PeerFlow

Positive Externalities: What Yoo Ignores

It turns out Prof. Chris Yoo has been rebutted by legal scholars before:

Our article directly replies to a series of articles published by Professor Christopher Yoo on this topic. Yoo's scholarship has been very influential in shaping one side of the debate. Yoo has mounted a sophisticated economic attack on network neutrality, drawing from economic theories pertaining to congestion, club goods, public goods, vertical integration, industrial organization, and other economic subdisciplines. Yet he draws selectively.

For example, his discussion of congestion and club goods is partial in that he ignores the set of congestible club goods that are most comparable to the Internet - public infrastructure. Yoo focuses on the negative externalities generated by users (i.e., congestion) but barely considers the positive externalities generated by users (he simply assumes that they are best internalized by network owners). Yoo appeals to vertical integration theory to support his trumpeting of 'network diversity' as the clarion call for the Internet, but he myopically focuses on the teaching of the Chicago School of economics and fails to consider adequately the extensive post-Chicago School literature. And so on.

In our article, we explain the critical flaws in Yoo's arguments and present a series of important arguments that he and most other opponents of network neutrality regulation ignore.

— Network Neutrality and the Economics of an Information Superhighway: A Reply to Professor Yoo, BRETT M. FRISCHMANN, Loyola University of Chicago - Law School; Fordham University - School of Law, BARBARA VAN SCHEWICK, Stanford Law School, Jurimetrics, Vol. 47, 2007, Stanford Public Law Working Paper No. 1014691, Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper No. 351

Hm, "positive externalities generated by users" as in participation and ad hoc content creation.

The authors also address David P. Reed's point that competition is not the holy grail of networking:

By focusing only on the market for last-mile broadband networks, Yoo not only neglects the importance of unfettered application-level innovation for realizing economic growth and the role of a nondiscriminatory access regime in fostering the production of a wide range of public and nonmarket goods. His argument also neglects other ways to solve the problem of broadband deployment that would not impede competition and innovation in complementary markets.

-jsq

Critics, it's Time to Stop the Quibbling: Broadband in Other Countries

Ars technica sums it up:

One of the ironies of the current broadband situation in the US is that staunch free marketeers defend the status quo even though the result of their views has been duopoly and high prices. Meanwhile, other countries (including those with a reputation in some quarters for "socialism") have taken aggressive steps to create a robust, competitive, consumer-friendly marketplace with the help of regulation and national investment.

Critics, it's time to stop the quibbling: the data collection practices that show the US dropping year-over-year in all sorts of broadband metrics from uptake to price per megabit might not prove solid enough to trust with your life, but we're out of good reasons to doubt their general meaning.

— Broadband: other countries do it better, but how? By Nate Anderson, ars technica, Published: May 11, 2008 - 07:37PM CT

That post includes a table of papers and reports on per-country broadband rankings with corresponding U.S. rankings, from 11 to 24.

Then it gets to lack of political leadership:

Despite the repeated claims of the current administration that our "broadb and policy" is working, the US act ually has no broadband policy and no aggressive and inspiring goals (t hink "moon shot"). The EDUCAUSE model suggests investing $100 billion (a third comes from the feds, a third from the states, and a third from compan ies) to roll out fiber to every home in the country. Whether the particular pro posal has merit or not, it at least has the great virtue of being an ambitious policy that recognizes the broad economic and social benefits from fast broadba nd. 

Here's hoping that the next president, whoever he (or, possibly, she) is, g ives us something more effective—and inspiring—than this. It's telling that the current administration's official page on the President's tech p olicy hasn't had a new speech or press release added since... 2004.

$100 billion may sound like a lot, but the federal government alone spends that much a year on the unnecessary Iraq war. The U.S. needs better priorities.

-jsq

Sensing History: Yoo Re Cherry

Dave Farber posted a response by Chris Yoo to Barb Cherry's post about myths and historical errors. Here's Chris's reponse in full. To me, it seems that he is conceding that she's right about the history, that antitrust says nothing about ISP competition, and that a few ISPs control most of the Internet in the U.S. But read it for yourself:

From: Christopher S. Yoo [mailto:csyoo@law.upenn.edu]

I don't pretend to be an expert on the history of common carriage regulation. Barbara has spent far more time thinking about this than I have, so I always appreciate hearing her reactions and learn from reading her work. That said, here are a few thoughts.

It is true that common carriage long predates both the Granger Movement and the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. That said, one of the central problems is that the historic justifications for common carriage have not aged very well. Often times the common carriage obligations were regarded as a quid pro quo for a government grant of some economic privilege. Other times they were justified because the industry was "affected with a public interest," a concept that is usually traced to the landmark Supreme Court case Munn v. Illinois (1876). The Supreme Court struggled to imbue that standard with content (along with a number of early treatises trying to make sense of the concept) and would ultimately abandon it as analytically empty in Nebbia v. New York (1934). Legal scholars, such as Thomas Nachbar and James Speta in addition to Barbara, have attempted to recover lessons from this era. I have never spoken to Barbara about this in particular, but both Tom and Jim have noted the difficulty in extracting any useful lessons from the history.

The rest after the jump.

Myths and Historical Errors: Cherry Re Yoo

Dr. Barbara Cherry sent me a response to Dr. Chris Yoo's "novel" opinion of her antitrust theory. Dave Farber posted Barb's comments on his Interesting People list, although without her postscript with the pointer to her articles and book. Farber appended a response from Chris, which I'll post separately.

From: "Cherry, Barbara" <cherryb at indiana.edu>
Date: Fri, 9 May 2008 18:28:04 -0400
Subject: Re: Prof. Yoo responds for Prof. Farber

John,

Christopher Yoo's response unfortunately contains several historical analytical errors that I've repeatedly discussed in my writings. It is unlikely that he actually read my TPRC paper to which you provided a link in our blog, as he would have readily discovered some of them.

Perhaps the fundamental problem is that many economists and legal scholars commenting on the network neutrality debate DO NOT understand the history of common carriage. Under the common law, common carriage obligations were TORT obligations imposed on carriers (in their relationship with customers) simply by virtue of their status of engaging in the business. In other words, the obligations are STATUS-BASED and unrelated to the industry's market structure. Attributing the imposition of common carriage obligations to natural monopoly is a MYTH, unfortunately so often erroneously repeated in the secondary literature that it is believed to be true.

The rest after the jump.

Social Welfare: Reed Asks Yoo

David P. Reed asks a question and Christopher S. Yoo responds on Farber's Interesting People list. I'm posting both in full here, with my thoughts at the end; basically, law isn't a science, and anecdotes can turn into legal cases; some have already regarding net neutrality.

From: David P. Reed [dpreed@reed.com]
Sent: Saturday, May 10, 2008 11:50 AM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] re-distribution of op-ed on Net Neutrality -- a reaction and a reply from one of the authors

I read through the long comment by Chris Yoo below, and as a non-lawyer interested in policy, I ask the following simple question:

Is there a well-regarded (one might ask for scientifically reasoned) argument that antitrust law as currently interpreted and practiced has a substantial impact measured in some currency like $ on social welfare?

Otherwise this entire argument is about nothing more than vaporware proceeding from a faith that competition (however loosely defined) creates social welfare best. AFAIK, this is largely an article of faith, just as the "End of History" was a grand article of faith posited by many of the same people as "truth".

It is just not fair to imply that the core of "today's settled antitrust law" carries even the level of weight as Darwin's Theory of Evolution. There have been no replicable studies of its practice.

Law professors and lawyers who don't challenge its truthiness squarely are merely behaving as dogmatic mandarins always do - asserting authority of professional status, rather than rigor of reasoning, experiment, or argument.

I say this not as FOX News or Hillary Clinton would call an elitist, but as a person who genuinely is unconvinced by magical faith in authorities.

That's Reed's question. Yoo's response, and my thoughts, after the jump.

Novel Point of View: Dr. Chris Yoo's Opinion of Dr. Barbara Cherry's Antitrust Opinion

I previously posted a pointer to Barbara Cherry's examination of antitrust history in response to Dave Farber's posting of an op-ed against net neutrality. Dave responds:

( INDEED I AM NOT A LAWYER AND SO I ASKED PROF. YOO, ON THE FACULTY OF PENN LAW AND ONE OF THE AUTHORS OF THE EDITORIAL, TO REPLY TO THIS NOT -- IN PARTICULAR PROF. CHERRY'S COMMENTS. DAVE FARBER)

— re-distribution of op-ed on Net Neutrality -- a reaction and a reply from one of the authors, David Farber, Interesting People, Fri, 9 May 2008 15:23:10 -0400

Here's Prof. Yoo's response:

From: "Christopher S. Yoo" <csyoo@law.upenn.edu>
Date: May 9, 2008 2:51:40 PM EDT
To: "David Farber" <dave@farber.net>
Cc: "Faulhaber, Gerald" <faulhabe@wharton.upenn.edu>

Dave Farber forwarded me a recent e-mail asking for a lawyer's reaction to Barbara Cherry's recent presentation and paper questioning whether antitrust law can protect against the harms envisioned by network neutrality proponents. As the only lawyer among the co-authors of the op-ed that Dave, Michael Katz, Gerry Faulhaber, and I worked up for the Washington Post, I am happy to offer a few thoughts. (Those interested in a different take on the relationship between network neutrality and antitrust law may want to look here: http://ssrn.com/abstract=992837.)

Barbara's work is based on a theory advanced by Neil Averitt and Robert Lande that would place consumer choice at the center of antitrust policy. As Averitt and Lande explicitly recognize, their theory would represent a fairly significant break (they would call it a paradigm shift) away from current antitrust law, which focuses on maximizing economic (and particularly consumer) welfare.

Interestingly, antitrust law once was quite friendly toward the consumer choice perspective that Barbara favors. (I review these developments in vol. 94 of the Georgetown Law Journal at pages 1885-87, http://ssrn.com/abstract=825669.) Early cases like FTC v. Brown Shoe (1966) and Times-Picayune Publishing v. United States (1953) invalidated exclusive dealing and tying contracts (which are among the types of antitrust practices most similar to network nonneutrality) because they infringed on unfettered consumer choice.

The rest of Dr. Yoo's response after the jump, and my response in a following post.

Anti-Trust Still Not Appropriate for Net Neutrality

I admire Dave Farber; he's done a lot for computing and the Internet. But sometimes I can't agree with him:

Antitrust law generally takes a case-by-case approach under which private parties or public agencies can challenge business practices and the courts require proof of harm to competition before declaring a practice illegal. This is a sound approach that has served our economy well.

— Hold Off On Net Neutrality, By David Farber and Michael Katz, Interesting People, Friday, January 19, 2007; A19,

In an op-ed he's recently reposted on his Interesting People list, he's recommending antitrust instead of legislation to deal with net neutrality. So far as I know, Farber is no lawyer. In this case, I tend to go more by lawyers who have actually studied the problem, for example Prof. Barbara Cherry, who used to work for the FCC and has examined the history of common, statutory and administrative law in the U.S., as well as the way Internet provision has been wrenched out of one legal regime into another by the FCC, and how the FCC has also stripped broadband of its common carriage status. Those who say that we shouldn't regulate because we don't know what will happen and anti-trust will catch problems if they occur are not taking into account that anti-trust doesn't automatically apply to or address problems in the new legal regime into which broadband has been thrust.

-jsq

Back to the Future: 10Mbps by 2012, or, What Japan Had Years Ago

Creeping ahead:

A study from Texas-based research firm Parks Associates predicts that 33 million US households will have broadband connections of 10Mbps or faster by 2012. As of the end of 2007, that figure stood at 5.7 million, which means that a lot of change will have to occur in the US market for that 33 million figure to become a reality.

— Report: 10Mbps broadband in 33 million homes by 2012, By Eric Bangeman, ars technica, Published: March 04, 2008 - 10:20PM CT

Meanwhile, Japan is already doing 100Mbps. But in Japan there is real ISP competition. Unlike in the U.S., where, as shown in the pie chart by Park Associates (via DSL Reports), each of Comcast and AT&T have a fifth of the broadband market, followed by Verizon and Time Warner each with 13%, plus Cox with 7%, and that's 3/4 of the total market served by only five companies, of whom most people have a choice of only two in any given locality. That's not competition.

-jsq

WSJ Fears Innovation: Net Neutrality As Internet Wrecking Ball

Apparently this WSJ opinion writer couldn't actually argue with Ed Markey's net neutrality bill, so he made up a straw man:

Imagine a town that has all sorts of gasoline pipelines running by it but only one gas pump. Rationing is inevitable. So are price controls.

Everyone gets equal amounts, except of course first responders like police and ambulances, which should get all the gas they want. And, well, so should the mayor. And if you can make a good business case that you work 60 miles away, you can file paperwork and perhaps pull some strings for more gas. How about those kids hot-rodding around town who can't drive 55? They get last dibs, and maybe we can sneak in some gas thinner to slow down their engines and not waste gas.

— Internet Wrecking Ball, By Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2008; Page A15

What's especially amusing about this strawman is that it's what the duopoly is planning as they do away with net neutrality, except it's not first responders or governments that will get favored bandwidth: it's Hollywood. Meanwhile, Markey's bill doesn't say any of that. It doesn't include any regulation at all.

Kessler invokes Orwell:

This is the essence of the Ed Markey's (D., Mass.) Orwellian-named Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, which would foist network neutrality on the wild and woolly Internet.

Kessler maybe wasn't around in the earlier days of the Internet, or he would know that net neutrality is what we used to have, until it got chipped away starting in about the year 2000, as the FCC failed to enforce the Unbundled Network Elements (UNE) of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and reclassified cable modem access as an information service in August 2002, wireline broadband in August 2005, and wireless broadband in March 2007. The FCC stripped common carriage status from Internet provision, something never done before in the U.S. So what Markey's bill is actually trying to do is to preserve the freedom the Internet used to have before the present administration and the duopoly systematically tried to do away with it. That's the opposite of Orwellian: that's the plain truth.

If Kessler did know Internet history, or had been around when we were making it, he would know not to write things like this:

Pathetic NTIA Broadband Report: Inflated ZIP Codes and BPL

U.S. Commerce Secretary hails "dramatic growth of broadband" in the U.S., citing a report from National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). That report not only uses the U.S. tinyband definition of 256Kbps as "broadband", it still uses ancient metrics such as this:

By December 2006, 91.5 percent of ZIP codes had three or more competing service providers and more than 50 percent of the nation's ZIP codes had six or more competitors.

— Gutierrez Hails Dramatic U.S. Broadband Growth, Government Technology, Feb 1, 2008, News Report

So any provider that has service available to at least one user in a ZIP code is counted as a "competitor".

Meanwhile, the ARRL says the NTIA report inflates broadband over powerline (BPL) figures:

Shades of NSFNet: EDUCAUSE Proposes 100Mbps Nationwide Broadband

Shades of NSF:

EDUCAUSE, the association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology, today proposed bringing the federal government, state governments, and the private sector together as part of a new approach to making high-speed Internet services available across the country.

The group, whose membership includes information technology officials from more than 2,200 colleges, universities, and other educational organizations, said that a new "universal broadband fund" would be necessary so that "Big Broadband" — services of 100 mbps — could be made widely available.

— EDUCAUSE Proposes New Approach to Broadband Development, Wendy Wigen, Peter B. Deblois, EDUCAUSE, 29 Jan 2008

Back in the 1980s, in the time of standalone dialup Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), the National Science Foundation (NSF) deployed a nationwide backbone network called NSFNet that eventually ran at the blazing fast for the times speed of 1.55Mbps. NSF also promoted development of NSFNet regional networks, many of which eventually figured in the commercialization of Internet that took off in 1991 when former dialup network UUNET started selling Internet connectivity and former personnel of an NSFNet regional formed PSINet and also started selling Internet connectivity.

Nowadays, when the fastest most people can get as so-called broadband is 1-3Mbps DSL from telcos or maybe 3-5Mbps from cablecos, maybe it's time to do it again. Is this a plan that would work?

Settling for Slow: Duopoly or Competition

This is what the duopoly doesn't want:

In France, for example, the regulator forced France Télécom to rent out its lines. One small start-up firm benefited from this opportunity and then installed technology that was much faster than any of its rivals'. It won so many customers that other operators had to follow suit. In Canada, too, the regulator mandated line-sharing, and provinces subsidised trunk lines from which smaller operators could lease capacity to provide service.

— Open up those highways, The Economist print edition, Jan 17th 2008

The duopoly will settle for the U.S. being slow and expensive as long as they get to collect the rents.

Here's how other countries do it:

Time Warner Volume Charging

Transparency via memo leak?

Metered Internet access is a fact of life for many broadband users around the world, but has been largely a nonfactor when it comes to wired broadband in the US. That may change, according to a memo leaked to the Broadband Reports forums. If the memo is to be believed, Time Warner Cable will be rolling out what it calls "Consumption Based Billing" on a trial basis in the Beaumont, Texas area.

Under the proposed scheme, new customers will be able to choose from a couple of different plans with varying bandwidth caps. They'll be given online tools to monitor usage and will be able to upgrade to the next higher tier of service to avoid charges for exceeding their monthly bandwidth limit. If the trial works well, Time Warner would then roll out bandwidth caps to current customers: "We will use the results of the trial to evaluate results for possible future nationwide rollouts," reads the memo.

Bandwidth caps have been a sore subject for some users who have found themselves bumping into mysterious, undefined limits. This past fall, a number of Comcast subscribers complained that their service was cut off after having reached Comcast's bandwidth limit.

— Leaked memo: Time Warner Cable to trial hard bandwidth caps, By Eric Bangeman, ars technica, January 16, 2008 - 04:12PM CT

If the memo is legitimate, it's good that Time Warner is going for more transparency. Although if they want transparency, why don't they just come out and announce what they're doing?

Cute Non-Technologists

The Economist buys into the telco propaganda about the Internet running out of bandwidth and Marc Andreesen thoroughly fisks the article:

Interesting! The only (correct) data you have is that carriers are rapidly upgrading their backbones. Isn't that an indicator that they're expanding the amount of available bandwidth to prevent your scenario from happening?

— When non-technologists write about technology, They're so CUTE! Marc Andreessen, blog.pmaraca.com, 23 Dec 2007

It's well worth reading the rest of it.

-jsq

Duopoly Fear Factor: Metered Access or a Thousand Flowers

EFF mentions "unmetered" once regarding how the duopoly currently says "unlimited" yet stifles BitTorrent or whatever else it thinks is too much.

George Ou flips that one word around: EFF wants to saddle you with metered Internet service. Scary, eh?

You know, I remember real metered pay-per-byte telephone charges, where Ma Bell would charge you a flat rate for the first three minutes and cash in for every minute thereafter, and the European PTTs would also add in exorbitant international fees. That's not what EFF is recommending.

AT&T, Texas Football, and Legislators

AT&T tried to impress Texas legislators by streaming the football game in high definition:

"I'd never seen a football game on a big screen like that. It didn't look very good."

—Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, D-Austin, quoted in UNDER THE DOME Most Austin reps skipped football game - and lobby party, W. Gardner Selby, Austin American-Statesman, Saturday, December 01, 2007

I'm not sure AT&T wanted that kind of reaction to watching a Texas football team in Austin, the capital of the second most populous state. The local cableco in Austin, Time Warner, didn't have the game (Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers), which was on the NFL Network, which has a deal with AT&T. Most legislators didn't even show up to watch. Interesting, considering that legislators and regulators are the real audience of the duopoly.

-jsq

PlusNet: Honest Prioritization

Unlike Comcast and Cox, PlusNet in the U.K. says what it is doing:

The principles of PlusNet's network management policies

• To make sure that time-critical applications like VoIP and gaming are always prioritised
• To protect interactive applications like web-browsing and VPN from non-time sensitive download traffic
• To flex the network under demand to cope with normal peaks and troughs from day to day and month to month
• To flex the network more gracefully than other ISPs in the event of unusual demands in traffic or disaster situations such as a network failure
• To provide a service relative to the amount each customer pays in terms of usage and experience
• Provides a 'quality of service' effect, meaning multiple applications running on the same line interact with each other effectively, and use of high demand protocols like Peer-to-Peer doesn't swamp time-sensitive traffic such as online gaming or a VoIP call.

— Traffic Prioritisation, PlusNet, accessed 26 Nov 2007

Interestingly, this list does not cite video as the most-favored application, instead it lists VoIP and gaming, which are participatory services. However, scan down to their table of types of traffic, and VoIP and gaming are Titanium, while video-on-demand is the highest level, Platinum.

Clogged: Internet Demise Predicted, Again

I predict this prediction will be misused by the duopoly to lobby for more favoratism for the duopoly:

User demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2010, according to a study released today by Nemertes Research. The study found that corporate and consumer Internet usage could surpass the Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, but also worldwide, within the next three to five years.

...

As Internet capabilities continue to expand and users strive to be constantly connected, usage of the Internet via the mobile phone, set-top boxes and gaming devices has exponentially increased thus limiting bandwidth capacity. This is due in large part to voice and bandwidth-intensive applications, including streaming and interactive video, peer-to-peer file transfer and music downloads and file sharing. According to ComScore, nearly 75% of U.S. Internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of online video in one month alone and viewed more than 8.3 billion video streams.

— Internet could clog networks by 2010, study says, By Sarah Reedy, TelephoneOnline, Nov 19, 2007 1:03 PM

If I had a nickle for every time imminent demise of the Internet has been predicted. This has been going on since before the Internet even existed, and the results have been different than in this prediction.

Obama's CTO

U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama says he will appoint a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the government, and he has specific tasks for this person, which go well beyond the current administration's reactive defensive technology policies. For example:

He wants Cabinet officials, government executives and rulemaking agencies to hold meeting that are open to the public and transmitted with a live feed. The CTO’s mandate will be to ensure this happens. Specifically, Obama wants the public to be able to comment on the White House website for five days before legislation is signed.

— Exclusive: Barack Obama to name a "Chief Technology Officer", By Matt Marshall, VentureBeat, 13 November 2007

Well, that would be a bit different from the current FCC, which doesn't even announce hearings on its own web pages.

U.S. Broadband Competitiveness: Let's Study It To Death

Let's study it to death:

The United States is starting to look like a slowpoke on the Internet. Examples abound of countries that have faster and cheaper broadband connections, and more of their population connected to them.

What's less clear is how badly the country that gave birth to the Internet is doing, and whether the government needs to step in and do something about it. The Bush administration has tried to foster broadband adoption with a hands-off approach. If that's seen as a failure by the next administration, the policy may change.

In a move to get a clearer picture of where the U.S. stands, the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday approved legislation that would develop an annual inventory of existing broadband services -- including the types, advertised speeds and actual number of subscribers -- available to households and businesses across the nation.

— U.S. sees some countries overtake it in broadband speeds, but is there a problem? Associated Press, 30 Oct 2007

On the one hand, this sounds like a popular approach to global warming by its deniers: now let's ask some scientists to study it. After all, the Okefenokee and surrounds burned more acres than in living memory, western wildfires have increased fourfold since 1970, 30 million people in half a dozen southwest states may run out of water in the next decade or so, and 12 million people in the Atlanta metro area are less than 3 months from having no water. And hundreds of climate scientists have already turned in their verdict. But, hey, now let's ask some scientists to study it.

On the other hand, this is Ed Markey's committee, and he has seemed serious about doing something, so maybe he's just cojmpiling a case. Sure, he's probably reacting to people like this who are taking the same tack as outlined above:

FiOS: Sort of Fast 20Mbps Symmetric

Verizon is starting to sell sort of fast symmetrical access, that is, 20Mbps in both directions. The price is $64.99/month, which is only about twice what you pay in Japan for more than twice the bandwidth. Also only in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York.

In an apparent reference to the ongoing Comcast stifling or perhaps even to Verizon's own admission of deceptive marketing of "unlimited" wireless telephone access:

Many FTTH providers also cap their symmetrical service, and whether the 20/20 tier would be capped was the first question fired at Verizon on the conference call.

"We don't impose caps upon our subscribers," insisted Susan Retta, Vice President of broadband solutions for Verizon. "We expect customers who order this 20/20 service will want to use it frequently, and we intend to give them the bandwidth that they ordered and they expect."

— Verizon Unveils Symmetrical 20Mbps FiOS, So far only in NY, NJ and CT... by Karl, BroadbandReports.com, 02:34PM Tuesday Oct 23 2007

Well, the bandwidth people expect in Japan is 50 to 100 Mbps, and only 30Mbps and above is considered actually fast, as in ultra-highspeed broadband. Here in the U.S., where the media don't report on other countries much, perhaps expectations are lower.

Interesting admission here:

Qwest Case and National Competitiveness

This case will forever be murky if retroactive telecom immunity for participating in illegal wiretapping passes, yet it has already thrown some light on some of the murkiest areas of government-corporate interaction.

Former Qwest CEO Joseph P. Nacchio, who has been convicted of insider trading for selling stock while Qwest's stock price was tanking, claims he had reason to believe Qwest would get lucrative government contracts, and that Qwest was denied them because he refused to participate in an illegal program. When this happened is very interesting:

The phone company Qwest Communications refused a proposal from the National Security Agency that the company's lawyers considered illegal in February 2001, nearly seven months before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, the former head of the company contends in newly unsealed court filings.

— Former Phone Chief Says Spy Agency Sought Surveillance Help Before 9/11, By Scott Shane, October 14, 2007

So if Nacchio is right, massive wiretapping by the current U.S. administration didn't start as part of the "War on Terror"; it must have started for some other reason.

The best the prosecution has been able to come up with is:

Japanese Broadband Growth: FTTH Pulls Up

Japanese broadband uptake as of March 2007:

14.013 million	aDSL
8.803 million	FTTH
3.609 million	Cable
11 thousand	Wireless

More impressive than raw numbers is the graph, which shows aDSL growing rapidly from 2001 to 2003, after which FTTH suddenly becomes the new growth broadband connection.

As of March 2007, merely 95% of all Japanese households had broadband, and 84% had ultra-highspeed broadband. Japanese government goals for 2010 are 100% and 90%, respectively. Ultra-highspeed seems to be defined as both up and down over 30Mbps.

Until now, FTTH has been the mainstream in terms of ultra-highspeed broadband, with upload and download speeds of over 30Mbps, but other wired and wireless technologies are aiming for technologies that will match if not overtake FTTH, and there will be a need for ongoing developments in broadband technology in terms of higher speed and larger volume to meet user needs.

— Study Group Report: Moving towards Establishing a Usage Environment for Next-Generation Broadband Technology, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), MIC Communications News, Vol. 18, No.13, 12 October 2007

Higher speed services in testing now include speeds faster than 1 Gbps, which would be around 300 times faster than what passes for broadband in the U.S.

FON: Cringely to Spain to Britain to U.S.?

Cringely claims credit for wireless craze:

Several years ago I wrote a column describing a system I had thought up for sharing Internet hotspots that I called WhyFi. Among the readers of that column were some entrepreneurs in Spain who went on to start the hotspot sharing service called FON, which now has more than 190,000 participating hotspots. Those Spaniards have been quite generous in attributing some of their inspiration to my column. And now this week FON signed a deal with British Telecom that promises to bring tens of thousands more FON hotspots to the UK and beyond. This isn't FON's first deal with a big broadband ISP -- they already have contracts with Speakeasy and Time Warner Cable in the U.S. among others -- but it is one of the biggest and points to an important transformation taking place in the way people communicate.

— You Can't Get There From Here: The myth of bandwidth scarcity and can Team Cringely really make it to the Moon? By Robert X. Cringely, Pulpit, PBS, October 5, 2007

Much like really fast broadband in Japan, FON is an American idea that people in another country adopted and ran with.

Os Invasores: Brazilian Malware Education Videos

At the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) meeting in Pittsburgh, one common theme was that people still fall for scams like phishing, and have little comprehension of the various forms of malware that phishing uses.

The Brazilian Computer Emergency Reponse Team, CERT.br, has one possible solution: animated videos from antispam.br. So far they've got a pair. Navegar e Preciso explains how the Internet works, and goes as far as firewalls. Os Invasores explains viruses, trojan horses, worms, bots, and spyware (keylogger and screenlogger). Both videos are in Portuguese, but it's pretty easy to follow what's going on. Spanish translations are already in progress, and other languages will probably follow.

A virus looks like a little purple crab with yellow eyese and welding torch. A worm has google eyes and a long cable-connector tail. A bot looks a bit like a worm, but with shady Doonesbury eyes, a mechanical-looking tail, and in the foreground in hand with a toy remote control. I wonder how long before somebody makes mass market toys out of these characters?

Unfortunately, I couldn't watch these videos in Pittsburgh, because the hotel Internet "high speed" connection was so slow. Ironic, isn't it? The most innovative approach to user education I've seen lately comes from Brazil, and back in the U.S. of A. there's difficulty finding fast enough bandwidth to watch it. At the moment I'm elsewhere on a cable connection, which works, although the larger version of Os Invasores (22.4Mb) takes several minutes to get here.

-jsq

Faster Speeds Enable More Applications, Competencies, and Participation

The figure shows new applications becoming possible as speeds increase, starting with electronic mail at the lowest speeds, through VoIP, also at a pretty low speed, and on up through multi-player games, video on demand, virtual reality, and telepresence. A few big ones seem to be missing, such as file transfer and the world wide web, but maybe those were available at too low speeds to mention. This point of speed enabling new applications is important, but even more so is what people do with those applications.

As Sharon Strover says, perhaps we should frame the discussion more in terms of competencies, rather than speeds. Or, as IIA says:

Business use of video conferencing is expected to increase as rising fuel prices, business continuity planning for possible avian flu pandemic or terrorist attack, environmental concerns and the provision of greater work/life balance for employees, begin to build pressure for workforce decentralisation. The Australian Telework Advisory Committee in its final report also recognised the productivity benefits that teleworking can deliver to business.11 These factors will see businesses require more broadband capacity and performance.

Overall, we anticipate that users will demand a mix of simultaneous or near simultaneous services to be accessible. As a guide, we would expect access services to be able to support concurrent uses of some or all of the following VoIP, gaming, multichannel streaming and video on demand (including HDTV quality), music, legitimate P2P file sharing, and browsing. The figure below illustrates the individual bandwidth requirements for a range of services.

— 2010 National Broadband Targets: Maintaining Australia's Competitiveness, p. 10-11, Internet Industry Association, 31 July 2006

Notice that many of these applications are participatory, and more intensely vivid methods of participations such as telepresence become available at higher speeds. However, electronic mail (one-to-one communication), mailing lists (one-to-many) and USENET newsgroups (many-to-many) were participatory at speeds most users would sniff at these days. Yet it takes higher speeds to do graphically-oriented multi-user roleplaying games such as World of Warcraft. Such games have hordes of paying users, especially in countries such as Korea with high access speeds. Participation breeds revenue, which fuels speed. Business and recreation aren't the only uses of participation.

Net Neutrality Won't be Fixed by Anti-Trust: B. Cherry

At TPRC Sunday, Barbara Cherry walked through the evolution of bodies of law in the U.S., and made some fascinating observations, including:

• Net neutrality is a manifestation of moving from a Title II industry-specific business legal regime under the Communications Act of 1934 to a Title II-based regime and greater reliance on a general business regime of antitrust and consumer protection laws, as the FCC did in August 2005 for wireline broadband access service to the Internet and in 2002 for cable modem access service.
• Simply mMoving among traditional and deregulatory legal regimes for transportation carriers does did not strip common carriage status; it merely changesd the legal overlay that enforcesd it.
• FCC stripping broadband of common carriage was a radical departure: nothing classified as common carrier has ever been declassified before.
• Anti-trust doesn't automatically cover problems from previously addressed in the Title II industry-specific regime when a business is moved to the Title II general business regime. Anti-trust needs modification to do this.
• Liability is also different between regimes. Without tariffs some legal protections for limited liability constraints are gone, and common carriers are now potentially fully liable for damages. The final filed rate doctrine should have no applicability to a detariffed world.

The above is, I think, a reasonably close paraphrase of some of her points.

I infer from this that the economists and politicians and telco and cableco executives who say that we shouldn't regulate because we don't know what will happen and anti-trust will catch problems if they occur are not taking into account that anti-trust doesn't automatically apply to or address problems in the new legal regime into which broadband has been thrust.

In other words, people see things in the context of what they know, and economists don't usually know about legal evolution.

Telco and cableco executives, on the other hand, may well have business and political reasons for claiming there's no need for regulation, whether or not they know that existing anti-trust law is inadequate. doesn't apply.

You can't have markets without some form of property rights of contract law. There is also basic legal infrastructure you need for communication infrastructure.

I see little or no understanding of these points in FCC, FTC, or Congress.

Prof. Cherry's whole paper is well worth reading: Consumer Sovereignty: Redrawing the Boundaries Between Industry-Specific and General Business Legal Regimes for Telecommunications and Broadband Access Services, by Barbara A. Cherry, TPRC, 30 Sep 2007

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PS: Markup for increased accuracy kindly supplied by Prof. Cherry.

Benton, Universal Service, TPRC, Social Contract

Many good papers on aspects of universal service at the Benton Universal Service Project:

As Congress and the FCC put universal service reform at the top of its telecom policy agenda, the Benton Foundation is supporting a series of papers advancing a new vision for Universal Service -- for making broadband as universal as telephone service is today and a pathway for retaking the lead as a broadband leader. This project outlines the policy rationale, the pathway forward, and the 12 key steps for advancing universal broadband and modernizing the universal service program for the information age.

Many of the authors of the papers are on a panel this afternoon at TPRC, including topicssuch as

The social contract implicit in telephony universal service versus the social contract implicit in broadband universal service.

Hm, maybe Verizon could learn from that one?

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