Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
For those you who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) listen to our recent podcast on the Comcast kerfuffle, the Heritage Foundation has now released an edited transcript of the discussion. You can find it here.
With the shrill factor getting louder each day in this controversy, Richard Bennett and Ed Felton — as well as our TLF regulars — provide what I think is a good, fairly nuanced, discussion of the controversy.
Worth a read.
A few days ago, Lauren Weinstein announced the formation of an organization called “Network Neutrality Squad,” an “open-membership, open-source effort, enlisting the Internet’s users to help keep the Internet’s operations fair and unhindered from unreasonable restrictions.”
This, I assume, is a part of his proposal to create an infrastructure for collecting and processing metrics associated with network neutrality, which I find to be a generally good idea. ISPs should be held to their Terms of Service and their Terms of Service should conform to customer expectations, including expectations with regard to neutrality (or non-neutrality), along with all the other dimensions of Internet access service that matter.
Needless to say, the founders of this group (at least the ones I know and what I know of them) probably favor government regulation of broadband service in the name of ‘net neutrality. An early correspondent reveals what I view to be an upside down view of the world, writing:
[B]ecause ISPs are not currently subject to common carriage rules they can pretty much do anything they want as long as they conform to their published terms of service which are usually written to allow just about anything the ISP cares to do.The solution to the problem is matching Terms of Service to consumer expectations. That’s what Terms of Service are for; they’re a contract reflecting the agreement between the company and the consumer. Common carriage regulation would be a mistake.
Consumers can and do push back against ToS they don’t like. This was done again recently when one dimension of AT&T’s ToS was found to be ridiculous. The Internet is a communications medium, and the community of users is well-equipped to name, shame, and punish violators of consumer interests and demands.
Whatever the ideology of the project, I suspect that any legitimate deviation from consumer expectations it turns up will be corrected by market processes long before regulation ever could. If the project unwittingly helps market processes conform Internet service provision to consumer demands, all the better.
Must reading from George Ou of ZDNet on the Comcast kerfuffle. (He benefits from a detailed exchange with Richard Bennett, as we also did when Richard was kind enough to join us for a TLF podcast on the issue two weeks ago). George goes into great detail about what is going on here and why it’s so important that people understand a bit about technology and network engineering before rushing to impose regulation making routine traffic management illegal. Ultimately, George concludes:
BitTorrent is by far the largest consumer of bandwidth and a single BitTorrent user is capable of generating hundreds of times more network load than conventional applications. Throttling the number of BitTorrent connections or any application that has similarly aggressive characteristics is critical to keeping the network healthy with reasonable round-trip response times. That means a better gaming and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) experience since they are both highly sensitive to network latency despite the fact that they are low-bandwidth. If the Net Neutrality extremists get their way and get the Government to ban active network management, cable broadband customers will suffer and those web hog TV commercials might just come true.
Bruce Owen, one of the finest communications and media economists of our generation, has written a powerful piece for Cato’s Regulation magazine asking, “After the long fight to end the ‘common carrier,’ why are we trying to resurrect it?” He’s referring, of course, to the ongoing efforts by some to impose Net neutrality regulation on broadband networks. In his new article, “Antecedents to Net Neutrality,” Owen points out that we’ve been down this path before, and with troubling results:
[T]he architects of the concept of net neutrality have invented nothing new. They have simply resurrected the traditional but uncommonly naïve “common carrier” solution to the threats they fear. By choosing new words to describe a solution already well understood by another name, the economic interests supporting net neutrality may mislead themselves and others into repeating a policy error much more likely to harm consumers than to promote competition and innovation. Net neutrality policies could only be implemented through detailed price regulation, an approach that has generally failed, in the past, to improve consumer welfare relative to what might have been expected under an unregulated monopoly. Worse, regulatory agencies often settle into a well-established pattern of subservience to politically influential economic interests. Consumers, would-be entrants, and innovators are not likely to be among those influential groups. History thus counsels against adoption of most versions of net neutrality, at least in the absence of refractory monopoly power and strong evidence of anticompetitive behavior — extreme cases justifying dangerous, long-shot remedies.
The brilliant Fake Steve Jobs has a great post on Google’s announcement of its new Open Handset Alliance. You should go read it right now because it’s all priceless, but I love this particular bit about openness:
Finally, has anyone else noticed the way Google is kind of desperately grasping at straws lately? They spend years trying to do something other than search and nothing works. Then, despite their big brains and IQ tests, they get totally blindsided by Facebook and have to gin up this ridiculous OpenSocial thing. Just like with this phone thing, they round up all the losers in that social networking space to form some dumbass alliance. You know how it looks? It looks weak. Companies don’t form alliances and consortia when they’re winning. Also, whenever you see companies start talking about being “open,” it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.
I love that Kevin Martin put out a press release (PDF because the FCC has apparently never heard of HTML) praising the Open Handset Alliance. So we’ll see press releases from now on each time a communications company announces vaporware?
Comcast’s terms of service and other consumer broadband service documents make no mention of any restrictions on the use of “peer-to-peer” applications like BitTorrent, or of any Internet network management.
AT&T and Time Warner Cable, two of the other big broadband providers, do mention restrictions on “peer-to-peer” services in their consumer broadband documents. Verizon Communications does not mention the phrase, according to an analysis of the four broadband providers conducted by DrewClark.com.
Unlike Time Warner Cable, Comcast fails to mention any “management,” “network management” or “reasonable network management” of its consumer broadband service in its documents.
Of the four providers, however, Comcast makes the most extensive warning to consumers against the “excess” use of bandwidth. For example, Comcast declares that the consumer “shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or degrade any other user’s use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an overly large burden on the network.”
In the heat of the Comcast Kerfuffle last week, Steve R. made some comments that I thought were important. In response to my “Market Meme” post, for example, he said:
Regulatory intervention is the outgrowth of companies doing underhanded and unethical behavior on a consistent and long term basis. So if we don’t want regulation why are there no calls for these companies to act ethically to begin with?????andSince there are no posts suggesting that these companies act ethically, the implicit assumption is that it is OK for companies to “steal” from customers until caught. Once caught, to quickly apologize (as a demonstration of how the free market works to regulate itself) and to then initiate a new hidden scheme to defraud the consumer until caught again, and again, and again, and again.
Consumer vigilance it a vital ingredient to a free market, but so is ethical and open corporate behavior. If you don’t want regulation, behave responsibly.
[I]f the posters on TLF want a free market, without regulation, they must demand that corporations act ethically.These are fair comments that deserve some consideration. Where’s the call for ethical business practices in the TLFosphere?!
Here’s my thinking:
Forget blogs and podcasts. The Free State Foundation and the Institute for Policy Innovation are hosting a good old-fashioned teraspace policy conference this Tuesday, October 30 in Washington D.C. Titled the “Federal Unbundling Commission?” (you can do the acronym on your own), the theme of the half-day event is the FCC’s penchant for unbundling communications services — from broadband to telephony to television. With Sen. Jim DeMint, Rep. Marsha Blackburn and FCC Commissioner Deborah Tate on the agenda, it promises to be an interesting and informative morning. (I’m also on the agenda, but try not to let that deter you.)
Hope to see you there. Click here to RSVP.
One question that has been repeatedly raised in regards the the Comcast-BitTorrent affair is why wasn’t Comcast more open about what it was doing? Comcast’s response — supported by Richard Bennett in our recent podcast — is that more transparency would make it too easy to bypass the system. They say this is a cat-and-mouse game with bandwidth hogs (to mix zoological metaphors), and announcing what techniques are being used would simply give away the game.
That got me thinking. Since the Associated Press broke the story last week, the proverbial feline is pretty clearly out of the bag. Is word spreading on a bypass? A quick search on Google, with the phrase “how to bypass Comcast” indicates the answer is a resounding “yes,” with no less than 34,700 results. I’m not a technical expert, so I can’t say the bypasses work (and I freely admit I didn’t read all 34,700), but that’s still a lot of mice.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean Comcast was right to keep its practices so hush-hush. Even if Comcast wasn’t under legal duties to reveal more, more transparency would certainly have precluded much of this week’s consumer outrage. Still, if the Google results are any gauge, the cat-and-mouse game does seem very real.
I want to comment on Adam Thierer’s recent paper, “Unplugging Plug-and-Play Regulation,” which makes several excellent points. Adam briefly summarized his thesis (i.e., there is no need for government “assist” in private standard-setting) here a couple days ago and generated a couple comments.
The cable industry and consumer electronics manufacturers are touting competing standards initiatives. The pros and cons of each approach, from a technology perspective, are somewhat bewildering to a non-engineer like myself. But there appears to be one clear difference that matters a lot. Adam points out that under the initiative sponsored by the consumer electronics industry,
the FCC would be empowered to play a more active role in establishing interoperability standards for cable platforms in the future. [It’s] a detailed regulatory blueprint that specifies the technical requirements, testing procedures, and licensing policies for next-generation digital cable devices and applications.
Why would ongoing assistance be required from the FCC, which mainly consists of lawyers?
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
