CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said today that broadband providers need to “provide transparency” about the speeds, service and prices that they are offering to consumers.
Martin, speaking after Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., headlined the FCC’s monthly meeting here today at Harvard Law School, said the FCC’s four principles on Net Neutrality — promulgated in 2005 — will not permit broadband providers to block applications from lawful Internet services.
Speaking at a hearing on the “network management” practices of broadband carriers, Martin said the agency’s neutrality principles were all subject to “reasonable network management.”
Continue reading →
I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a forthcoming paper on the network neutrality debate. Amanda was kind enough to review an early draft, and raised an issue I hadn’t thought of. I had proceeded on the assumption that network neutrality and the end-to-end principle were more or less synonymous. Certainly, I recognize that non-technical activists don’t always conceptualize it in those terms, but I thought that it was widely agreed that that’s more or less what the term refers to. Amanda disagrees, arguing that by treating the terms as synonymous, I’m unilaterally changing the terms of the debate.
The best example we were able to come up with of a policy that does not violate the end-to-end principle but is widely perceived as a network neutrality violation is Verizon’s broken DNS server, which Ed Felten, at least, regards as a network neutrality violation. At the time, I disagreed, arguing that because users had the option to use another DNS server if they preferred, the obnoxious behavior of Verizon’s DNS server isn’t a network neutrality issue.
What do y’all think? Is network neutrality synonymous with the end-to-end principle? Can you think of other examples of network neutrality violations that are not end-to-end violations? And if they’re not synonymous, how would you define network neutrality?
It’s on the tip of nearly everyone’s tounge: America needs a National Broadband Strategy. With Capital Letters. Now. Or at least by January 20, 2009.
Seriously, it is amazing how much consensus there seems to have developed on this simple point. From the Bell carriers to Googlers, from public interest groups to local legislators, from Democratic activists critical of anything and everything done by the Bush administration to rural Republicans who finally want the Universal Service Fund to cover high-speed Internet services: they all want a National Broadband Strategy.
The only remaining question is: What sort of Broadband Strategy? The debate will begin at the 2008 Politics Online Conference.
Continue reading →
The long-awaited network neutrality bill of Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) was unveiled this week. H.R. 5353 establishes a new broadband policy and requires the Federal Communications Commission to conduct an Internet Freedom Assessment, with public summits and a report to Congress.
This is one of the issues we discuss in our most recent podcast, TPW 36: The Markey bill, the politics of MS-Yahoo, and taxes on video games.
Broadband Policy
According to the bill, it would be the policy of the U.S. to:
- maintain the freedom to use for lawful purposes broadband telecommunications networks, including the Internet …
- ensure that the Internet remains a vital force in the United States economy …
- preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of broadband networks …
- safeguard the open marketplace of ideas on the Internet by adopting and enforcing baseline protections to guard against unreasonable discriminatory favoritism for, or degradation of, content by network operators …
I wanted to make sure that everyone saw the filings that Richard Bennett and George Ou made this week to the FCC in the proceedings regarding broadband network management policies. They are excellent. [Richard and George have both been guests on the TLF podcast and discussed these issues here and here in detail.] I thought I’d clip a few of the highlights here, but make sure to read them all the way through.
Here’s some of what Richard had to say:
The four prongs of the Policy Statement do not include a “right to be free of delay” or a “right to
infinite bandwidth”, and in the real world someones ox must be gored when the load offered to a
network segment exceeds its capacity. Hence, the petition for declaratory ruling must be
rejected.
[…]
So this is the choice that Comcast has on its network of today: should it allow a handful of
BitTorrent users to degrade the performance of VoIP and web users to the point of distraction, or
should it limit the bandwidth that BitTorrent users can consume? This is not a hard choice to
make, and the only interesting implications it has concern methods employed and obligations for
disclosure owing to the customer.
[…]
If ISPs have the freedom to experiment with different methods and business models, and
consumers have reasonably broad choices, the market will sort this matter out. Hence the policy
priority should be the promotion of market-based competition between Fiber, DOCSIS, DSL, and
wireless.
[…]
It’s worthwhile to point out that Internet2 schools practice traffic shaping and policing on their
campus networks, for the same reasons that public carriers such as Comcast do: it’s not
economically feasible to build networks around the excessive bandwidth appetites of a few users.
[…]
There are alternative methods and policies that may be employed by ISPs to address problems of network congestion and overload; the market should decide among these, not the government.
Continue reading →
My Progress & Freedom Foundation colleagues Ken Ferree, president of PFF, and Bret Swanson, a senior fellow with PFF, have filed comments today at the FCC in the heated proceeding about broadband network management policies. [Note: For more background, listen to our recent TLF podcast on the issue.] In their filing, Ken and Bret argue that:
Traffic shaping or channeling by broadband Internet access providers should be no more controversial than the examples provided above. Broadband access is not an unlimited resource. To the contrary, video and other rich media applications are profoundly changing the nature and volume of Internet traffic, straining network capacity. Video applications require between 100 and 1,000 times more bandwidth than static applications involving text, voice, or simple graphics. As video and graphics move to high-definition, many observers believe that web content and applications will grow in data-density by yet an additional factor of 10. Internet and IP traffic in the U.S. could grow more than 50-fold by 2015. The challenge facing providers of broadband access is how to maintain high-speed service for the vast majority of consumers while demands on the network mount.
[…]
Far from some nefarious plot to undermine the communications of their own subscribers, broadband access providers using traffic management tools to maintain the highest level of service for the greatest number of users simply are mirroring the commercially reasonable conduct of service providers everywhere, in nearly every field.
They go on to detail the technical reasons why various types of network management activities are necessary and beneficial:
Continue reading →
Today, the BroadbandCensus.com has added a collection of the 1,527 carriers that the Federal Communications Commission says are providing broadband in the United States. If you don’t see your carrier when you Take the Broadband Census, please use the e-mail link to tell us who is missing!
I’ve been really heartened by the incredible response from so many people to this still-new Web site. We realize that our database is limited by broadband carriers’ reluctance, thus far, to provide the BroadbandCensus.com with information about where they offer services. With your help, the Broadband Census can go around them and get individual users, and others, to provide the information necessary to understand the true state of broadband availability, competition, speeds and prices.
Continue reading →
Threats can work wonders. A few months ago I tried to bargain Charter into giving me a better deal on my cable service. They jerked me around and successfully made the process unpleasant enough that I decided it wasn’t worth the bother. Recently, I got an offer from AT&T for $15/month Internet access. I don’t really want their slow, “Your World Delivered to the NSA” Internet access, but it gave me a good excuse to call Charter and tell them I wanted to cancel my service. Boy did that work wonders. No longer did I have to go through some ridiculous Internet sign-up process to get a cheaper deal. They knocked $20 off of my bill right on the phone.
So if you’re not getting a “special” price from your cable provider, call and tell them you want to cancel; tell them your phone company is offering you a lower price. Most likely they’ll offer you a discount to keep you as a customer. And if they don’t, you can always call back the next day and tell them you changed your mind.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.