The Internet, and the technologies that developed around it, has thrived precisely because of minimal government regulation. The idea that bureaucratic control of the old telcos spurred the growth of the thriving communications infrastructure we see today is palpably ridiculous.
New technologies driving the current economy were created in a world outside of the one where red tape was squeezing the air out of the telecom companies. While government was spinning its wheels trying to "create" competition between telecom companies, capital investment was fleeing the telecom sector and moving to more promising, less regulated places, like voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology.
VoIP, which allows phone calls over the Internet, is cheaper than old phone services and has rendered landline telecommunications moot. But the environment that allowed for its creation may be facing the biggest threat ever.
Under the guise of a principle called network neutrality--the idea that network owners should remain neutral with respect to the content they carry--pro-regulation forces are trying to increase their control over the information superhighway. Joining those who want greater government control of the Net are some content companies, like Google and Yahoo, which are currently engaged in a business struggle with companies such as Verizon and AT&T, which want to charge more for greater use of their broadband networks.
There are two separate issues at work here.
The first issue is over whether broadband providers would ever stop consumers from visiting the legal Web sites of their choice. It is incredibly unlikely that would ever happen, and if it did, the companies that implemented such a policy would suffer, as their customers would soon migrate to their competitors. And, contrary to what regulatory fanatics would have everyone believe, competition in the broadband sector is significant and growing. Cable, DSL, satellite, cellular and broadband over power lines are all options for consumers.
The second issue is whether broadband providers can charge more when customers use more of their networks. That seems like a no-brainer, but the bizarre world of communications regulation often tosses aside common sense.
Companies should be allowed to choose the business model that works best in a market economy. History shows that a heavy regulatory regime such as the forced-access mandates under the 1996 Telecom Act was a disaster and put Americans at a disadvantage by slowing the deployment of high-speed Internet services. Those damaging regulations have been addressed through a combination of Federal Communications Commission actions, court decisions and technological changes, and the time is now to start treating telecommunications firms like any other technology company, not the other way around.
If Silicon Valley's technology companies take a deep breath and clearly consider their options, they will see that negotiating in the marketplace is eminently more preferable than submitting to government micromanagement. Some peoples' fantasies aside, it would be a serious strategic error to invite the bureaucratic regime into technology negotiations.
Biography
Sonia Arrison is director of technology studies at the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute.
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telecommunications, Silicon Valley, broadband provider, broadband, VoIP
True and that means one makes tactical investments to further strategic goals to increase operational advantage. In short, it's cheaper to buy influence in the Beltway than to negotiate with competitors.
Sad but so. There are no open markets. That is the fantasy. There is more or less regulation and price competition. No service or innovation of one company is not quickly adopted or offset by another. That equalizes over the medium term. So regulations apart from public safety concerns are as effective as open competition. On the other hand, if one can gain a competitive advantage through a legislative means, it is the fiduciary responsibility of the board members to see to it such means are pursued.
Cat and mouse: if the mouse can get the cheese and back to the hole in the wall before the cat can catch him, that is how little mice are fed.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
Perhaps the author should spend less time directing studies and more time on research before going public. Seriously, why even put this in? Whatever Al Gore said has nothing to do with the possiblilty of the government regulating the internet.
In other words he claimed to be responsible not for the idea behind the internet, but in it's actual implementation - i.e. if it wasn't for him, there would be no internet.
People who know the history of the internet also know that it existed for decades prior to Al Gore ever being elected in any political position - first as a military network, then as a public network mostly used by academics, transforming over time into the commercialised network we have today.
He did work on a focus group that gave funding to network operators, and passed anti-discrimatory laws preventing large businesses from being favoured over smaller companies, as well as preventing telcos from giving access preference to business users over that of home users.
However his input in these areas was minimal to say the least, as his knowledge didn't quite cover the technicalities behind these issues.
What he did do was add his reputation as a political heavyweight to those bills and because of his support, these and other laws helping the internet transform into it's current offering came to pass.
He did not, however, install the routers, lay the cable, light up the fibre, setup the servers, nor did he write the software, or create the intefaces or protocols we use to access this network.
whole lot of doubt, does it????
Or just put is down to standard Fog, Snow, and BS handed out by
political wannabes.
If funding and legislation were not provided "back in the day", this article would probably be moot. Without government funding pushing development, the Web as we know it would not exist.
If it existed at all, we'd be paying a monthly bill just like electric bills, phone bills and cable bills. Not only that, we'd have the companies and groups like the PRI telling us how great deregulation is, how it will increase competition and how it will lower our monthly bills! ROTFL
So in the end...if you don't want gov regs involved the answer is very simple. Pay for use. That's what the telco's want, and that's what Wall Street would love to see... especially now that web use in all its forms have become embedded in the whole culture/business of every nation. I can see them drooling now.
a gi=uy there to fix them without any argument about whose job
it was. And Joe the Farmer got cheap phone service because the
local PSC's decided that businesses could subsidize the
individuals so just about everyone could get a phone., which was
good for businesses.
And then the DOJ got a wild hair. If there were anyone in the DOJ
with any brains, AT&T would have been penalized by making
them take over the post office. Then we would have the world's
two best communications systems.
And maybe when you called your local telco for help, there
would be someone to answer the phone who actually could and
would help you.
think tank. It receives funding from, among
others, Philip Morris. It is very likely that
Sonia Arrison was paid to write this article by
some corporation like AT&T.
This may be a hard-core attitude, but I think
that certain people are not entitled to an
opinion on the subject of Internet Governance.
In that spirit, here are a few questions for
Sonia Arrison:
1. Have you ever had a job writing code?
2. Do you know what the difference between IP4
and IP6 are?
3. Can you describe what TCP does? How about
what the letters stand for?
4. Can you describe what a router does?
5. Can you explain the difference between a
bridge and a router?
Well? Do you know anything about the subject?
Or are you just a lobbyist?
This is an economic question much more than a technical one. Should Google submit its business plans to the FCC before rolling out a new technology, or new pricing on AdWords?
It's a question of who makes the call, not a question of what the technology is. We don't know what the technology will be in 10 years, and we don't want to regulate it before it's even invented.
VoIP came to be because it was attractive to consumers and the gov't had nothing to do with it. Ditto Intel chips, Google Maps, iPod, the Amazon API.
Enforcing a business model on the telcos is to throttle the incentive for building the next generation of network. It's a punishment in search of a crime. Let them build what they want, charge what they want, and live or die by their customers' judgment.
Mark Cuban gets it right: http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000267073488/
"Google submit its business plans to the FCC
before rolling out a new technology, or new
pricing on AdWords", the issue is whether Yahoo
or Google or news.com has to get approval from
AT&T Broadband or whoever owns the physical last
mile. Given that it will take almost as long to
get an answer out of AT&T as the government, I
think that there will be no difference, in terms
of prevention of innovation.
Second, I was asking the blond if she actually
knows anything, not you. If she is just an
ignorant lawyer/lobbyist, then I don't think that
she is entitled to have an opinon on the subject.
I especially don't feel that, if she is ignorant,
that having some ILEC's position paper posted
behind a random pretty face is going to advance
the discussion. BTW, the question stands.
I agree that having an uncertain regulatory
environment does inhibit investment. We need
to decide if newly built broadband will be
regulated under the "common carrier" rules, or
if AOL can buy your town's cable and DSL system
and force you to use only AOL. Clearly, the
carriers will make more money if they can control
the content of the network. That's not a good
enough reason to abandon "common carrier" rules.
This sort of thing has happened before. When the
telephone system was new, there were all sorts of
questions regarding whether the telephone company
was responsible for crank calls and whether the
telephone company was allowed to discriminate and
refuse to provide service to some people. The
current system of regulated monopolies came about
as a political compromise around 100 years ago.
Broadband service is going to need some kind of
well-defined rules, before investment is going
to be attractive. (To date, most of the DSL and
cable services have piggy-backed on existing wire
or fiber: Very little purpose-built last-yard
infrastructure is currently active.)
Economic theory has a name for this problem:
Systems like the local telephone system are
called "natural monopolies".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
The bottom line is this: Are we going to allow
those companies who happen to own the last mile
to be allowed to ban Skype, BitTorrent, or
Napster? How about iTunes, Google, or Yahoo?
I tend to not like the whole idea of government
involvement in this area, but allowing the
corporations to run amok would be even worse.
First, it is not "laughable" to say that regulation helped the Internet to develop. There are, of course, many types of regulation and many purposes of regulation. The specific regulation to which the Public Knowledge piece referred is common carriage. This is a pro-competition, market-opening concept. In the dial-up telephone world, it meant that phone companies couldn't discriminate in the traffic they carried. One service had to be offered to all.
We do not advocate returning to the full common carrier regime. Instead, PK favors a complaint-driven process with the burden on the carrier to prove that it isn't discriminating against a service provider. That way, a small service provider wouldn't be shut down in a dispute with a much bigger carrier.
Arrison's column also missed the points about the issues she raised, whether a carrier would prohibit a user from visiting a web site, and whether broadband carriers can charge users more when they use the networks.
The issue she doesn't mention is the type of discrimination about which we're most concerned -- at the service provider/application end of the business. If a telephone company provides some package of elements to one business that gives that business a faster connection than another, then that telephone company is discriminating. Any telephone company option offered to one service provider should be offered to all. That's the nature of the open Internet which allowed any user to put any application online without advantages granted by the network operator.
Whether the network operator could block a user from getting to a web site is problematic. Under the broadband regime today, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, there are no rules in the broadband world. Carriers can do what they want. If there were more competition, then it wouldn't be a problem. But as Vint Cerf testified the other day, only about half the country has a choice of telco or cable. The rest either have only one provider, or none.
We see no problem with carriers charging consumers for their use of the broadband. Consumers do that now, assuming they have a choice, of a number of speeds and options. That's not the issue.
Finally, there is that old canard about Al Gore inventing the Internet. It may have been a poor choice of words, but the fact is Gore was a visionary on these things going back to when he was in the House, and his work helped to make the academic data network transform into the robust commercial Internet we have today.
Art Brodsky
Public Knowledge
As much as admire the man, and believe if he'd been president not only would 911 have been prevented (the previous administration not only had daily meetings concerning the activities of Al Quaeda, but almost certainly wouldn't have ignored memos such as "Al Quaeda are going to attack", "Al Quaeda are training pilots in the US", "Al Quaeda are planning to fly commercial airliners into buildings" - all of which were in GW's inbox, however he was too busy taking vacations to bother with this, and his senior officials actually told their subordinates not to mention Al Quaeda or else), but we would not now be in a hopeless quagmire of a conflict in Iraq - the rhetoric that he helped make the academic data network transform into the internet is deceptive.
He was on a team of people that did achieve this transformation - but his input was minimal to say the least. Actually to say his input was non-existant in this matter would be pretty accurate.
Thus people are quite correct to ridicule his statement that he "invented the internet", because he more or less had nothing to do with it - except by accident.
And what is wrong with neo-liberals? Allow me to quote here some of the "alternative" definitions currently cited on the Wikipedia for "neo-liberalism". (you can look up the term there for the full background)
- A philosophy in which the existence and operation
of a market are valued in themselves, separately from
any previous relationship with the production of goods
and services, and without any attempt to justify them
in terms of their effect on the production of goods
and services; and where the operation of a market or
market-like structure is seen as an ethic in itself,
capable of acting as a guide for all human action,
and substituting for all previously existing ethical
beliefs.
- The rule of the market, and rejection of the concept
of "the public good" or "community".
- The policies and processes whereby a relative
handful of private interests are permitted to control
as much as possible of social life in order to maximize
their personal profit.
All sound good to you?
issue. You were posting a comment on the issue, weren't you???
bicycle. The Internet we have is what it is because the government
stayed the h--- out. That's the way it should be.
There's nothing that can screw up a good idea like letting the
government get involved.
- Horsefeathers
- by directorblue February 20, 2006 6:34 AM PST
- Here are three simple questions the carriers should be forced to answer:
- Reply to this comment
-
(23 Comments)1) Will you use deep packet inspection to analyze and/or meter customer behavior?
2) Will you offer tiered (e.g., "gold", "silver", and "bronze") Internet packages to customers otherwise operating at the same bandwidth?
3) Will you monitor, delay, and/or block voice-over-IP (VoIP), peer-to-peer file transfers, or any type of service used by customers?
The hardware that Cisco and others are pitching the carriers implies that, indeed, they are exploring new, intrusive, and anti-innovation methods of controlling what content providers can do:
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2006/02/end-of-internet-another-fantastic-deal.html
Take a look at Cisco's SEF hardware and you'll get a sense of what the carriers may be trying to do.