PeerFlow

Amnesty Foes 2.0: SenatorObama-PleaseVoteAgainstFISA

I've been waiting for this to hit the bigtime, and it has, it's been slashdotted:

ya really notes a blog posting up at Wired reporting that foes of the Telecom Amnesty Bill have mounted a campaign on Barack Obama's own website. Though the group was created only days ago, on June 25, it has grown to be the fifth largest among 7,000 such groups, just short of Women for Obama. Although it is widely known that Obama changed his stance from opposing telecom immunity to supporting it, many have not given up hope of getting him to switch once again.

Telecom Amnesty Foes On the Move, Posted by kdawson, slashdot, on Tuesday July 01, @08:02AM from the one-week-and-counting dept.

And today the group has more than 9,000 members and is #2 among all MyBO groups.

It's everywhere else, too, Time, WSJ, Wired, Huffington Post, TPM, DailyKos, MyDD, OpenLeft, digg, reddit, and of course facebook. Read all about it on the wiki.

(Yes, I'm a member of the group, since about the second day, and here's what I think about the issue.)

This group is a goldmine of information about which telecoms gave what money to whom.

The most significant part to me is that people are using a candidate's own organizing tools to attempt to organize the candidate. Not stopping there, either, attempting to organize allies for the candidate. Obama claims to be people-powered. Let him say that while other politicians follow money from lobbyists, he listens to the people who give him money, who are the people, and when they said think again he did, and discovered the bogus House FISA "compromise" bill is no such thing, and now he's against it. We'll see.

-jsq

Online Everyone: The Internet for Everyone, a new public/private coalition

Google's Vint Cerf, ZIPcar's Robin Chase, FCC's Adelstein: Internet for Everyone, a public/private coalition for getting everyone online:

It's Google's involvement in the deal that makes the new coalition something to keep an eye on. The company has expanded its Washington DC lobbying group significantly in the past few years.

"When you have a public interest community up against a massive industrial sector like the cable and telco companies, you're going to likely fail because of the corrupted political system where money buys influence," said Silver. "However, if you can align the public interest with major industrial sectors that also have an increasing influence in Washington, then you have something formidable, then you actually can beat the cable and phone cartel, and this is going to how its going to play out."

— Net Neutrality Advocates Call For Fast, Universal Access To The Net, By Sarah Lai Stirland, Wired, June 24, 2008,

Access, choice, openness, innovation: yes, those are the points (plus speed), without being weighed down by the albatross of the clunky "net neutrality" malnym.

-jsq

PS: Free Press: if you're going to put a video up front, pick a fluent public speaker such as Robin Chase or Jonathan Zittrain to show first, eh? "Collective hallucination," yes!

Not for Sale: Canadian Internet

Net neutrality has become a political issue in Canada, where a small and very polite rally occurred in Ottawa the other day.

p2pnet news | Freedom:- Today is the day Canadians are gathering in Ottawa to tell the federal government what they think about Net Neutrality and bandwidth throttling.

Bell Canada was suffering under the delusion it could choke down accounts paid for by some of its customers, wrongly claiming they’re responsible for bandwidth congestion.

— Canadians rally for Net Neutrality, P2Pnet news, 27 May 2008

-jsq

Postal Hikes and Time Warner's Role Discovered by New York Review of Magazines

The New York Review of Magazines catches up with Time Warner and the postal rate hikes it lobbied for and got. First, the bottom line:

...the true price of letting corporations shape government policy: free speech.

— Going Postal, Callie Enlow, New York Review of Magazines, 2008

The NYRB gets into some of the underlying political machinations:

Even Time Warner was taken aback. Halstein Stralberg, co-creator of Time’s rate proposal, said, “There was a new chairman at the commission and there was a totally new environment, and they adopted it, to my surprise.”

The NYRM noted the sudden parachuting in of a new chairman just before the decision as unusual:

In the corporate world, The Progressive Populist would most likely be forced out of business. But should the same rules apply when the product is ideas and the conduit is a government-owned monopoly? To the current administration, the answer is yes, said Cullen. The president appoints the five commissioners that compose the Postal Regulatory Commission. Between the 2005 Time Warner complaint, when the PRC rejected the corporation’s proposed rate restructuring, and the 2006 rate hearings, when the PRC adopted the suggestions almost verbatim, two new commissioners joined the PRC. One of them, Dan G. Blair, replaced George Omas as chairman just one month before the end of the rate cases, a move that Bob Cohen described as “pretty unusual.”

However, the NYRM didn't follow up on the other chairman, the chairman of the Postal Board of Governors from January 2005 to January 2008, James C. Miller III, and his 27-year-old theory:

"...none should be favored and none benefited. Each party pays the cost of service it consumes, not less, and does not bear the cost of others’ consumption."

Curious how someone with that philosophy should be chairman just at the time the decision was made.

The NYRM does say what happened, why it was unusual, and who it affected:

Fair Trade: Fixing Antitrust for the Internet

So suppose for the moment that net neutrality is an antitrust issue. Does this bill fix antitrust law enough to deal with it?

Federal lawmakers have introduced yet another network neutrality bill, but this time with a focus on fair trade issues.

This week, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced legislation that addresses the issue by labeling it an antitrust matter. Conyers' H.R. 5994 would ban discriminatory network management practices by amending the Clayton Act.

The bill, labeled the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act, would require carriers to promote competition and allow people to use any device they want to on the carriers' networks. The bill makes exceptions for emergencies, criminal investigations, parental controls, marketing, and improvements to quality of service.

Under the Detroit Democrat's proposed legislation, ISPs could give preference to certain types of data, but they must give the preference regardless of the data source. It would ban ISPs from discriminating based on content, applications, or services.

— Lawmakers Eye Net Neutrality As Anti-Trust Issue, The Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act would require carriers to promot e competition and allow people to use any device they want to on the carriers' networks. By K.C. Jones, InformationWeek, May 9, 2008 05:42 PM

And does this fix the problems Google and Ebay complain about?

Meanwhile, a cosponsor sums it up:

U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., has co-sponsored the legislation.

"Recent events have shown that net neutrality is more than a hypothetical concern. We need a meaningful remedy to prevent those who control the infrastructure of the Internet from controlling the content on the Internet," Lofgren said. "This legislation will help guarantee that the innovative spirit of the Internet is not trampled."

-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.

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.

Arbitrary and Capricious: FCC (says Fox)

The FCC seems to have no friends these days:

Fox Television said it won't pay its part of a $91,000 indecency fine levied recently by the Federal Communications Commission for a 2003 episode of a reality TV show that featured strippers and whipped cream.

Fox said in a statement that it won't pay the fine imposed against five of its stations because it believes the FCC's decision that the show in question was indecent was "arbitrary and capricious, inconsistent with precedent, and patently unconstitutional." The network said it will appeal the FCC's decision and proposed fine on behalf of 13 stations....

— Fox TV Refuses to Pay Indecency Fine by FCC, By Amy Schatz, Wall Street Journal, 24 March 2008

Fox lifted the wording from a 2007 court ruling, apparently about a different show. Oh, right: that one.

Maybe if the FCC would get back to actually dealing impartially with real matters of public policy, it might garner public and Congressional support.

-jsq

Jettisoned: 8 Centuries of Common Carriage Law

Someone at CAIDA (presumably kc Claffy by the writing style), went to

an invitation-only intensely interactive workshop on the topic of Internet infrastructure economics. participants included economists, network engineers, infrastructure providers, network service providers, regulatory experts, investment analysts, application designers, academic researchers/professors, entrepreneurs/inventors, biologists, oceanographers. almost everyone in more than one category.

— internet infrastructure economics: top ten things i have learned so far, by webmaster, according to the best available data, October 7th, 2007

and wrote up a report including this summary of the political situation:

...and it turns out that in the last 5 years the United States — home of the creativity, inspiration and enlightened government forces (across several different agencies) that gave rise to the Internet in the first place — has thoroughly jettisoned 8 centuries of common carriage law that we critically relied on to guide public policy in equitably provisioning this kind of good in society, including jurisprudence and experience in determining ‘unreasonable discrimination’.

and our justification for this abandonment of eight centuries of common law is that our “government” — and it turns out most of our underinformed population (see (1) above) — believes that market forces will create an open network on their own. which is a particularly suspicious prediction given how the Internet got to where it is today:in the 1960s the US government funded people like vint cerf and steve crocker to build an open network architected around the ‘end to end principle’, the primary intended use of which was CPU and file sharing among government funded researchers. [yes, the U.S. government fully intended to design, build, and maintain a peer-to-peer file-sharing network!]

That's right folks: "resource sharing" was the buzzword back then, and every node was supposed to be potentially a peer to every other.

Internet Freedom Policy Act

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS) have introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, which will amend Title I of the Communications Act of 1934 to say Internet freedom, commerce, innovation, participation, and speech are the policy of the United States. It's interesting what this bill does not say. It doesn't specify any regulations, so that those who oppose net neutrality don't have a leg to stand on when they say net neutrality is all about regulation. It doesn't say "net neutrality": it says "freedom", "marketplace", "innovation", and other positive benefits. (I think I'll take a cue from Commissioner Copps and start referring to Internet freedom.) It doesn't say "consumers" except a few times, including once where that word is immediately qualified by

(i) access, use, send, receive, or offer lawful content, applications, or services over broadband networks, including the Internet;

Let's see, if "consumers" can send their own content, applications, and service, they're not really consumers in the traditional sense, now are they?

This is all very nice, in that Markey and Pickering apparently get it about what Internet freedom is about. However, why does this bill have no teeth, unlike Markey's bill of last year or the Snowe-Durgan bill before that?

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:

Verizon Does Something Right: No Hollywood Policing

Verizon talks sense:

We see substantial increases in the volume of traffic. Generally we see that as a good thing. We have more customers paying for more services we provide.

—Tom Tauke, executive vice president for public affairs, Verizon, quoted in Verizon Rejects Hollywood’s Call to Aid Piracy Fight, By Saul Hansell, Bits, New York Times, February 5, 2008, 3:56 pm

He's specifically responding to requests from Hollywood to police copyright. Tauke lists at least three good reasons not to:

1. Slippery slope. What else? Pornography? Gambling?
2. Liability. Especially for a deep-pockets company like Verizon.
3. Privacy:

   Anything we do has to balance the need of copyright protection with the desire of customers for privacy.

A telco concerned with its customers' privacy? I'd call that a good thing!

There is, nonetheless, a downside.

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:

Forensic FCC Oversight

Preventive Congressional oversight had no effect on the FCC. We'll see if forensic oversight does any better:

Bipartisan leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation of the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday, three weeks after the agency's controversial vote to ease media ownership restrictions.

In a letter sent to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, the committee asked that all electronic records and personal e-mails related to FCC work be saved.

The committee has "initiated a formal investigation into FCC regulatory procedures to determine if they are being conducted in a fair, open, efficient, and transparent manner," said the letter written by Chairman John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, and ranking Republican Joe Barton of Texas.

"This investigation will also address a growing number of allegations received by the committee relating to management practices that may adversely affect the agency's operation," the letter said.

— House panel launches probe of FCC practices, Reuters, Tue Jan 8, 2008 4:15pm EST

Maybe Congress will slap the FCC with another stern letter. I'm sure Kevin Martin is quaking in his boots.

-jsq

Moderate? Comcast Stifling Isn't

Promising unlimited access, not delivering, and refusing to admit it is managing a network for the good of the many above the activities of the few? Pete Abel thinks so:

Earlier this month, Comcast — the nation’s largest cable broadband company — was caught doing what any good Internet Service Provider (ISP) should do, i.e., manage its network to ensure that the online activities of the few don’t interfere with the online activities of the many,

Fair vs. Foul in Net Neutrality Debate, By Pete Abel, The Moderate Voice, 24 November 2007

The problem with Comcast stifling BitTorrent by faking reset packets from a participant is not that Comcast is trying to manage its network: it's that Comcast used a technique that if it came from anyone other than an ISP would be considered malicious denial of service, that Comcast still hasn't admitted doing it, and that Comcast bypassed numerous other methods of legitimate network management, such as those used by PlusNet. Comcast could even use the Australian model and sell access plans that state usage limits and throttle or charge or both for usage above those limits. What Comcast is doing it seems to me is much closer to the false advertising of unlimited access that got Verizon slapped down for wrongful account termination.

The biggest problem with what Comcast (and Cox, and AT&T, and Verizon) are doing is that their typical customer has at most one or two choices, which in practice means that if your local cable company and your local telephone company choose to stifle, throttle, block, or terminate, you have no recourse, because there's nowhere to go. Competition would fix that.

Abel tries to back up his peculiar interpretation of network management with revisionist history:

Normative net neutrality: Milton Mueller on free association and free trade

Free as in free speech, free association, and free trade: Milton Mueller drafts an Internet governance paper using net neutrality as its central principle.

... as a normative guide to policy, network neutrality transcends domestic politics. The network neutrality debate addresses the right of Internet users to access content, services and applications on the Internet without interference from network operators or overbearing governments. It also encompasses the right of network operators to be reasonably free of liability for transmitting content and applications deemed illegal or undesirable by third parties. Those aspects of net neutrality are relevant in a growing number of countries and situations, as both public and private actors attempt to subject the Internet to more control. Because Internet connectivity does not conform to national borders, net neutrality is really a globally applicable principle that can guide Internet governance.

— Net Neutrality as Global Principle for Internet Governance, Milton Mueller, Internet Governance Forum, 5 November, 2007

Basically, instead of getting mired in discussions of bandwidth or technical methods of stifling, throttling, or censorship, let's get back to deriving net neutrality from general political and economic principles, which turns out to make net neutrality a convenient lens by which to view those principles and to apply them to the Internet.

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:

Christian Coalition Joins Naral Against Telco Censorship

Verizon's blocking of NARAL has led to some strange bedfellows:

Today, the presidents of NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Christian Coalition co-authored a Washington Post op-ed calling on Congress to address the censorship policies of phone companies like Verizon and AT&T. Last month, Verizon arbitrarily banned text messages from NARAL, deeming the lawful political speech too "controversial and unsavory" to send.

"We are on opposite sides of almost every issue," wrote NARAL President Nancy Keenan and Christian Coalition President Roberta Combs. "But when it comes to the fundamental right of citizens to participate in the political process, we're united -- and very worried. Whatever your political views -- conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, pro-choice or pro-life -- it shouldn't be up to Verizon to determine whether you receive the information you requested."

— Groups Fight Cell Censorship, Unstrung, 17 October 2007

Most of the U.S. political spectrum seems to be against censorship by telcos and cablecos. The next question is whether this opposition will have any effect, or will the telcos get the FCC to lay off anyway, or will telco and cableco political contributions and lobbying convince Congress to turn a blind eye.

-jsq

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.

Revive OTA?

Just last week I was talking to somebody who used to work for the Office for Technology Assessment, which was a bipartisan Congressional research group that brought in various outside experts to help out. She recognized me from various times I showed up.

Serendipitously, Susan Crawford says "OTA: You Are Missed".

Nearly a decade ago, Congress closed its Office of Technology Assessment. The president of the Federation of American Scientists, a former OTA employee, called the closing the “equivalent of a self-inflicted lobotomy.” Between 1974 and 1995 OTA produced 750 thorough reports about a wealth of scientific and technical studies.

Since then, the Congressional Research Service (thanks, CDT!) has been providing Congress with quick summaries of issues, but CRS doesn't have the deep technical expertise that OTA did, or the resources to do sustained studies. The National Academies have the time and the resources, but they take too long and they have too many constituents to serve.

In re-writing the Telecom Act and jumping into having the FCC regulate the internet, it would be good to have a neutral, expert, bipartisan group advising Congress about the consequences of their actions.

For example, such a group might have told Congress that current antitrust law isn't well positioned to deal with problems of lack of competition since broadband was wrenched from one legal regime into another.

-jsq

When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission.

One sentence sums it up:

When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission.

&mdash: Net Neutrality: This is serious by timbl (Tim Berners-Lee), DiG, Wed, 2006-06-21 16:35

That's Internet freedom. That's why we need net neutrality.

What is net neutrality?

If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.

Where you and I are any pair of participants on the Internet.

Twaddle v. a Wonder of the World

It's good to see a newspaper not mince words:

A free-for-all web (after normal monthly broadband charges have been paid) is one of the wonders of the world and a binding force for all communities.

...

The Federal Communications Commission has just been advised by the US department of justice, under heavy lobbying from the operators who stand to gain from higher data charges, that a neutral net might "prevent, rather than promote" investment and innovation. This is twaddle. An open-access net has produced one of the greatest surges of innovation ever recorded and has given an opportunity for people all over the world to communicate with each other and share knowledge on equal terms. Long may it continue to be so.

— In praise of... a freely available internet, Leader, The Guardian, Tuesday September 11, 2007

The Guardian brings up a related point:

It has only become an issue because the US Congress is scrutinising the question of "net neutrality", though why the US authorities - rather than an international body - should deem themselves to have jurisdiction over the internet is not clear.

The usual answer to that is that a properly constituted international body would do even worse. Although nowadays, it seems the otherwise unlateralist U.S. government is toeing the (pseudo-)capitalist international party line.

-jsq

Intended vs. Legal

Shortly after a high level U.S. official acknowledged that telephone companies have helped the government in illegal spying, this comes out:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration wants the power to grant legal immunity to telecommunications companies that are slapped with privacy suits for cooperating with the White House's controversial warrantless eavesdropping program.

The authority would effectively shut down dozens of lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies accused of helping set up the program.

The vaguely worded proposal would shield any person who allegedly provided information, infrastructure or "any other form of assistance" to the intelligence agencies after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. It covers any classified communications activity intended to protect the country from terrorism.

— Bush Seeks Legal Immunity for Telecoms, By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer, August 31, 2007 - 5:02 p.m. EDT

Let's let President Nixon sum it up:

Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

— Richard M. Nixon interviewed by David Frost, 19 May 1977.

Yet the same administration can't be proactive about effective regulation of first-mile Internet access for effective competition.

-jsq

The Amazon Channel

It's all very well to talk about net neutrality or Internet freedom and how it affects 700Mhz spectrum sales or freedom of the press. But what does all this have to do with the average Internet user?

Suppose the telcos and cablecos get everything they want.

To buy a BBQ grill on eBay, you'll have to pay for the eBay channel. This is above whatever you pay the seller for the grill or eBay for your membership. You'll have to pay your local Internet access company just to let you get to eBay to participate in the auction. Oh, maybe you'll be able to get there anyway, but your access may be so slow that you'll pay for the eBay channel out of frustration.

If you want to buy a book from Amazon, you'll have to pay for the Amazon channel. For search you'll need the Yahoo channel or the ask.com channel or the google channel. Assuming your favorite search engine is even offered as a channel. Many smaller services probably won't be.

Maybe it won't be quite this bad.

Broadband Speed by Country

Letting a picture tell the story of how Japan, Korea, France, Poland, Portugal, and other countries have faster broadband than the U.S., here's a graphical illustration of average broadband speeds per country. Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland I would expect, since they've long been fast. But Poland?

There seem to be two tiers. Japan and Korea are the top tier. Then Finland, Sweden, and France. Then a third tier starting with the Netherlands. The U.S. is either in that third tier or in a fourth tier, depending on how you look at it.

The source report, Assessing Broadband in America: OECD and ITIF Broadband Rankings, By Daniel K. Correa, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, April 2007, also examines broadband uptake, in which the U.S. is also fifteenth in these OECD rankings.

Maybe it's time for a change. A change in public policy and the addition of competition.

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Warp Speed From Behind

As we've mentioned before Japan has Internet connections much faster than those in the U.S. This point is getting more mainstream media play:

Broadband service here is eight to 30 times as fast as in the United States -- and considerably cheaper. Japan has the world's fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else, recent studies show.

Accelerating broadband speed in this country -- as well as in South Korea and much of Europe -- is pushing open doors to Internet innovation that are likely to remain closed for years to come in much of the United States.

The speed advantage allows the Japanese to watch broadcast-quality, full-screen television over the Internet, an experience that mocks the grainy, wallet-size images Americans endure.

— Japan's Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future, By Blaine Harden, Washington Post Foreign Service, Wednesday, August 29, 2007; Page A01

So is it just for video? If so, maybe we'd better let the telcos have their way.