While everyone is on vacation, the 5 member FCC Commission is voting today on Net Neutrality. The scope of what is being voted on today is nowhere near the “end of Internet Freedom” that some radio hosts have been fretting about, but it should be of concern to you.
The thing they are voting on today basically says that Internet Access providers can’t charge extra, give preference or restrict access to parts of the Internet that are engaged in legal activities.
For most of the 15 years the Internet has been Commercially available, the general principle has been that the sender of data on the Internet pays the costs of getting their “stuff” to you. Web site owners pay, radio streamers pay, Google pays, software download archive sites pay. If you’re big enough, you lease your own fiber optic circuits around the country and drop off your “stuff” at the doorstep of the Internet Access Providers. Sending traffic between cities is called “transport”.
Your local Internet provider (now mostly phone companies and Cable TV companies) are really only obligated to connect to a nearby traffic exchange point. That’s what you pay them for (similar to local phone service). But over time, they have built up their own national networks to handle traffic better. Their general principle is equity – if someone else (AOL for example) carries a similar amount of traffic from Comcast as AOL sends to Comcast, everyone is happy. If there is an imbalance, the sender pays – or they pay a third party to provide the transport.
So along comes Netflix. Very little gets sent TO Netflix. They now sell a service to download entire movies, which are huge. Comcast’s network isn’t built to support that amount of traffic – and on top of that Netflix (and Hulu) are direct competitors against Comcast in selling entertainment. [Some have advocated that Cable TV should be separated between the Internet services and the entertainment services]
Netflix says Comcast should carry their avalanche of traffic for free – Comcast says Netflix should follow the Internet practice of paying the costs of sending the movies from the Netflix servers to you. That dispute is a good example of what Net Neutrality is about.
The problem though is why the FCC and Congress think they are wanted to resolve this type of dispute. The current system works pretty well. Once the FCC declares it has any jurisdiction over any aspect of the Internet, even in the name of “fairness”, only bad things happen from there.
The unfortunate change to the Internet is that as people shifted to higher speed infrastructure, competition vanished. Instead of having 500 choices for dialup Internet, with today’s Internet you have generally at most 2 choices – your local phone company and your local Cable TV company. They’re well connected and big enough to spread money around Washington DC to get what they want.
If Netflix wins (and the others who will follow), the only logical outcome is the cost of your Internet bill will go up – either by usage based pricing on individuals who consume lots of traffic or a general cost increase over all the customers to spread the increased costs.
Consumers would pay based kinda like minutes on a cell phone?
Also, since you seem to be deeply into this stuff, I heard that cable companies aren’t regulated like other companies? Is that because they put in their own cable? And hasn’t a LOT of the Internet infrastucture been govt. funded? So how do private cos. charge to send “stuff” over public owned infrastructure?
BTW, I’ve rid myself of the cable co. TV side since they couldn’t seem to deliver a non-pixilated TV show. I use an HD box (now that I live close enough to a metro area to get a good over the air signal), and also get Netfix over the cable (which also struck me as odd they couldn’t reliably send a TV signal but could send an Internet signal?)
But the point I started to make here dovetailed to something you brought up – if we only have two sources for Internet in the long run the quality is bound to dip since there is no competition to drive improvements.
And the govt. controlling this? Don’t get me started ….
Cable TV is licensed by your city/town, not the Federal Government. The first “camel nose under the tent” was when the FCC was asked to set up the “Must Carry” rules by the NAB folks that force Cable TV companies to choose between “Must Carry for Free” or “Will Pay to Carry but can opt not to Carry” the local TV stations in their local service area.
The disputes over whether Cable TV can drop sports channels if they get too expensive raised the FCC’s power one more notch. The FCC doesn’t have the power to force your cable company to carry or not carry non-broadcast channels like sports – but they certainly threatened to ask for the power from Congress to get involved in those disputes (when y’all called up Congress to complain).
The pending legislation to force TV stations / Cable TV channels to not TURN UP THE VOLUME DURING COMMERCIALS is the next attempt at Federal Regulation over content the FCC is taking on.
But Internet Access is not Cable TV – it just happens to be a service that was convenient to sell over the existing Cable TV infrastructure. AOL back in the late 1990s tried to force this issue – to get Internet Access ruled to be a “TeleCommunications Service” like long distance phone service and regulate it with Federal control as a common carrier.
When AOL acquired Time/Warner (which was/is a big player in Cable TV/Internet), AOL/Time-Warner immediately dropped that demand that Cable systems be required to rent their infrastructure at below cost rates so that AOL could make more money by bundling Cable Internet withe the AOL Information Service (which they did voluntarily do for a while).
The opposite point of view is that Cable TV Internet is an “information service”. That was the FCC’s ruling in 2002 that it wanted only minimal oversight. The 9th Federal District Court of Appeals in California demanded in 2003 that the FCC get involved in more regulation (surprised it was the 9th?). In 2005, the Supreme Court overruled the 9th District in a case called National Cable & Telecommunications Assn. v. Brand X Internet Services. The decision affirmed that the FCC had the right to look at the Internet as an information service and not a telephone system.
In 2008, Comcast decided to block its customers from using BitTorrent, which created the next chapter in the story. The FCC ruled that Comcast could not do that, but the FCC didn’t really have a strong legal basis for making those kinds of decisions. That ruling laid for the foundation for pushing “Net Neutrality” to establish a set of rules for what Comcast can and can’t do to what you can do with your Internet service.
Another part of the ruling today allows the Internet Provider to offer “premium” access to information suppliers – so Youtube or Netflix could pay the Cable/Phone company to allow their traffic to go faster than it would otherwise be able to. That effectively means that Netflix is going to have to pay Comcast.
Keep in mind that Cable TV/DSL/FIOS Internet is using no radio spectrum to work – in newer systems, the internet access is over Fiber Optic cables, in older systems it is over Coaxial cable. The FCC has no jurisdiction over Information Services – that’s been the ruling by the courts up to this point. The only “public” infrastructure your Cable TV system uses is the telephone poles, which is regulated by your town.
Another aspect of the ruling (which was approved today as expected) is that wireless internet providers (think AT&T/iPhone) cannot block mobile devices from using VoIP phone services (like Skype or Google Talk). If you have an iPad, Skype, 3G and a headset, you don’t need an iPhone for your phone calls (albeit it is a bit awkward to carry around an iPad in your pocket/purse. No need to burn cell phone minutes if you have 3G internet. But Facebook and Twitter are already causing people to make a lot fewer phone calls….
Surprised it was the 9th Circus Court of Appeals? No.
Surprised that the ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court? No.
Someone should keep track of the % of overturns by each Cicuit Court – it would show just how far the Uber Lib 9th Circus Court of Appeals will go to push their agenda (even in spite of that oath to uphold that pesky Constitution).
Great summary, and I especially liked the part about cable not using any spectrum.
It once again illustrates another bald faced power grab by the government.