rules of Beer Pong. And there’s a video on the site also that was shot at a recent official Beer Pong tournament. Made me sentimental about my days at Indiana University in the late 80s where I was part of endless Beer Pong tourneys. And to think that now there’s an entire industry being build around this “sport!” God Bless America.
[Source: Wall Street Journal]
In July, I mentioned the interesting comparison chart that Verizon’s Link Hoewing put together comparing contracts, competition, coverage, prices, new services, and more in both the U.S. and European cellular markets.
If you’re interested in this subject, there’s a new report out by the American Consumer Institute entitled “Comparison of Structure, Conduct and Performance: U.S. versus Europe’s Wireless Markets.” The report finds that:
- The U.S. wireless market offers more choice and is less concentrated than any Western country’s wireless market;
- U.S. consumers use an average of 800 wireless minutes per month, while most European consumers use less that 200 minutes per month;
- U.S. wireless prices are the lowest in the world, with the exception of Hong Kong; and
- The combination of higher usage at lower prices presents compelling evidence that the overall consumer welfare derived from wireless service is higher in the U.S. than internationally.
“In summary, a comparison of international statistics suggests that the U.S. wireless market, in fact, leads its European counterparts, and the U.S. wireless market, compared to Europe, appears to be more competitive and vibrant. The contention that concentration leads to higher prices, lower usage and decreasing consumer welfare does not appear to be a U.S. problem, and furthermore, the contention that the U.S. lags the European market and needs some regulatory remedy is without empirical merit.”
Read the whole thing here.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.