Pro Net Competition: Other Voices
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Net Neutrality Redux: No Legislation Needed
March 28, 2008 - link >>Anders Bylund, the Motley Fool
The concept of network neutrality—making sure that the Internet we’ve come to know and love doesn’t break down in a balkanized mess of restricted access policies—generates strong feelings on both sides of the debate. You may already have noticed my bias in favor of the status quo, for example.
That’s why it’s such a shock to see two traditional enemies in this debate take a break from lobbying Washington to agree on a technical solution to the problem of squeezing near-unlimited traffic into limited bandwidth. They’re almost acting like grown-ups—a spirit we could definitely use more of. Who’da thunk it?
Not So Free Press
March 28, 2008 - link >>The Foundry, Heritage Foundation
In their Business section front page puff piece on Free Press policy director Ben Scott, the Washington Post does reports that FP’s “critics” often note that FP “is not as boot-strapped as it may appear, with donors such as billionaire George Soros and singer Barbra Streisand.” WaPo then goes on to breathlessly report that:
Free Press has more than $5 million in funding, in part from major foundations such as the Soros Open Society Institute. Its annual lobbying budget is $250,000, compared with the $13.8 million spent by Verizon Communications, $17.1 million by AT&T and $8.9 million by Comcast last year.
The implication being that FP’s small $250,000 lobbying budget is dwarfed by the millions spent by Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast. The truth, however, is a little more complicated. Besides the fact that the Verizons of the world have many other issues on their Washington office plates other than net neutrality, WaPo conveniently forgot to mention that net neutrality has plenty of its own corporate deep pocket supporters as well.
Google, Ebay, Yahoo, Sony, and Microsoft all spend millions on lobbyists too and they all support net neutrality. Free Press is not nearly as out gunned as the Washington Post would have us believe.
Net Neutrality Could Harm Competition, Ex-FCC Chief Economist Says
March 20, 2008 - link >>Greg Piper, Communications Daily
Formal net neutrality rules could stifle business deals that could change how the Internet is used, a former FCC chief economist told Wednesday’s Internet Video Policy Symposium. Google’s search engine and Apple’s iPhone in particular owe their ascendancy—and pressure on rivals to improve products and services—to regulators’ hands-off approach, said Tom Hazlett, director of the Information Economy Project at George Mason University. Panelists agreed that providers’ network management practices should be transparent, not kept secret, as Comcast did with its BitTorrent traffic-shaping policies.
Adding bandwidth can cure congestion but “bandwidth isn’t free, so there has to be some incentive to deploy,” said Simon Wilkie, another former FCC economist and now head of the Center for Communications Law and Policy at the University of Southern California. Arnie Berman, Cowen and Co. chief technology strategist, dove into the oft-invoked highway metaphor. Neutrality advocates talk about toll roads costing users more, Berman said, but a toll-free data highway would have to be a ridiculous 30 lanes across to accommodate buses—that is, heavy video traffic—which are three lanes wide. It’s expensive to lay more fiber to increase bandwidth, but with market-based pricing networks can use bandwidth more efficiently, so the government should avoid “ambitious micromanagement,” Hazlett said.
Networks should be barred from “foreclosure” of services with which a network has no agreement, Wilkie said, but before its regulates that way the FCC should “wait and see,” he said. By the foreclosure standard a provider could de- prioritize video traffic in general if it wasn’t “playing favorites” with some applications, Berman said. Wilkie said he could “live with” Comcast creating a theoretical competitor to YouTube and slowing that site’s streaming, “as long as it’s disclosed.” Proponents of regulation should have to show how their rules would help consumers, Hazlett said: “These markets have evolved in large measure without regulation of interconnection.”
Markets derive “tremendous efficiencies”—and consumer benefits—from discrimination, Hazlett said.
It got “the break of its corporate life” when, for a fee debated bitterly by Google management, AOL agreed to make it the default search engine in AOL’s old browsing client, Hazlett said. AT&T “gave away the store” to be the carrier with an exclusive on the iPhone, reversing the pattern of carrier dominance over phone design, he said. Verizon responded with a “kick-ass” phone that seems to mirror the iPhone’s design, but its walled-garden approach hasn’t done well against the iPhone’s open-browsing platform, Berman said. Ironically, Apple, the prime example of a closed platform, is a “hero” for spurring mobile Web browsing, Hazlett said.
The fixed-line telephony market has seen extensive competition because cable companies were allowed to dedicate a channel for “digital voice,” keeping companies like Vonage from getting such jitter-free service, Hazlett said. Japan’s DoCoMo basically created the market for wireless Internet with its popular i-mode service, a walled-garden approach Japanese rivals now are copying, Hazlett said. When a listener told Hazlett that Internet video startup Joost’s recent hiring of a Cisco executive was “somewhat incestuous,” he replied that Washington in general is incestuous, adding that such business deals bring “enormous dynamism.”
FTC Chief Economist Patrick Degraba sees no “empirical” consensus that the Internet access market is anticompetitive or will be without intervention, meaning it would be premature to engage in antitrust intervention, he said. Some lobbyists tell the FTC that wireless broadband to the home by new entrants is “just around the corner,” others are skeptical, and still others see sufficient competitive pressure between cable and telcos in each market, he said. If the old AT&T had gone into cahoots with American Airlines to keep people from using other phone companies to book flights, that would be an easy antitrust matter, Degraba said. Nothing like that exists in the Internet world, he said.
Network-management practice disclosure could resemble SEC corporate disclosure statements, a format every public company knows, Berman said. Wilkie proposed a “simple menu” by which networks could tell consumers in terms of use how they treat their networks: no management, some traffic- shaping using header data in packets, shaping based on type of traffic, or shaping based on identity, such as a formal relationship with an e-mail provider.
Trade Group Goes On Offense In Net Neutrality Debate
March 20, 2008 - link >>Congress Daily
With the FCC and Congress raising fresh concerns about the control that communications companies exert over their high-speed Internet systems, National Cable and Telecommunications Association President Kyle McSlarrow pushed back today. He told reporters that file-sharing services and other bandwidth-hogging sites should inform users that accessing content from such locations can tie up Internet traffic. “Proper disclosure is an obligation not just of [cable and telecom] network providers, but of applications providers as well,” he said. Cable giant Comcast has been accused of blocking customers from sharing video and music files over the BitTorrent site, prompting an FCC investigation. Comcast, which acknowledges that it sometimes slows traffic at peak demand times for network management but insists it does not block access to sites, faced intense criticism at a FCC field hearing in Boston last month. McSlarrow defended Comcast, noting that it has increased disclosure to consumers about its practices. The FCC will hold a follow-up session April 17 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
Reiterating his view that regulation can stall deployment and investment, McSlarrow insisted that robust competition “is the best check anyone could have on our conduct.” House Energy and Commerce Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey, D-Mass., introduced “network neutrality” legislation last month that is designed to bolster FCC guidelines aimed at preventing broadband providers from acting as content gatekeepers. There has been widespread speculation the bill could be ripe for action next year if a Democrat wins the White House.
Is the Net Too Neutral?
March 11, 2008 - link >>Technology Review
Recent FCC hearings pitted network operators and content distributors against each other. But if the two can find a way to collaborate, the Internet will work better for everybody.
By Larry Hardesty
At the end of February, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) held a public hearing at Harvard University, investigating claims that the cable giant Comcast had been stifling traffic sent over its network using the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent. Comcast argued that it acted only during periods of severe network congestion, slowing bandwidth-hogging traffic sent by computers that probably didn’t have anyone sitting at them, anyway. But critics countered that Comcast had violated the Internet’s prevailing principle of “Net neutrality,” the idea that network operators should treat all the data packets that travel over their networks the same way.
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