Part of the interesting piece is the history of "common carriage": "The idea that certain businesses are so essential that they must not discriminate between customers is as old as ferries. With only one vessel in town, a boatman was generally not allowed to charge a butcher more than a carpenter to move goods. This concept, called 'common carriage', has served the world well, most recently on the internet."
I've never doubted my support for net neutrality, and the legal history of "common carriage" makes this even more obvious.
The Economist article is written with the presumption that there are are problems that need non-neutrality in order to be solved and that there is thus a tradeoff of some sort to be made. They cite better network management, and give as examples latency-sensitive applications that suffer from the lack of guaranteed latency.
Those are fallacies. The lack of guaranteed latency is fundamentally no bigger of a problem than the lack of guaranteed bandwidth. Non-neutral traffic shaping is not necessary to maintain good performance, and in practice a best-effort network can achieve acceptable latency for things like VoIP without having to explicitly identify, classify, and prioritize VoIP protocols. ISPs may be accustomed to using such explicit techniques, but neutral alternatives exist and work better for general purpose connections, so we shouldn't carve out any exceptions here.
The Economist also points out the difficulty of determining when traffic is or should be illegal and blockable. It is not at all apparent to me that ISPs have a need to be involved in subjective decisions like that in order for us to have a functional Internet. Is erring on the side of allowing traffic and prosecuting later really going to cause serious problems, or can we come up with an objective set of guidelines for what constitutes a DoS worth blocking?
>The Economist article is written with the presumption that there are are problems that need non-neutrality in order to be solved and that there is thus a tradeoff of some sort to be made.
This is the absolute classic form of media psychic manipulation: present a false choice and allow endless debate within this window but never question what might lie outside it. Additionally, one side of the debate is accepted as the default and alternatives are only evaluated relative to this one viewpoint.
Another current example is the "work life balance" "debate" as it relates to social media. We are constantly told that we should "unplug" and "find time for ourselves," assuming that the majority of the time we are "plugged" and devoting our energies, via elaborate and exciting abstractions, to some distant venture capital fund.
The other key fallacy that the telecoms seed the media with is that with common carriage, there is no way to provide quality service.
Net neutrality doesn't mean that you cannot optimize the path to get somewhere, just that you don't discriminate. If you need a lower latency or need to lower utilization on certain links, the ISP can do things like peer with the chatty networks.
That covers copyright infringement but not criminal activity. They haven't explicitly said what they intend to do with section 230, which provides safe harbor for ISPs that try to block obscenities and offensive content.
> It is not at all apparent to me that ISPs have a need to be involved in subjective decisions like [determining when traffic is or should be illegal and blockable]
What makes you think they are or would be under this proposal?
The announcement said, "These enforceable, bright-line rules will ban paid prioritization, and the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services."
It says nothing about unlawful content. If blocking lawful content is illegal, but not-blocking unlawful content is not illegal, obviously ISPs will err on the side of not blocking grey-area content. It will only be obviously unlawful content that is blocked, which is really no different than today's situation.
People keep using DoS as the canonical example of the need for this, but in that case one of the endpoints is requesting that the traffic be dropped. The ISP isn't making the decision for anybody.
Except that there isn't actually a real and usable protocol for pushing drop rules up to your ISP, so in practice you can't authorize your ISP to block a DoS on your behalf without getting humans involved.
But strangely the author of the Economist post concludes that the market should be left to regulate itself. Even stranger, they immediately lament the fact that it's failed to do so in the 75% of America where there is a single broadband provider.
Which makes me wonder - will the FCC action do anything to expand the provider market, or merely ensure the quality of currently available access?
> Which makes me wonder - will the FCC action do anything to expand the provider market,
No, the provider market is unlikely to significantly expand without local loop unbundling; fair access to poles and conduit may help in some cases, but overbuilding is still going to be expensive and limited.
> or merely ensure the quality of currently available access?
We'll have to wait and see what falls under acceptable and unacceptable network management, to see what happens to quality.
I think there's an interesting interplay between this FCC announcement and the earlier one on classifying "broadband" connection speeds of 25 Mbps and above.
If an ISP is required to abide by net neutrality and can only sell broadband when it meets the above requirement, then the FCC is essentially mandating quality and consistency of service.
Does a service meet the requirement when the highest possible rate is 25 Mbps or when the average rate is 25 Mbps? Underprovisioning is standard practice, and it's possible to get only a tiny fraction of what a link is physically capable of.
Also, I don't see anything there about QoS or uptime guarantees. (Uptime guarantee: "One nine." "90%?" "9%.")
ISPs can still sell sub-broadband; it just doesn't count for the broadband map ( http://www.broadbandmap.gov/ ). This map is also used to determine how much competition there is in the market. So basically DSL no longer counts and many locations now only have one "broadband" provider.
Does this mean that there's a chance that previous decisions that "DSL is broadband and is thus competition to cable" might be able to be turned over, and therefore it might be possible to sue cable companies under anti-trust laws if they act in a way that prevents competition or otherwise abuse their monopoly?
DSL is not broadband; that's a done deal. Now that DSL doesn't count, Comcast has 56% "broadband" market share. http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/comcast-now-has-more... (I question these TWC numbers, though, since almost all TWC customers have access to 25 Mbps.)
Not sure whether guarantees or provisioning levels are defined, but today's definition of "broadband" is 4 Mbps, so all else being equal, the FCC is trying to modernize the language.
Is AT&T trying to muddle the concept of an ISP as something that delivers content and an ISP as something that hosts content? That's all I can figure, here.
Especially when writing about the ability to decline service to customers. I'm not sure how net neutrality relates to AT&T having freedom to pick and choose its customers. (Surely the folks that just want their content delivered -- Hacker News, for example -- don't consider themselves AT&T customers.)
They are. If they just deliver packets then they are clearly Title II. Last time the FCC did this (2004/5), the ISPs claimed that their homepages and email service and DNS made them not "telecommunications".
Well, Gmail, OpenDNS, Google DNS and Facebook (new homepage), make those arguments less useful. So "caching" is the new DNS.
Not sure how they'll deal with the rise of VPNs and HTTPS though. VPNs and non-cacheable are the most clear argument that people pay broadband ISPs just to deliver their packets.
"We need to use sophisticated computers to switch our networks because we use deep packet inspection to accomplish Fuckery; therefore, we are an information service; therefore, you have to keep letting us use sophisticated computers in the name of Fuckery."
It looks like they're at least trying to muddle the concepts of an ISP and a search engine. But I found the complaint to be overall pretty hard to parse.
Instead of wasting money on courts AT&T should upgrade all their DSL lines to fiber optics, lower prices on their plans and increase bandwidth. But of course they'd rather just whine about how their monopoly is threatened by Title II. I hope they'll lose big deal.
Though it wouldn't help anything of the above anyway, since even with Title II AT&T won't be facing much competition. They'd be just more limited in ways they can abuse their monopoly.
In the Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Cary/Apex/Morrisville) area of North Carolina, AT&T UVerse was laying fiber until very recently. They literally stopped when the FCC started talking about Title II. When Google Fiber was announced for this area a couple weeks ago, Time Warner announced speed upgrades at all their price levels, effective in the next couple of months. They aren't modifying their network at all -- it's just a reduction in blatant abuse. We'll now be auto-upgraded [at their top end] from 50/5 to 300/50. THAT IS INFURIATING!
They'll quickly forget about Title II worries when Google Fiber will actually come to that area and will rush to upgrade their network. They are just a bunch of hypocrites. Alternatively, may be people there can start a community broadband project?
Municipal broadband got outlawed in NC after the town of Wilson demonstrated that it was a real threat to the incumbent ISPs. New community broadband projects can't get off the ground until the FCC officially preempts the state law, which they'll be voting on later this month.
If you develop a successful business plan selling pineapples- and then a regulator comes in and says that assumptions x, y, & z are no longer legal- why would a business owner decide not to "waste money" on courts? Is it not obvious that the best reason to do so is that you've made investments based on a set of assumptions that have a longer horizon than the next 6 months?
The courts exist to provide relief in the case of a conflict. Without them, the only conflict solution is violence. If a company has invested billions in network upgrades and has a regulator come in and upset the apple cart- it's either cheaper to accept it or it's disastrous. I know the appeal of hyperbole, but apply occam's razor. Why would they 'waste money' on the courts?
Monopoly is a word which you are misusing. Verizon is the leading wireless ISP in the country. Comcast is the leading wireline ISP in the country. Centurylink is a dominant force in ISP delivery.
> If you develop a successful business plan selling pineapples- and then a regulator comes in and says that assumptions x, y, & z are no longer legal- why would a business owner decide not to "waste money" on courts?
Now change pineapples to air and consider a colony on some remote asteroid. Do you get the idea better?
> Monopoly is a word which you are misusing. Verizon is the leading wireless ISP in the country. Comcast is the leading wireline ISP in the country. Centurylink is a dominant force in ISP delivery.
It's not misused. Monopoly is clearly present in areas where there is no choice between all those options you listed (for example for landline Internet). Only few places have multiple choices. And even then they are often colluded - i.e agree with each other not to compete in order to prevent lowering prices and spending money on improving the service. So those cases for users are essentially a monopoly anyway, even if formally they have "choices".
>>So those cases for users are essentially a monopoly anyway, even if formally they have "choices".
This- I get.
You made assertions without qualifications. I don't know where AT&T is the dominant ISP vs Comcast vs Centurylink. My point is not to be acerbic. It's to say that ISP service delivery is EXPENSIVE. You have to make major investments. Those investments are based on assumptions. If a regulator comes in and unwinds those assumptions, OF COURSE YOU ARE GOING TO SUE. No rational business owner would do otherwise.
The better option would be to incentivize competition, but nobody wants to address how expensive space on telephone poles is. So now we're going to kill the golden goose so everyone can get their netflix & youtube videos.
Investments are working just fine with Title II as practice shows. And if assumption of the investors is monopoly, they deserve to lose big deal. It's their own fault.
> The better option would be to incentivize competition
Here I agree fully, but how exactly would you do that without causing ire of the same monopolists who hate competition? For example you could force unbundling, i.e. require to give access to the network to competitors. Some countries do that (France I think) and quite successfully. But do you think AT&T and Co. will like that? They'll start screaming ten times as much as they do now because of Title II.
No, I don't, but I'm not an AT&T apologist. It's networking I care about.
>>but how exactly would you do that without causing ire of the same monopolists who hate competition?
Fuck the carriers who are fighting against competition. My concern is that in 2030, we're going to live with regulations that were established in 2015. Do you remember what the Internet was like in 2000? Do any of the rules that would have made sense then apply now? IoT, M2X, etc. are changing how everything works.
I don't want a bandwidth hogging technology like video to overwhelm innovation in machine learning based m2x spaces. I want video to work- but I also don't think we're done innovating.
> My concern is that in 2030, we're going to live with regulations that were established in 2015.
In the areas that the FCC regulates, it regularly makes updates to those regulations more often than every 15 years. (This would be more reasonable of a concern if highly-detailed rules were being written into statute law.)
Incentivizing competition almost certainly cannot be the best solution given that last-mile connectivity is a natural monopoly. It would take a lot of regulatory overhead to overcome the cost of digging three or four trenches to every house instead of just one.
Anyway, in case of AT&T they easily invested in their mobile networks, while telephony there is covered by Title II. Where were their investment fears? Title II won't affect any investments - all those arguments are bunk. What it will affect is making ripping everyone off with anticompetitive techniques harder.
The statute is written in a way where forbearance from almost all the actual provisions of Title II is written into Title II for wireless carriers. For wireline, Forebearance is at best at the FCC's discretion, and at worst possibly an abuse of the FCC's discretion that'll be overturned in court. Thus, with wireline the carriers face the threat of full-blown Title II which they don't with wireless.
> The statute is written in a way where forbearance from almost all the actual provisions of Title II is written into Title II for wireless carriers.
Where? The only thing I can see in the statute that might touch on different treatment regarding wireless carriers actually limits the degree of forbearance that can be applied to "commercial mobile services" in ways that do not apply to other common carriers. compare 47 USC Sec. 332(c)(1) with 47 USC Sec. 160.
But 332(c)(2) makes clear that the FCC can apply Title II provisions only to the services that interconnect with the PSTN: http://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1068&... (explaining the distinction between commercial mobile service in 332(c)(1) and private mobile service in 332(c)(2)); see also Cello P'ship v. FCC, 700 F.3d 534, 538 (D.C. Cir. 2012) ("In particular, section 332 specifies that providers of "commercial mobile services," such as wireless voice-telephone service, are common carriers, whereas providers of other mobile services are exempt from common carrier status. See id. § 332(d)(3), (c)(2).")
Even leaving aside the issue of whether Congress intended to create a voice/data dichotomy: at a purely a technical level, voice and data networks are segregated. LTE only supports packet-switched IP, and unless you're using VoLTE, voice runs over the circuit-switched GSM network.
> But 332(c)(2) makes clear that the FCC can apply Title II provisions only to the services that interconnect with the PSTN
But 332(d)(2) explicitly grants the FCC the authority to define, through regulation, what the terms "service that is interconnected with the public switched network" mean in the context of defining whether a service is a "commercial mobile service". Given that there is absolutely a sense in which the internet itself is interconnected with the PSTN through many gateways, its not entirely impossible that part of the the proposal at issue expands the existing regulatory definition of interconnection to include any general-purpose mobile broadband internet service, which would bring such services within the scope subject to common carrier rules.
Anyhow, the argument that mobile internet is outside the scope of what may be subject to common carrier status (and thus, Title II regulation) is a different one than the argument you made earlier that there are statutory provisions expressly requiring forbearance from "most provisions" of Title II for mobile services.
Lawyers cost money. The carriers are clearly going to sue. There is opportunity cost in persuing the lawsuits. You are going to see these lawsuits happening right now, and you are going to not see projects behind the scenes for each carrier which don't get funded because they are investing in lawsuits.
If they are ready to waste money on lawsuits and later whine that they don't have money for improving the service because they wasted it on lawsuits - it's really their own fault. They should blame themselves.
AT&T's argument appears to be that since they are already shaping traffic and abusing their customer's trust, they aren't actually an Internet service provider anyway, so they can't be regulated as one.
I stopped having any sympathy for AT&T after the Auernheimer case. If they wanted to garner public support for any reason, a move like this is likely to kill it for a lot of people. Myself included.
(I know Auernheimer's not well-liked, and I don't agree with his politics, but he deserved to win that case on appeal.)
I read the indictment [1]. Auernheimer wasn't a white hat security researcher--he intentionally went after AT&T with intent to damage them and reap rewards from it. He's not exactly a martyr for the cause of freedom.
"I have no illusions that any of this will change what happens on February 26," when the FCC is expected to vote, AT&T Federal Regulatory VP Hank Hultquist wrote in a blog post yesterday. "But when the FCC has to defend reclassification before an appellate court, it will have to grapple with these and other arguments. "
I might be misreading something, but is he not saying "We know this is useless but we want to waste the FCC's time and resources anyways" ?
I'm not familiar with how lawsuits for these kinds of cases work, but wouldn't this be enough for a judge to throw away any lawsuit they file? If they clearly state t hey have no intention other than to get in the way, it doesn't seem like a valid lawsuit to me.
> I might be misreading something, but is he not saying "We know this is useless but we want to waste the FCC's time and resources anyways" ?
No, he's simply saying this prior release is not going to influence the FCC vote in any way, shape or form on Feb 26th.
However, a court battle after-wards might (as it did previously with the FCC National Broadband Act and the courts ultimately ruled the FCC had no authority to do what they proposed).
He's saying that the threat of lawsuit isn't enough to prevent the FCC from going through with the reclassification, so they're going to wait for it to happen and then sue to overturn the FCC's decision.
This is largely political saber rattling. AT&T's best arguments are going to be procedural.
If FCC gets past arguments it didn't dot the i's, then this will go to the Supreme Court where AT&T and Verizon will get walloped. I can explain why, but basically there are 9 votes lined up against the ISPs on reclassification.
Well, duh. The telecoms have sued over every previous move regarding net neutrality, and they've made it very clear that they are going to continue to do so even if the FCC does exactly what the court in the last case said they could do.
No one is surprised by this, least of all the FCC Commissioners considering voting on the proposals. I suspect that Wheeler's staff already has prepared legal analyses addressing most of the issues AT&T might raise in a lawsuit. Its hardly their first rodeo.
While I don't like Internet providers creating different classes of traffic, the idea of the government getting involved should terrify anyone who values innovation and freedom.
Soon, we'll end up with a monopoly guided by regulations from lobbyists and using laws as a weapon against competition. That's hardly better than the problem we seek to resolve.
I don't think this libertarian sloganeering does anything to help. Freedom is something that individual persons deserve, not massive entrenched corporations who are throwing their weight around to prevent any innovation from happening and keep their profits fat.
It's true that government intervention screws a lot of things up, but so does unrestricted capitalism. We can't solve the biggest problems of today with reductionist ideologies.
The lack of provider competition isn't a natural monopoly. It's a government-created monopoly/duopoly in a given market. Instead of regulating the one or two providers in a market, we could try a different model that improves competition.
The other way is to break the city franchise model. Cities generally grant franchise rights to cable and phone companies, excluding other providers for a promise of universal coverage and a few percent of the revenue.
The latter is what Google Fiber is asking for from the cities it goes into:
- It wants blanket access to all of the telephone poles and other right-of-ways, without having to do per-pole applications, application fees, and approval process that can take weeks/months each.
- It wants to not have to do universal access, but rather only roll into neighborhoods with a high enough density to be profitable.
- It won't pay the city a percentage of revenue. Instead, it agrees to build out free internet access to schools, public spaces, etc.
Google Fiber's model has the advantage of not relying on a city to properly maintain a fiber network, but the disadvantage of leaving poor communities un-served.
Part of the interesting piece is the history of "common carriage": "The idea that certain businesses are so essential that they must not discriminate between customers is as old as ferries. With only one vessel in town, a boatman was generally not allowed to charge a butcher more than a carpenter to move goods. This concept, called 'common carriage', has served the world well, most recently on the internet."
I've never doubted my support for net neutrality, and the legal history of "common carriage" makes this even more obvious.