FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s lame excuses for his net neutrality proposal

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/05/fcc_chairman_tom_wheeler_s_lame_excuses_for_his_net_neutrality_proposal.html

by Libertatea • 12 years ago

70 41 12 years ago

slate.com

parfe• 12 years ago

Wheeler created a legacy dystopian novelists only dream about. The article uses netlfix vs amazon for their exclusive example but the true issue is news.

Millions of customers limited to seeing video from one news network. Fox news or CNN or MSNBC. Or one newspaper's video service. Suddenly instead of streaming NY Times you can only reliably view the Washington times or the NY post.

And forget about non profit or advocacy sites competing for mind share against large companies who can get their content delivered with high quality and reliably unbuffered.

chimeracoder• 12 years ago

This is what concerns me about the public debate surrounding the proposed Comcast/Time Warner merger. Look at the coverage that MSNBC (owned by Comcast) has devoted to the issue, for example[0][1].

Having news agencies very tightly coupled with (and owned by) companies that are lobbying for major policy changes to basic infrastructure and utilities[2] is a recipe for disaster.

[0] http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/04/14/something-you-still-wont...

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-abrams/msnbcs-big-fail-de...

[2] Yes, I consider the Internet in 2014 to be a basic utility, even if the FCC does not agree (yet).

twoodfin3• 12 years ago

I hate to give such a short take, but any article about "net neutrality" that doesn't use the words "video" or "streaming" once isn't a serious discussion. "NetFlix" appears one time. The repeated use of "website" seems intended to mislead casual readers about what, exactly, is being debated. Slow banner ads for poor nuns? C'mon.

Any real resolution of this issue has to involve either forcing the cable companies to be dumb pipes and somehow figuring out how that will still incentivize anyone to build out infrastructure, or allowing companies representing 1/3 of primetime traffic to come to negotiated agreements with companies representing 1/3 of primetime viewers.

mgkimsal4• 12 years ago

Yeah - 'dump pipes' - that was a phrase I was looking for. My water company just pumps water to my house. That's it. It's a commodity service. Major content companies also owning and managing the information pipes seems as bad an idea as having Monsanto or General Mills own and manage my local water infrastructure, no?

twoodfin3• 12 years ago

But you don't want new pipes that can deliver twice as much water every few years.

mgkimsal4• 12 years ago

Can't edit now - I meant 'dumb' pipes.

AnthonyMouse4• 12 years ago

forcing the cable companies to be dumb pipes and somehow figuring out how that will still incentivize anyone to build out infrastructure

That is just a talking point. What do you think happens with the power company in a growing city? If there is going to be twice as much consumption of electricity as there was last year then the power company has to upgrade the distribution infrastructure. They manage to do it without needing the "incentive" of controlling which brands of washer and dryer you can plug into the mains.

If you're going to have a regulated utility then you don't need market incentives (which barely exist in uncompetitive markets like last mile anyway) because you have regulations requiring them to do it. Either they offer speeds which are e.g. 50% faster than the median speed in first world countries or they face penalties worse than the cost of the upgrade.

rayiner5• 12 years ago

Power companies are a terrible model, first because most upgrades to power systems happen on a scale of decades, second because power generation has been a disaster in many growing parts of the country like California or Texas, third because the politics and capture surrounding utility regulation are worse than those in telecom, and fourth because the regulated utilities do have incentives to invest in upgrades, like guaranteed rates of return, and such incentives have had decidedly mixed results.

You can't force private companies to build out a network on unattractive terms. They'll just exit the business and take their capital elsewhere. See the difficulty municipalities have had trying to get companies to build out fiber on ridiculous tarms.

The model of regulated utilities has largely been a disaster. If you want public infrastructure, build it with public money, like we do roads. But the problem with that approach is you'll quickly realize ordinary people don't want to spend as much money on all this as the techies do.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

I know some people who are very wealthy in part as the result of owning a pipeline. Building that pipline was a lot more expensive than laying fiber, and it just does one thing.

malandrew• 12 years ago

I am secretly hoping this completely backfires on the cable companies and every startup and alternative news outlet that needs to get data to customers bands together to make end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer infrastructure for delivering video.

i.e. if Comcast or Time Warner won't carry my bits at a reasonable rate, then I join a consortium of companies that band together to make sure their bits are always available quickly through peer-to-peer technology.

If all the small companies and individuals bands together to hide all their bits collectively behind encryption, there will be little that the telco companies will be able to do.

Just like nature finds a way, so does tech. The Bit torrent and p2p sharing community has little by little protected themselves against almost every attack the government and other institutions has thrown at them. The only successful attacks against p2p technologies have come in the form of legal attacks due to the illegal nature of the content. When the content is not illegal, that attack vector becomes unavailable.

If something like this happens, the only attack left is to attack the customer, which would be a total non-starter risking driving customers into the arms of competitors that are more fair.

The whole problem the net neutrality debase is that is phrased as companies on side Telco vs companies on side Tech/startup. The truth is that this should instead be presented as the companies on side A verus their customers.

TheLoneWolfling• 12 years ago

And then they start throttling anything that isn't to a whitelisted destination.

Which they are now allowed to do.

mgkimsal4• 12 years ago

I've tried to follow this on and off for a while, but I don't understand what the justification is. We have a current system in place, and now we're under constant pressure to pass some new legislation to address a problem that doesn't seem to exist (certainly not for millions/billions of end users).

wpietri• 12 years ago

I'm not sure which side you think needs justification, but a brief background:

The Internet started as a collection of small academic networks. Eventually, commercial providers joined in. Through a system of peering [1], we got global reachability: everybody could talk to everybody. In practice we generally had network neutrality [2], where everybody's packets were treated fairly. This happened because there were many internet service providers, and any one of them thinking about being a greedy dick would have to consider that they were substantially outnumbered. And they'd also have to worry about customers switching to competitors.

But now the US internet market has collapsed to a small number of players. Most people have little or no choice. And the remaining players are either a) very large, or b) commercially irrelevant. So the incentives are different. Comcast sees a lot of money being made by Netflix and resents it. So they are basically threatening to make Netflix's service worse unless they get paid more. And they want to be able to do that to anybody who makes a lot of money over the Internet.

That was previously prevented by the FCC, but no longer, because the head of it used to work for the cable companies. Comcast's remaining competitors aren't going to complain; the big ones see a great opportunity for a similar shakedown racket. Consumers can't do anything, because they often can't switch, and if they could it's generally to some other giant.

So basically, the old system did work fine, it is breaking down. What almost everybody wants is to formalize the old approach, network neutrality. But Comcast, et al, have an enormous amount of money and long experience at manipulating governments, and they currently appear to be winning.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

mgkimsal4• 12 years ago

Thank you. I haven't seen it presented quite this succinctly, and I'm more looking at things over the past 20 years. Things work pretty good. Legislation to try to keep it that way would be good. But the legislation we seem to be seeing codifies the new way. Again, I'm likely glossing over some big bits I've not seen yet - I'll go read up some more.

666c6f• 12 years ago

This is a major problem. The situation in the US seems to be really fucked up. I wonder why they aren't just expropriate VZ and giving the access to the Internet in public hands.

tim333• 12 years ago

"We can't have a situation in which the corporate duopoly dictates the future of the internet and that's why I'm supporting what is called net neutrality." - Barak Obama, 2006

Apparently Obama has the power to replace Wheeler as chairman and I wish he would.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Wheeler suggests that the “unreasonable discrimination” rule would be flimsy and could lead to abuse.

Oh, but "commercially reasonable rates" isn't a flimsy rule that could lead to abuse? This actually exposes the sham Wheeler has orchestrated. If one is flimsy, then so is the other, and he seems to understand both are flimsy, but he protects his commercially reasonable rate rule, while fights against the unreasonable discrimination one, because he thinks the latter may actually be less flimsy than the former, and he knows carriers wouldn't like that. So he doesn't want people to start pushing for that one instead.

That's not the only way to bring net neutrality, though. Reclassifying ISPs are common carriers would do that, too, and I think it would also be much easier to have small ISPs come and use Comcast or whoever's cables, and therefore more competition, too. Two birds with one stone.

Intermernet• 12 years ago

"The chairman and the professors argue that the only alternative to allowing paid fast lanes and slow lanes is some rule against “unreasonable discrimination.” Wheeler suggests that the “unreasonable discrimination” rule would be flimsy and could lead to abuse."

Isn't this the same argument as the one people are using against this law change?

Isn't eradicating "unreasonable discrimination" the primary purpose of net neutrality?

mercurial• 12 years ago

Reading that, I'm really happy the EU Telecom package made it through with net neutrality intact.

puppetmaster3• 12 years ago

Here is his bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wheeler_(lobbyist)

Find the key word there, no need for more info.

snarfy• 12 years ago

"We've excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs." - Barak Obama

smokeyj• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem

It seems to me we need a technical solution to a political problem.

wtmcc• 12 years ago

The only real restriction is that fast lanes can’t be offered exclusively to a company also owned by the cable or phone company.

This fast lane already exists, and it exists for the cable company itself.

E.g. Comcast’s digital television (including Netflix-rivaling “Xfinity” on-demand service) is delivered over bandwidth that is dedicated/statically allocated to serving their entertainment package.

Worse still, Comcast’s data also has a dedicated backhaul. Live TV is collected from satellite feeds at a local “headend” facility, and on-demand content is likely cached close to the user à la Netflix Open Connect.

lawnchair_larry• 12 years ago

The new FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, was previously a telecom VC, lobbyist, and industry association chief. He's actually in the "Cable Television Hall of Fame". His fortune previously depended on influencing the FCC. Now he's in charge of it.

Make no mistake, this guy has one job. He's going to do whatever he can to break net neutrality.

Oh, he also donated (via bundling) over 500k to Obama, who appointed him (nobody knows how much more than 500k, because the disclosure requirement is just "over 500k"). Obama also campaigned both on not hiring lobbyists, as well as net neutrality.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s lame excuses for his net neutrality proposal

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