(The text is available in snippets as of Tuesday afternoon here.) Kim Hart and Tony Romm end their piece with this kicker, showing whose side they’re on:
But McDowell reminded the packed room at the FCC’s meeting that the agency is going against the explicit direction of lawmakers.
“The FCC is not Congress. We cannot make laws,” he said. “The FCC has charted a collision course with the legislative body.”
The Washington Post’s technology writer Cecilia Kang on Monday night characterizes also Genachowski’s proposal as an expansion of government control, writing that it “seeks to add teeth” to current policy. The lead:
Federal regulators are poised to enact controversial new rules affecting Internet access, marking the government’s strongest move yet to ensure that Facebook updates, Google searches and Skype calls reach consumers’ homes unimpeded.
Under the regulations, companies that carry the Internet into American homes would not be allowed to block Web sites that offer rival services, nor would they be permitted to play favorites by dividing delivery of Internet content into fast and slow lanes.
“Fast and slow lanes” on the information superhighway—one of two commonly cited metaphors for regulation of the Web. Copps used this meme himself when he spoke earlier in the month at The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism about the need for strengthening regulation in broadcast media. He referenced Columbia Law professor Tim Wu’s book The Master Switch, which uses case studies from previous communication technologies—like radio, film, network television, and cable—to demonstrate how media consolidation and corporatization could also potentially imperil an open Internet.
“And while [Wu] doesn’t believe the Internet is necessarily doomed to tread the same destructive path, surely we see signs that it could,” Copps said. “Consolidation is already well-advanced, and businesses are clearly dreaming about on-ramps with toll booths dotting the information highway.”
The second comparison that persists in reporting on FCC policy, usually to defend Internet providers’ right to offer tiered/prioritized service, is the comparison to cable television. For instance, Wilson Rothman, writing on the Technolog blog on MSNBC.com, finishes his post on Tuesday with these thoughts:
I don’t mean to present some dystopian pay-for-play future where we’ll all walk around with virtual taxi meters on our heads. I think that for the most part, the regulation — and the lack of regulation — will manifest itself in new services. It’s like cable TV. First there was a basic subscription, then there were premiums, now there are 30,000 options, all listed with nickel-and-dime rates or in shiny bundles. We complain about the increasing cost of cable, and some (though not many) of us jump ship. But we do get more than before.
That’s how it’s going to play out — you’ll get more, you’ll pay for more.
As more details come out about the commission’s new rules and just how the FCC hopes to enforce them—and as the bluster persists—we’ll continue to follow the developments.
Rothman is so wrong with his comparison. The cable companies are often charged by the content providers (the cable channels) and they pass that cost on to people paying for cable. But the ISP cost is for providing the pipe and connection, we can pick from our content, much of which is free. If we want to pay for the WSJ on-line, we pay the WSJ for their content. If you want to stream Netflix, you pay Netflix for the content they have streamed.
I pay for the pipe, my ISP shouldn't differentiate speed based on what content I am seeking.
Note: I do understand based on hosting servers, that you can have differing load speeds, but that is based on the content provider speeds, not "traffic management" (aka extortion) of my ISP.
#1 Posted by End The Echo, CJR on Wed 22 Dec 2010 at 03:13 PM
"The new policy bans discrimination by Internet companies of any specific online service."
In other words: The federal govt is again decimating competition in the market, thus further cartelizing industry.
#2 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 22 Dec 2010 at 10:04 PM
See Jack Shafer's brilliant imagining of the fate of the Internet if the FCC had decided to start regulating it in 1993, in today's Slate. Another American industry headed for consolidation and stagnation after brilliant, unregulated growth.
#3 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 27 Dec 2010 at 12:41 PM
The whole internet was regulated by international consortiums and standards maintenance organizations such as
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/
http://www.isoc.org/standards/orgs.shtml
Icann and the rest. The idea of having a protocols allows people to use the best products based on compliance with the protocol. The reason why the internet is open is because it is regulated with open standards.
That hasn't stopped competitors (like Microsoft) from trying to proprietize the web and lock in their body of users to their products, but a well regulated marketplace allowed better products to survive and thrive based on their standards compliance. There's a reason why internet content proliferates on html, java, flash (somewhat unfortunately), and javascript and not active x. The previous technologies allowed a consumer to use them how they sought fit, they didn't care about the platform underneath (and now that flash is not compliant with the mobile platform, we will see how flash either changes or fades out).
pt2 l8r
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 27 Dec 2010 at 10:57 PM
Before it was the computer platform that was trying to lock users in, now its the network provider. Before it was an informal rule that providers care about a users usage and not where he spends his usage. Now they want to charge based on where you send your bits so they can tilt the marketplace and push the usage to their preferred vendors. Before cable companies got so brazen about how they want to control usage, we could be informal about it, but now they have monopolies in their markets and they want to change how the internet works.
The internet works worse in America than in Japan and Europe already because of a lack of government regulation on providers.
It's embarrassing:
http://www.techspot.com/news/41535-fcc-68-of-us-broadband-connections-arent-broadband.html
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/opinion/23krugman.html
But yeah, that was a problem that didn't need critical regulation because it affected how fast the internet worked and how much it cost. It didn't affect how the internet worked.
This is different.
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 27 Dec 2010 at 11:06 PM
See here:
http://theopeninter.net/
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 27 Dec 2010 at 11:11 PM
This article
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/the-cost-to-offer-the-worlds-fastest-broadband-20-per-home/
gives you a really good insight into why providers are pushing to change the internet and how they can bill for it.
The reason is that the internet is a communication medium and it's being provided by companies that specialize in other communication mediums (telephone, cable, cellular networks).
And where the user sees the internet as having an amazing power to communicate and consume media from across the world tailored to their tastes, the other communication mediums see it as threat to their core businesses.
Telephones companies already have to worry about google voice and skype eating their profitable long distance businesses; cable companies see bit torrent, itunes, and you tube slicing into their cable packages; if municipal wi-fi ever takes off, the cell phone companies will have to compete with iPods and iPads and Androids equipped with skype and line2.
The internet products they provide cannibalize the providers non-internet business.
You have to understand how these internet providers think in order to understand why they want to change how it works - and then you can say no.
#7 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 28 Dec 2010 at 06:48 PM