Telcos: Don't mess up the Internet with regulation
WASHINGTON--Representatives from industry, government, and advocacy groups agreed on Thursday that the Internet needs to be open and widely available throughout the United States. The question is how to get there.
A newly emboldened Democratic Congress is sure to have a long wish list, including new Internet regulations that corporations believe are unwise or unnecessary. Net neutrality regulations are one possibility, as is broadband and spectrum legislation. But it's unclear where the money to pay for sweeping new projects will come from--neither tax increases nor deficit spending on tech seem that likely when a Wall Street and Detroit bailout are center stage--so today's laws and regulations may end up being extended by default.
The next Congress is sure to introduce Net neutrality legislation, a Democratic congressional staffer said Thursday. "With the Obama administration being extremely supportive of Net neutrality, we're quite excited we can actually get things done," said Frannie Wellings, telecom counsel for Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.).
Speaking at a telecommunications law and policy conference hosted by the University of Nebraska College of Law, Wellings said, "We definitely feel legislation is necessary" in the area of Net neutrality. (On the other hand, the Democrats have controlled Congress for two years and have advanced precisely zero Net neutrality bills, even though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once called it a tremendously important topic.)
Representatives from the telecommunications industry insisted they have a common interest in maintaining open networks since their revenues come from carrying bits--but say that they're OK with the current state of the law. New legislation, they say, is not the way to achieve open access--and could even have adverse results.
The Federal Communications Commission's ruling against Comcast proved the commission's approach of reviewing possible Net neutrality violations on a case-by-case basis is effective, said James Cicconi, senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs for AT&T.
Panelists at a conference Thursday discuss the merits of broadband and Net neutrality legislation.
(Credit: Stephanie Condon/ CNET News)"The essence of network management is some form of discrimination," he said. "This really is about what's reasonable and what isn't. Discrimination that impacts consumers negatively is something unreasonable."
Cicconi said Comcast's appeal of the decision "was a mistake from many standpoints," and that a ruling in Comcast's favor would almost certainly lead to Net neutrality legislation, which would make the FCC's review of telecom practices less flexible.
Replacing a flexible, case-by-case approach to Net neutrality enforcement with a common approach "would lead to more litigation, not less," Cicconi said. (See a related CNET article about wireless Net neutrality.)
The threat of litigation against Net neutrality rules may be overblown, suggested Ben Scott, policy director of media advocacy group Free Press. He cited the news that the wireless trade association CTIA recently dropped its legal challenge to the open access conditions the FCC imposed on the C-Block spectrum Verizon purchased earlier this year. Verizon dropped its legal challenge in October.
The 111th Congress will also reintroduce legislation to promote universal broadband, Wellings said, though the need for that was also disputed.
"It's probably the case the FCC, despite the uncertainties, can probably accomplish much of the Obama administration's agenda without legislation," said Richard Wiley, a former FCC chairman who now represents telecom companies as a partner at Wiley Rein.
There was a consensus among the panelists that one significant step the Obama administration could take would be to reallocate spectrum currently appropriated to government agencies.
"The biggest reason it's a precious resource is because the government has appropriated half of it," said Cicconi.
"If we're serious about having wireless as a serious competitor to wired networks, we're going to have to find more spectrum," Scott added. "The best place I see is government allocations."
The Obama administration will also have to revamp the FCC's approach to establishing an public safety network on the D-Block, panelists said.
Cicconi called it "borderline scandalous" that Congress and the Bush administration "saddled the FCC with the conundrum of how to do it without appropriations."
The situation was analogous to giving an agency land on which to build a highway system exclusively for police cars and ambulances but expecting the agency to get private sector funding, Scott said.
"This is a great opportunity and great challenge for the Obama administration," Wiley said.
CNET's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report
Stephanie Condon is a staff writer for CNET News focused on the intersection of technology and politics. She is based in Washington, D.C. E-mail Stephanie. 
I want to buy any phone I like, pay $50 a month per line, and use it how I like, period!
They're in the market to compete against each other, as Comcast is an investor in Clearwire, which AT&T previously issued comments to the FCC to essentially stall Clearwire's efforts with Sprint, while AT&T developed LTE.
Of course no one in the telecom business wants hard regulations...neither did the commercial banking system, now did it? Heck, you could ask any company listed on Wall Street, if they'd like to self-regulate, and you already know what the answer is.
Net neutrality has worked for many years. It was the law in the US until recently, and it needs to be the law again. Deregulation may work for some things (well... I assume, since it keeps being done), but clearly deregulating everything and letting greed take over and destroy things for everybody is only good for the people who get to cash in on it - be they service providers, banks or the politicans they purchase.
No, the only way to be fair would be to treat all traffic the same. If I want to start a business and offer a new service over the Internet I should get a fair chance to do so without being automatically traffic shaped into bankruptcy. If there isn't enough bandwidth to get VOIP to work then the ISPs need to take the billions of tax payer dollars they've already gotten from the government and actually build more bandwidth with it like they were supposed to.
The reason that the "network neutrality" trope didn't pop up until 2005 is because the rules were very clear until then: The Internet was NOT regulated, and an ISP could pass whatever the hell they wanted to, or block, or proritize, or anything else, and this was GOOD! Huh? Good because there was OPEN ENTRY into the ISP business. ANY ISP could request access to a telco's DSL network. It was under a common carrier tariff. So if an ISP behaved in a way that offended its users, the users could jump ship. And if there was demand for a different type of ISP, one could pop up.
Again, the point is that there was a clear distinction between "carriage" and "content". A telephone company provided carriage, totally bit-neutral, and ISPs could order it in order to provide "content". The entire Internet was treated as "content".
This distinction dated back to the FCC's 1969 Computer Decision, which was clarified and strengthened in 1981's Computer II rules. Those rules said that if a telephone company affiliate (like its own ISP) provided any "enhanced service"(content), then the "basic service" (carriage) that it used had to be made available to all comers on the same terms. Simple and clean. And revoked by the FCC in 2005, at the behest of the telephone companies.
Oh, and don't believe the FCC's lie that the Supreme Court's Brand X decision required them to do it. Read the Brand X decision's text (I did). It explicitly states that it is about cable, not DSL, and that DSL can be subject to different rules. FCC chair Kevin Martin, a Dick Cheney protege, lied through his shiny little teeth when he said that the Brand X decision forced his hand.
Regulating ISPs makes no sense, and would literally break the fragile machinery that keeps the Internet creaking along.
...seems that whenever something threatens their pocketbooks, the telcos go running for legislative *cough*bribery*cough* and assistance in a big hurry...
/P
If Telcos REALLY wanted to avoid regulation and legislation then Comcast and AT&T (and others) should not have interfered or limited our traffic. Its their own irresponsible behavior that bought this on. The only way to ensure wide-spread internet is to treat it like a utility and as such regulations. They had the opportunity to stay under the radar, but they blew it by being greedy and blocking traffic rather than investing in their infrastructure.
Shouldn't their cell tower infrastructure be paid for now and just in a maintenance mode (How many new towers are they actually building now) ?
We've all lived with the big telecoms reluctance to upgrade their bandwidths. We've all seen how the telecoms care nothing about us as customers so why should we trust them to maintain net neutrality? Any time I read an article that takes the side of the telecoms, I have to wonder why?
- by Dalkorian November 17, 2008 4:56 PM PST
- "Trust us", "it's not necessary", "solution looking for a problem", "stay the course" ...
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(16 Comments)We've tried that. It didn't work. Now we have to fix the mess you're causing by being greedy and stupid. Deal with it, we pity you NOT.