PeerFlow

AT&T's Striped Bass

You may recall that the FCC at the last minute in 2006, after the elections and before the electees took office, agreed to some conditions on the merger of Bellsouth with AT&T. Among them was a $10/month DSL plan.

The merger commitment specifies that the plan had to be offered. That means to me that it has to be put forth as an option!!! (If there's a fifty pound striped bass somewhere out there in the ocean, that's not an offer of fish!)

So I don't think AT&T is honoring its $10/month commitment.

— Is AT&T Honoring its Merger Commitments? David Isenberg, isen.blog, Friday, July 06, 2007

This is the same $10/month service USA Today announced AT&T was developing back in January. Maybe they'll just keep "developing" it until the 48 month time limit expires, or make it available to a few people and claim they've honored their commitment.This is what SBC used to do: claim availability if one person per ZIP code could get a service, and the FCC let them get away with that.

Isenberg asks:

Do you think the FCC will investigate?

Market Failure?

Here's an interesting directive from the White House:

The order requires federal officials to show that private companies, people or institutions failed to address a problem before agencies can write regulations to tackle it. It also gives political appointees greater authority over how the regulations are written.

— House Balks at Bush Order for New Powers, By Jim Abrams, The Associated Press Tuesday, July 3, 2007; 8:16 PM

How does this work?

Franchise Reform?

In the previous post, I quoted a paper as saying competition would promote lower prices. Here's what the authors recommend to produce that competition:

Federal reform and additional state-specific reforms have focused on reforming "video franchising" laws to reduce barriers to entry and investment by new service providers. We commend such policies as likely to contribute to investment and competition in broadband services.

— The Effects of Broadband Deployment on Output and Employment: A Cross-sectional Analysis of U.S. Data, By Robert Crandall, William Lehr and Robert Litan, Brookings Institution, 2007

Here's what some affected parties think about that:

Two years ago we profiled the rural Massachusetts towns of Shutesbury and Leverett, who have long been trying to get broadband from anyone -- but aren't deemed profitable to serve by Comcast or Verizon. While towns as close as 300 feet get service, these two towns are still waiting, though some have concocted home brew solutions. Locals tell us they were insulted when approached by Verizon to support "franchise reform," which all but seals their fate by eliminating build out requirements.

—Broadband Black Holes: FiOS? We've never been able to get DSL, by Karl, BroadbandReports.com, 10:42AM Thursday Jul 05 2007

It seems "franchise reform" may be one of those newspeak phrases like "tax relief" which is used to persuade those who will suffer to support something that will benefit those who propose it.

It's enough to make you nostalgic for FDR and the REA.

-jsq

Broadband Produces Employment

Many have assumed that broadband is good for the economy; now here's a study with rivets:

More specifically, for every one percentage point increase in broadband penetration in a state, employment is projected to increase by 0.2 to 0.3 percent per year.

— The Effects of Broadband Deployment on Output and Employment: A Cross-sectional Analysis of U.S. Data, By Robert Crandall, William Lehr and Robert Litan, Brookings Institution, 2007

Of course, this is like saying every state in medieval Germany that had a printing press produced employment in the printing industry. There are economic and social effects far beyond mere employment. What should be done?

The paper has a few recommendations:

The surest route to lower prices is provided by increasing competition in the delivery of broadband services.

Broadband in Two Countries

Broadband growth is slowing in the U.S.:

Price reductions and other factors led to 40 percent growth in adoption from March 2005 to March 2006. Over the following year, growth was a more modest 12 percent, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said in a report Tuesday.

"The low-hanging fruit was picked ... so you saw a slowdown understandably going to 2007," said John Horrigan, Pew's associate director for research.

— Study: Broadband Growth Slowing in U.S. By Anick Jesdanun, AP Internet Writer, 3 July 2007

Meanwhile, back in the USSR Russia:

The broadband market in Russia, particularly in Moscow, is growing quickly. The Ministry of IT and Communications reports that the fixed broadband market grew 42% and wireless broadband market showed a 61% annual growth rate in 2006.

— FTTx and DSL in tussle for Moscow market share, PointTopic, 3 July 2007

And in Russia it's mostly fiber to the home, enabling even faster future speeds.

-jsq

FTC: What, Me Worry?

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says there's no need for net neutrality:

FTC Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras said that without evidence of "market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area."

So in a "market" where the average customer has at most two choices, we're supposed to wait for a market failure?

A Googley Way

Google blogs policy:

We're seeking to do public policy advocacy in a Googley way. Yes, we're a multinational corporation that argues for our positions before officials, legislators, and opinion leaders. At the same time, we want our users to be part of the effort, to know what we're saying and why, and to help us refine and improve our policy positions and advocacy strategies. With input and ideas from our users, we'll surely do a better job of fighting for our common interests.

— Taking the Wraps Off Google's Public Policy Blog, by Andrew McLaughlin, Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs, Google, Monday, June 18, 2007 at 7:09 AM

I'm all for participation, so that caught my eye. What are they getting googley about?

Internet Deconstructs Spin?

Joe Trippi thinks the Internet changes politics from spin to something better:

Internet activism is spelling the end for the age of spin, the online campaign guru Joe Trippi will warned two British politicians, suggesting that the rules for dealing with "old media" no longer apply.

...

"Command and control ... [is] a disaster in the peer-to-peer social network world."

— Does the Internet Spell the End of Political Spin? By Tania Branigan, The Guardian. Posted June 15, 2007.

Dave Weinberger suggests more or less the same thing, somewhat less optimistically,

None Should Be Favored

What's the theory behind the recent postal rate changes? The Chairman of the Postal Board of Governors spelled it out 27 years ago:

"...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."

— James C. Miller III and Roger Sherman, “Has the 1970 Act Been Fair to Mailers?” in Roger Sherman, ed., Perspectives on Postal Service Issues 63 (1980).

And the Postal Regulatory Commission is following that theory.

Postal Radio?

What's the point of a free press if it can't be delivered?

To the surprise of many independent publishers, in February the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), the body in charge of determining postal rates, rejected a rate-hike plan that was submitted by the U.S. Postal Service, the people in the business of delivering the mail for the past 215 years. This plan was widely understood to call for an approximate 12 percent increase that would have hit all publications more or less equally.

Instead the PRC adopted a revised version of an extremely complicated proposal submitted by media conglomerate Time Warner that included a number of possible discounts favoring the largest publishers.

— Postal Rates = Free Press, Rate hike pushed by media conglomerate Time Warner threaten small and medium-circulation publications, By Robert W. McChesney, In These Times May 17, 2007

Why Time Warner?

Presidential Spectrum

A presidential candidate sends a letter to the FCC about reallocating 700Mhz spectrum currently used by analog TV:

In recent years, the Internet has grown to touch everything and transform much of what it touches. It's not the answer to everything, but it can powerfully accelerate the best of America. It improves our democracy by making quiet voices loud, improves our economy by making small markets big, and improves opportunity by making unlikely dreams possible.

— Edwards Calls On FCC To Make Internet More Available And Affordable, John Edwards '08, 30 May 2007

The letter goes on to propose sensible concrete actions. So not only is this letter remarkable in that a presidential candidate sent it, but also that what he writes makes sense.

-jsq

PS: Seen on Art Brodsky.

Slow and Expensive U.S.

Speed is trivial, but you'd think we could do better than this:

The average broadband download speed in the US is only 1.9 megabits per second, compared to 61 Mbps in Japan, 45 Mbps in South Korea, 18 Mbps in Sweden, 17 Mpbs in France, and 7 Mbps in Canada, according to the Communication Workers of America.

— US high-speed Internet is slow, Submitted by Canada IFP, Press Esc, on Sun, 2007-05-20

And as we've seen, that list of countries could soon include Hong Kong and India, because they're taking the problem seriously. More interesting was this was said to.

Speed Is Trivial

Sometimes Bob Frankston makes me shake my head in wonder:

Speed is trivial — the dial up modem completely trounced the entire Interactive TV industry thanks to the web which gave people a reason to find their own solutions without waiting for a service provider to deign to provision a path. As long as you don't over-defined the solution you'll get speed — it's hard not to.

— Re: We're Stuck In The Slow Lane Of The Information Trollway -- it's all about the billing relationship, Bob Frankston, Interesting People, Sat, 12 May 2007 20:13:50 -0400

Yes, back in the 1990s, video on demand and interactive TV were the big plans of the cablecos and telcos. They tried it. Users didn't buy it. Instead, participants bought modems and the web boomed.

Content-Delivery Supply-Chain Usefulness

Susan Crawford hits the broadband nail on the head:

What content-delivery supply-chain usefulness is broadband providing?

—For, by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, 9 May 2007

That's the question you get if you're in a corporate strategy meeting trying to decide where this broadband thing fits in with your core competences. That plus they'll be thinking purely in terms of broadband, because that's their product, not the Internet. There's nothing wrong with that, except when there are only a couple of first-mile ISPs deciding the answer for all their users. And the answer in such cases tends to be "video on demand" or "IPTV" or "our search engine". Corporations are designed to maximize their own profits, not to think in terms of a supply chain that delivers participation, innovation, and prosperity for the general welfare.

Industrial Internet Policy

Susan Crawford posted a laundry list of countries that have an industrial policy (she prefers economic policy) involving the Internet:

• South Korea: "the government said where they wanted to go, invested in research and development, [and invested money and made micro loans], and they're now seeing 70% of adults (not just kids) involved in online social networks. Very high speeds, very low cost."
• Hong Kong: "also not embarrassed to talk about economic policy and telecom."
• India: its "government 'proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009.'"
• Japan: Have I mentioned lately that almost every Japanese can get broadband, and usually it's ten times faster than what we can get stateside?

Now the point here isn't whether the specific country government policies are good, bad, etc.

Copa, Pew, and Parents

The 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA) has bounced back and forth between lower courts and the Supreme Court ever since it was passed, until a permanent injunction was ruled by Judge Lowell Reed of the U.S. District Court for Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on 22 March. This case had already been through the Supreme Court, in 2004:

The big split in the most recent Supreme Court COPA decision is between Kennedy and Breyer, with Kennedy saying that there are plenty of choices of relatively-effective (and certainly less-restrictive) filtering tools out there for parents to use, and Breyer essentially saying that parents are helpless so mandated shields of various kinds should be put in place to protect kids. It turns out that, in fact, parents are knowledgeable and are giving advice to their children about what to do online.

— Pew on teenage online social networking practices, by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, Thu 19 Apr 2007 06:43 PM EDT

It turns out because the Pew Internet and American Life Project did a study on Teens, Privacy, & Online Social Networks, in which they asked things like whether teens hold back information from their online profiles and how much their parents know about what they're doing. That, plus what Judge Reed had already determined, which is that there are pretty effective software screening products available that parents can use if they want to.

Yes, even children benefit from open participation through the Internet. Perhaps parents could learn from their children, too.

-jsq

Grad Student Explains Net Neutrality to Elected Official

Rep. Lamar Smith (D-Austin) recently (9 Apr) said he didn't understand net neutrality "I think it would be foolhardy to cement some fixed notion of "neutrality" - whatever that means - into the law." So an Austinite explains it to him:

Net neutrality is the underlying principle of a free and open Internet that all users can access the content or run the applications and devices of their choice. These Internet Service Provider companies, from whom you took at least $10,000 each from Verizon and AT&T just last year, will take away our ability to access information by charging higher prices and essentially squeezing out the "little guy" content providers who can't afford to pay. These companies had nothing to do with inventing the Internet, the World Wide Web or Web browsers. While their infrastructure costs money, they were heavily subsidized for this with our tax dollars, and they already charge for both bandwidth and access. Don't be fooled into thinking that these companies would not continue to provide these services and innovate if they did not have this additional revenue stream, which will only serve to enrich their shockingly high level of profits.

&mdash A lesson for Rep. Smith on net, Angie Yowell, Public affairs graduate student, 9 April 2007, The Firing Line, The Daily Texan, 11 April 2007

The rest of her post is also well worth reading.

Hostile Corporate Takeover of the Internet

Creative Voices sums up recent FTC and FCC actions (or lack thereof) on net neutrality:

With momentum in Congress building to pass Net Neutrality legislation, the FCC and even the Federal Trade Commission quickly swung into action. The FTC, which has been hostile to Net Neutrality since it emerged as a serious concern, held what it described as a "public workshop on 'Broadband Connectivity Competition Policy.'" In giving heavily "favored carriage" to panelists hostile to NN, the FTC unintentionally but compellingly demonstrated why NN is so necessary; to preserve the ability of citizens to access all viewpoints over the Internet, including those of independent and diverse voices, and then make their own choices, rather than have the government or the cable and telco companies choose for them.

The FCC also mobilized, launching an official "inquiry" into Net Neutrality. An FCC "inquiry" is often a no-deadline, never-ending process that results in no action. As Brooks Boliek noted in The Hollywood Reporter, critics contend that the FCC "majority on the five-member panel is stalling because they don't want to do anything to prevent such big network companies as Comcast or Verizon from turning the Internet into their own personal amusement park" That's spot on; this is little more than an attempt to give NN opponents an argument to fend off calls for meaningful Congressional action to preserve the freedom of consumers to choose what websites they can visit on the Internet.

— Net Neutrality Update, Creative Voices' 1Q 2007 Newsletter, April 10, 2007

And as we've already seen, net neutrality opponents are already using the FCC inquiry for that purpose, even though the inquiry isn't complete.

Neutral Net Face

An online chili vendor gets political:

Now, Maricle is worried that the big boys might gain an edge on the virtual highway where he set up shop. That explains why he and five other Internet devotees from Albuquerque sat down with Republican Rep. Heather Wilson in late February to urge her to act on "Net neutrality," legislation that aims to block telephone companies from providing a premium service to Internet customers who pay higher fees.

— The Human Face of Net Neutrality, By: Jeanne Cummings, The Politico, April 9, 2007 05:34 PM EST

Politicians respond to local constituents.

FCC Sees Wireless Broadband Internet as Information Service

The FCC has reclassified wireless broadband Internet access services as information services, just like DSL, BPL, and cable modems:

Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) declared that wireless broadband Internet access service is an information service under the Communications Act (Act). This action places wireless broadband Internet access service on the same regulatory footing as other broadband services, such as cable modem service, wireline broadband (DSL) Internet access service, and Broadband over Power Line (BPL)-enabled Internet access service. It thus ensures that wireless broadband Internet access services are similarly free from unnecessary regulatory burdens. Competition among all of these broadband services will provide consumers with more and better services at lower prices.

&mdash: FCC CLASSIFIES WIRELESS BROADBAND INTERNET ACCESS SERVICE AS AN INFORMATION SERVICE, Chelsea Fallon, FCC, 22 March 2007

Well, there is more competition in wireless Internet access than in cable or telco Internet access, but given the track record of this classification thus far in actually promoting more and better services, I have to remain sceptical. Also notice the word "consumers", not participants.

-jsq

Is It Broke?

I've seldom seen so many conclusions reached by pole vault in one paragraph:

Everybody agrees that there are no actual problems with net neutrality, and as our own Chris Wolf explained last week, it doesn’t make sense to fashion legislative remedies to situations that don’t actually need remedying. If anything, it just shows that the supporters of net neutrality laws are looking for any avenue possible to impose restrictions on ISPs that would benefit the big online content companies. Whether through the Senate, through the FCC, through the state legislatures, it doesn’t really matter. Any opportunity to regulate the Internet is one they want to pursue.

— Ask Questions First, Change Policy Later, Hands Off the Internet, April 3, 2007 at 10:24 am

Everybody? Such confidence to be able to speak for everybody with no exceptions! Situations that don't need remedying? I think the situation before August 2005 needed less remedying; now that the telcos have already gotten the FCC to abrogate net neutrality, the situation does need remedying. Restrictions on ISPs that would benefit the big online content companies? Only in the sense of no new charges for something they're already paying for, and restraints on the ISPs restriction content or speeds. "Any opportunity to regulate the Internet"; oh my. How dastardly those net neutrality proponents must be!