FCC's Martin faces GOP pressure on Comcast and Net neutrality
Kevin Martin, the Republican chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is drawing fire from economic conservatives over his plan to declare that Comcast violated the law when throttling BitTorrent last year.
The vote is expected at a FCC meeting (PDF) on Friday morning. It promises to be a landmark one: this would be the first time the commission has ruled on a Net neutrality violation. (An earlier one was settled without a formal ruling.)
Martin's intra-party backlash started on Wednesday with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that started with this uncomplimentary paragraph: "Bad personnel decisions have haunted the Bush Administration, and one of the bigger disappointments is Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin. In his last months as Master of the Media Universe, he seems poised to expand government regulation of the Internet."
The Journal also reported in a news article on Friday that the Bush administration itself is irritated. "We're concerned about the decision," Meredith Attwell Baker, acting head of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications & Information Administration, told the paper. "It appears to reverse a decade-old bipartisan policy against regulation of the Internet."
There's also House Republican Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, who sent a letter (PDF) to Martin on Thursday warning him of going through with his plan to rule against Comcast, with the help of the five-member FCC's two Democrats. The text of the letter:
Dear Chairman Martin,
I am dismayed by recent press reports that you intend to interfere with the network management decisions of broadband providers, essentially regulating the Internet. As one of your Republican colleagues at the FCC, Commissioner McDowell, so aptly explained in his July 28 Washington Post editorial, "[t]he Internet has flourished because it has operated under the principle that engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems." Congress has intentionally refrained from imposing the heavy hand of government, which is precisely why we have seen such rapid growth in the Internet. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board pointed out July 30, "the FCC's job is not to determine business models in the private sector. The community of Internet service and content providers has proven itself more than able to work out problems on its own as Web use has exploded."
As press reports indicate, the current case is no different. Difficulties in quickly transferring large files led to the development of cutting edge peer-to-peer technology. When a small minority of subscribers--often using these applications to share pirated music and movies--began clogging the networks to the harm of the large majority of users, broadband providers began taking steps to alleviate the congestion. This, in turn, has prompted peer-to-peer developers to collaborate with broadband providers to find better ways to manage traffic. It is this market-based, self-governing nature of the Internet that is the key to its success. Your heavy handed attempts to inject the FCC into the middle of that process threaten to hijack the evolution of the Internet to everyone's detriment. It will also deter the very broadband investment we need for the Internet to continue growing to meet the increasing demands being placed upon it.
Adding insult to injury, it appears you are wading into this debate on very shaky procedural and legal grounds. While the FCC has endorsed certain Internet policy principles, it has never adopted regulations through a proper notice and comment rulemaking. Nor should it, for the reasons I outline above. Nonetheless, your continued pursuit of this matter suggests that you are making not only a poor policy judgment, but a poor legal one, as well. I urge you return to a sound market-oriented approach, rather than continue down the path you have chosen. It will surely stifle one of the greatest technological and economic success stories our Nation has seen.
Adam Thierer, a policy analyst at the free market Progress and Freedom Foundation (which began its days as Newt Gingrich's favorite think tank), wrote this week that liberal activists "will incessantly petition the FCC to review each and every business model decision and encourage the unelected bureaucrats at the agency to manage the Internet to their heart's content."
It's possible that this last-minute criticism will change Martin's mind, or he may be spooked at the prospect of damaging his future political viability (at least inside the Republican Party). We'll know for sure in a few hours.
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The Internet has flourished precisely because of such non-discrimination protections. With them everyone can participate and innovate online without first seeking permission. Without them, we're letting companies like Comcast arbitrarily pick and chose who gains entrée and who does not .
The FCC is simply acting within historical parameters to protect users and preserve this level playing field. Martin should be applauded for standing up for online innovation, choice and the Internet's free marketplace of ideas. Aren't these baseline conservative ideas?
The statement is below:
The following is the response of Public Knowledge President and Co-Founder Gigi B. Sohn:
?It is a shame that the harm Comcast has done to the Internet has not been appreciated by Leader Boehner. Rather than criticizing FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, Leader Boehner should praise him for putting a stop to a practice that technical experts have said is clearly outside the bounds of accepted Internet practice, while at the same time the FCC is acting to protect consumers.
?The FCC?s action is in no way ?heavy-handed,? as Leader Boehner put it. It is, rather, a return to the principles of open competition and non-discrimination that have been a part of communications law in this country for more than 70 years. It will in no way deter broadband investment, as the financial results of AT&T, which is operating under a Net Neutrality merger condition, have shown. It will in no way hinder the ability of companies to manage their networks.
?The FCC?s action, and the Chairman?s leadership, is entirely praiseworthy. Those who support innovation and competition should praise the Commission, not condemn it.?
I discovered the potential of the internet twelve years ago, a year after discovering ?leased access?. Another discovery has been that unlike my former cable-pioneer associates, cable owners today are ?mean spirited? and greedy. The desire to manage bandwidth is a ?red herring? of cable. They don?t want end consumers viewing the growing availability of TV via the internet since it competes with their own ?pay per movie? scheme.
You, sir, as well as Commissioner McDowell seem to overlook the GOP once was the friend to business, all business, not just Big Business.
Those of us with local TV on cable operations (thanks to Congress) are the real backbone of America?s business?we?re the truly ?small business? operators.
This is not about ?engineering?, it?s about GREED.
Intelligent people in Washington DC know what RICO laws are, they wrote them and passed them. It has all the trappings of criminal conspiracy, and if people want to call it greed, they can, but let's call Comcast's action what it really is: Illegal. The laws are there, and it's time they were enforced.
How much of Comcast's ill-gotten gains will go into election coffers?
The only other point I find noteworthy in this is which politicians want to call this something other than criminal, and why would they be willing to look the other way when people are being robbed? Could it be the same crowd that looked the other way at Enron's minor issues?
AND -- if we take this a step further, perhaps we can eventually pull together a few Blue-state National Guard units coupled with the aforementioned 'Citizens Militia' and, in our efforts to fight for freedom from corrupt, greedy officialdom and their special-interest, union-busting sweatshop corporations, we might even be able to take Washington!
Funny -- that's exactly what happened in China and Russia just a generation ago...
I don't think a fine is the way to go (since Comcast will just use it as an excuse to raise rates, again). A precedent is needed to stop the anti-competitive abuses Comcast has been committing against their customers and their attack on choice. I want to see Comcast invest their cash in infrastructure and actually improving service, not inflating each executive's salary and compensation to astronomical heights and trying to limit or outright block internet TV and phone use. The focus thus far has been on Torrents, but this issue is much much bigger than that. This has more to do with limited 'unlimited' internet, internet TV, internet phone, internet rentals, and other online services which Comcast wants to manage access to to prevent competition with its own substandard digital cable and phone service. Torrents were just an easy start to test out this sort of activity.
Things would be different if people were free to choose what cable or telecom company they wanted to use. I unfortunately live in Comcast territory and they're the only show in town. I would absolutely love to drop their service and I don't know anyone who doesn't feel the same way. By slapping Comcast for their discrimination of network traffic, we can hopefully put a stop to the expansion of these practices. Remember it is the ultimate goal of some people to charge you based on what sites you visit. To sit back and do nothing (in a service provider arena that is already regulated into regional monopolies) is to sit idly by and watch as things get worse.
Comcast is the lesser of two evils here. Let them do what they must and you can feel free to get service else where.
Duane Polich
Combonate Media Group
I have a regional cable company that has their own News Channel that has forbidden me from delivering live programing to my own decoder equipment at their headend. I pay for the airtime and own the equipment but yet they refuse because it will compete with their ad sales and ratings on their news channel. The FCC has an obligation to regulate because of the built in conflict of interest that cable companies have. Why don't we just let the airlines self-regulate air safety? (p.s. I am a republican and a pilot)
does Comcast OWN the internet? NO. They are a conduit to it. People - especially young people who have little backhistory of the internet - are slowly becoming brainwashed into believing that the Internet is owned by the likes of Comcast; and are thus allowing them to infringe on our rights as if they as some governmental authority. If Comcast has it's will, with no governmental interjection, we will be paying for each and every little graphic element on each page you go to. The goal of companies like Comcast is to harness and control the ihe internet - they want to turn it into a closed media system, like Cable TV - where they control the content and access. How many of us can afford a cable station? It will be the same thing with web pages - just so information can be controlled.
I hope the judge comes back and bites those spoiled brats hard. I hope he is preparing a statement that will blow his detractors out of the water. At least it will show that there may be 2 or 3 people in Washington that have some clue as to what the heck is really going on outside of the walls.