Net Neutrality

[RPB]

I almost bought me a new pair of custom handmade cowboy boots, but then realized the shoe industry hasn't been "nationalized" yet with enough Federal controls and regulations, so I guess I'll wait .... they should be a better product afterwords. I don't imagine they'll have side-impact airbags ... but, perhaps serial numbers databased by the Feds, which would be great, because I had a pair stolen from my car once.

Where else will the Feds be poking their noses, where they don't belong?

I"m guessing .......... anywhere they can.

[jimlongley]

I am a long time telecom employee. I get paid a pretty good salary by Verizon to not work there, and I never did - I retired from NY Telephone in 1995, just before it officially ceased to exist.

As a telecom technical trainer and generally curious person, the history of telecom has always interested me, and as such I can site numerous examples of just the sort of thing that EconDoc states below.

There are some great pictures of NY City that people use to show what things were like in the horse and buggy days, and I like to use them because they show one of the dangers of not having that "natural monopoly." Hidden carefully, in plain sight, in those pictures, are wires running up and down both sides of the streets, from poles that look more like tall ship masts (and were constructed in the same manner BTW) with drop wires running from them to buildings on each side of the street, making the whole thing look like a monstrous spider web constructed by a very intoxicated spider.

It wasn't uncommon for one company to rent space on another's poles, including splicing another pole on top of the first, and it was equally common for employees of one company to sabotage the others plant, even up to cutting down poles that were blocking "right of way" and occsionally line gangs had street fights that resembled the best of the "Five Corners" battles in NY City.

The city of Auburn NY is still, or was when NY Telephone existed, divided right down the middle by two phone comapnies, and it is a toll call from one side to the other. Back before the partition of the city, it might be impossible to call from your house to your neighbor's house, or you might have to pay an exorbitant toll. My grandfather, supervising water and sewers for that city back in the 20s, had to have three telephones in his house in order to be able to contact all of the people that worked for him.

The problem with phone and cable service (and electric, gas, water and sewage, etc.) is that they are natural monopolies. There are some businesses that are just not well-suited to competition. In the case of utilities it is the need to construct infrastructure that is the problem. We don't want three different sets of phone lines run down the same street by three different companies. That is too expensive. The best way to deal with a natural monopoly is through regulation.

However, my concern about "net neutrality" is that it will somehow be co-opted into something approaching the fairness doctrine. Example, what if, when you Googled "NRA", you got the Brady Center instead, with the NRA's website buried three pages later? That is the sort of garbage that I fear from all of this.

And this sort of thing happened back in the infancy of the phone companies, leading Strowger to invent his dial telephone system, which Bell immediately stole, or at least parts of it. Strowger was a Kansas City undertaker who thought that the live operators of the day were taking bribes to block calls to him and route them to his competitors, and he was probably right.

And regulation, done right, can work, but getting it done right is where the tough part is. When I was a boot phone man, there were 76 different telephone companies in NY state, each one with its own clearly defined territory, and they didn't raid each other, although sometimes people with need to do business in both territories, such as a veterinarian whose phone I worked on, who had two almost identical telephones "side by each" on his desk, one for people who lived south of him and one for people to the north.

One of the regulatory rules of the franchises was that any phone company that went out of business for whatever reason could not be allowed to just die, but had to be taken over by a nearby company if a suitable buyer could not be found, and the nearby company elected by the bureaucracy was usually the one with the deepest pockets. Suitable buyers were very rare, because one of the regulatory rules was that anyone who bought such a company had to immediately upgrade its service to the state of the art. Thus, when Schoharie Valley Telephone was closing its doors because mom and pop couldn't get the kids to take over the family business, New York Telephone became the natural choice to absorb SVT into its "monopoly" allowing me the opportunity to work on old hand cranked telephones for a while, and I can honestly state that I have worked on every sort of telephone system from hand caranked to fiber optic during my career.

So regulation seems natural to me, but it scares me at the same time. I was there for the breakup of the Bell System, which was not the only phone company at the time, even if everyone thought so. And I was a low level manager and engineer through a lot of the years afterward before retiring in 1995, semi-forced, but with added perks that made staying on voluntarily and maybe being assigned to work in NY City very inattractive. And I have seen the benefits and pitfalls of regulation up close and personal as it were.

The best way to imagine it would be to cite the railroads, imagine having two or three competing railroads, with different gauge tracks and different signalling systems, etc, all competing for the same physical space. And that actually happened here and there. And what happened when one railroad went out of business, or your server? And what if your provider was bought by another who decided that they would only carry communicatons in EBCDIC (as if anyone could tell the difference these days) or in packets of 125 bits?

OK not quite realistic, and somewhat self destructive, but regulation would prevent that, while at the same time stultifying innovation, such as using left over space in fixed size packets to carry other information, like tweets.

[/rant off] Sorry, I get going.

[The Mad Moderate]

just to clear out some of the lies that are currently echoing in the right right noise machine the net neutrally issue is simple it keeps the internet open and stops internet companies from charging you more for a you tube video than they do for checking your Facebook status its not an attempt to control the internet only to stop the corporations from ripping off consumers


conservatives vote their fears while liberals vote their dreams

[OldCurlyWolf]

just to clear out some of the lies that are currently echoing in the right right noise machine the net neutrally issue is simple it keeps the internet open and stops internet companies from charging you more for a you tube video than they do for checking your Facebook status its not an attempt to control the internet only to stop the corporations from ripping off consumers


conservatives vote their fears while liberals vote their dreams

Nice fantasy land you live in.

[RPB]

True story: I was a tiny kid but I'll never forget my parents discussing the price of milk at school in the car one day.

"If the federal government money is accepted by the schools, the price of milk will drop from 7 cents to 4 cents, that will be good"
"Yes, but the next thing you know, the Feds will try to regulate what they teach and what can be said in school"

inch=mile

Sorta like that "voluntary" income tax they passed a while back, which became mandatory.

No matter what party is in office...It's just the nature of the beast. Each branch of Gov't wants increased control over more areas, to leverage the "checks and balances"... and it all grows.

It's all about obtaining more power.

[bnc]

What resources required for internet service to exist are limited?

[RPB]

What resources required for internet service to exist are limited?

Not sure what you are asking; but taking your question as asked:

Example: Most of the Texas Hill Country=
1) no DSL available in most areas; what is available is more costly than in Metropolitan areas
2) no fibre optic nor cable available... priced roughly 10 times higher than metro areas
3) limited wireless availability, depending which side of a hill you live
4) Satellite mostly available
5) Dialup available

But, that's the free market and sparse population/expense of adding DSLAMS/running cables, it doesn't really need government controlling it more.... as a market grows/population increases, companies meet demand, same as cities/companies did providing water/sewer/phone and other services.... as demand increases, more companies arise; more competition and lower prices as people switch companies/providers.

I recall being on a waiting list in Houston for DSL/Cable and paying a lot when I got it ... now it's 10 times faster and a fourth of the price.... all without additional gov't controls.

If "free market" works ... why CHANGE it?

It's all about Gov't obtaining more power.

If it aint broke...obama will fix it until it is.

[longhorn_92]

What resources required for internet service to exist are limited?

Not sure what you are asking; but taking your question as asked:

Example: Most of the Texas Hill Country=
1) no DSL available in most areas; what is available is more costly than in Metropolitan areas
2) no fibre optic nor cable available... priced roughly 10 times higher than metro areas
3) limited wireless availability, depending which side of a hill you live
4) Satellite mostly available
5) Dialup available

But, that's the free market and sparse population/expense of adding DSLAMS/running cables, it doesn't really need government controlling it more.... as a market grows/population increases, companies meet demand, same as cities/companies did providing water/sewer/phone and other services.... as demand increases, more companies arise; more competition and lower prices as people switch companies/providers.

I recall being on a waiting list in Houston for DSL/Cable and paying a lot when I got it ... now it's 10 times faster and a fourth of the price.... all without additional gov't controls.

If "free market" works ... why CHANGE it?

It's all about Gov't obtaining more power.

If it aint broke...obama will fix it until it is.

Here are quotes from someone who "got it". These were taken from a speech given in 1964...

"Well I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers."

"Well, I, for one, resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the free men and women of this country, as "the masses." This is a term we haven't applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, "the full power of centralized government" -- this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy."

"This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down: [up] man's old -- old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course."

-- Ronald Reagan

I wonder if we are willing to stand up and say NO to all of this massive government takeover of our lives and our freedoms? Just wondering?...

[bnc]

What resources required for internet service to exist are limited?

Not sure what you are asking; but taking your question as asked:

Example: Most of the Texas Hill Country=
1) no DSL available in most areas; what is available is more costly than in Metropolitan areas
2) no fibre optic nor cable available... priced roughly 10 times higher than metro areas
3) limited wireless availability, depending which side of a hill you live
4) Satellite mostly available
5) Dialup available

I worded that really poorly. What I meant was, what factors of internet use are scarce such that the use of them by one internet user interferes with the use by another user.

Land, for example, is scarce in this sense. By occupying my land, there is less land available for everyone else. Conversely, sunlight is not scarce in this sense, it is superabundant. If I go outside and enjoy the sunlight it does not impact other people to do the same, there is no way to "use up" all the sunlight so that others are left in the dark.

To use a shooting example just look at a typical indoor range. Most ranges have some sort of fee schedule involving a lane and time along with number of guns and number of people per lane. The lanes are clearly scarce since they are not infinite in number and, therefore, limit the amount of customers the range can service. If I am using one lane, there is one lane less for everyone else, thus limiting the number of customers that can be served. Time is quite similar, in that the time that I use a lane for is time in the lane that nobody else can have in that lane, again limiting the amount of service available to others. But the number of guns I bring, on the other hand, does not impact the availability of the shooting ranger's services. If I take a lane for an hour with one gun it has no impact on the guy next to me, or the guy waiting in line behind me, any differently then if I took a lane for an hour with 3 guns. Therefore, the number of guns someone brings to the range is not a scarce resource and does not limit the availability of the range's services, and shouldn't be charged for; it costs the range nothing if you bring another gun in if you are still in one lane for one hour. You might make the same argument against charging based on the number of rounds fired, but that might be legitimate if the backstops can only handle so many rounds before replacement or repair.

So, what factors (infrastructural resources) of the internet are similarly scarce like lanes and time are at the shooting range? Bandwidth, time, number of websites accessed, downloaded/uploaded material, other stuff? (I'm not to savvy on IT infrastructure stuff)

[chasfm11]

Unless I'm mistaken, the Farm to Market road system in Texas, like a similar one in Pennsylvania, was an example of government regulation over the free market environment. Traffic over the FM roads could not justify their existence but the government did it anyway under the banner of giving everyone equal access and promoting commerce.

Using the inch=mile, once you do it in one area, it is pretty easy to do it in another.

The really interesting juxtaposition is that the Federal government originally owned the Internet and tried to give it to AT&T so that they would maintain it. In governmental hands, laying fiber everywhere would have been pretty easy because they could use eminent domain to lay the cables. Before it was brought down by corruption, MCI became a rousing success by buying up old pipeline rights of way and using them to lay fiber optic cables, bypassing a huge bottleneck for acquiring access to the ground needed to accomplish the building of a network. Now, we've come full circle and because the Internet has become so successful, the governments wants it back - to regulate and tax. I firmly believe that the saliva is flowly freely, dripping from the corners of politicians' mouths at prospects of regulation because that would open the door for taxation.

[jmorris]

....
So, what factors (infrastructural resources) of the internet are similarly scarce like lanes and time are at the shooting range? Bandwidth, time, number of websites accessed, downloaded/uploaded material, other stuff? (I'm not to savvy on IT infrastructure stuff)

The idea of net neutrality really has nothing to do with the lack of infrastructure resources (at least it shouldn't). As mentioned elsewhere, the idea is that one content provider can't pay a service provider (comcast, at&t, time-warner, etc) to inhibit access to network resources to other content providers. For example, Yahoo paying Comcast to restrict bandwidth to Google and Bing. It does NOT stop Yahoo from paying extra for more bandwidth.

It should also restrict service providers from throttling access to, say, Hulu because they think it's using too much bandwidth, but not restrict a provider from setting up a tiered usage fee structure for users.

Unfortunately, after all the politicians and the FCC got done with it, it's hard telling what it will really do. It's going to take a while to figure out what the proposed rules really mean.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/20 ... neutrality

[Pyrat]

Game over? Maybe not...

What's Next for the FCC and Net Neutrality? (PC World Magazine)

[RPB]

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." P.J O'Rourke

[G.A. Heath]

I'm very much in the smaller government camp, and I still see a need for Net Neutrality although the concept of more regulation scares the daylights out of me. Lets say AT&T and Google merge or simply make a deal that causes all AT&T customers to loose access to Microsoft unless they payup for a "Premium Access" package. Now users of Microsoft Operating systems can no longer get updates, and when a user goes to Microsoft.com they get directed to "Google Software Services". Suddenly when their computer is completely infested with malware an AT&T rep shows up and says "You must fix or replace your computer before we turn your internet back on because it is sending spam and/or attacking other machines. Among the papers he leaves is a CD with Google's Chromium OS that can be installed and will get their internet turned back on for Free.

Here's the rub: this scenario is possible, but we already have regulations and laws that will prevent it if applied correctly. We can use the existing anti-trust and monopoly laws/regulations to prevent this kind of abuse. So whats my position on Net Neutrality? I think that it is currently a solution in search of a problem. When the problem actually happens we should address it then and in a manner that minimizes government growth, preferable by using laws and regulations already in place to make things happen.

[Dave2]

I'm very much in the smaller government camp, and I still see a need for Net Neutrality although the concept of more regulation scares the daylights out of me. Lets say AT&T and Google merge or simply make a deal that causes all AT&T customers to loose access to Microsoft unless they payup for a "Premium Access" package. Now users of Microsoft Operating systems can no longer get updates, and when a user goes to Microsoft.com they get directed to "Google Software Services". Suddenly when their computer is completely infested with malware an AT&T rep shows up and says "You must fix or replace your computer before we turn your internet back on because it is sending spam and/or attacking other machines. Among the papers he leaves is a CD with Google's Chromium OS that can be installed and will get their internet turned back on for Free.

Here's the rub: this scenario is possible, but we already have regulations and laws that will prevent it if applied correctly. We can use the existing anti-trust and monopoly laws/regulations to prevent this kind of abuse. So whats my position on Net Neutrality? I think that it is currently a solution in search of a problem. When the problem actually happens we should address it then and in a manner that minimizes government growth, preferable by using laws and regulations already in place to make things happen.

So you're for it, but think that existing laws are sufficient? I can respect that. I might even agree with it, but I'd have to research existing laws first, and it's laundry night.