[governance] FW: [Dewayne-Net] The internet is fucked

michael gurstein gurstein at gmail.com
Tue Mar 4 12:29:31 EST 2014 

-----Original Message-----
From: dewayne-net at warpspeed.com [mailto:dewayne-net at warpspeed.com] On Behalf
Of Dewayne Hendricks
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2014 8:53 AM
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The internet is fucked

[Note:  This item comes from friend Tim Pozar.  DLH]

From: Tim Pozar <pozar at lns.com>
Subject: The internet is fucked
Date: March 4, 2014 at 8:13:00 PST
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne at warpspeed.com>

POLICY & LAW
The internet is fucked
By Nilay Patel
Feb 25 2014
<http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/25/5431382/the-internet-is-fucked>

Here’s a simple truth: the internet has radically changed the world. Over
the course of the past 20 years, the idea of networking all the world’s
computers has gone from a research science pipe dream to a necessary
condition of economic and social development, from government and university
labs to kitchen tables and city streets. We are all travelers now, desperate
souls searching for a signal to connect us all. It is awesome.

And we’re fucking everything up.

Massive companies like AT&T and Comcast have spent the first two months of
2014 boldly announcing plans to close and control the internet through
additional fees, pay-to-play schemes, and sheer brutal size — all while the
legal rules designed to protect against these kinds of abuses were struck
down in court for basically making too much sense. “Broadband providers
represent a threat to internet openness,” concluded Judge David Tatel in
Verizon’s case against the FCC’s Open Internet order, adding that the FCC
had provided ample evidence of internet companies abusing their market power
and had made “a rational connection between the facts found and the choices
made.” Verizon argued strenuously, but had offered the court “no persuasive
reason to question that judgement.”

Then Tatel cut the FCC off at the knees for making “a rather half-hearted
argument” in support of its authority to properly police these threats and
vacated the rules protecting the open internet, surprising observers on both
sides of the industry and sending new FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler into a
tailspin of empty promises seemingly designed to disappoint everyone.

“I expected the anti-blocking rule to be upheld,” National Cable and
Telecommunications Association president and CEO Michael Powell told me
after the ruling was issued. Powell was chairman of the FCC under George W.
Bush; he issued the first no-blocking rules. “Judge Tatel basically said the
Commission didn’t argue it properly.”

In the meantime, the companies that control the internet have continued down
a dark path, free of any oversight or meaningful competition to check their
behavior. In January, AT&T announced a new “sponsored data” plan that would
dramatically alter the fierce one-click-away competition that’s thus far
characterized the internet. Earlier this month, Comcast announced plans to
merge with Time Warner Cable, creating an internet service behemoth that
will serve 40 percent of Americans in 19 of the 20 biggest markets with
virtually no rivals.

And after months of declining Netflix performance on Comcast’s network, the
two companies announced a new “paid peering” arrangement on Sunday, which
will see Netflix pay Comcast for better access to its customers, a
capitulation Netflix has been trying to avoid for years. Paid peering
arrangements are common among the network companies that connect the
backbones of the internet, but consumer companies like Netflix have
traditionally remained out of the fray — and since there’s no oversight or
transparency into the terms of the deal, it’s impossible to know what kind
of precedent it sets. Broadband industry insiders insist loudly that the
deal is just business as usual, while outside observers are full of concerns
about the loss of competition and the increasing power of consolidated
network companies. Either way, it’s clear that Netflix has decided to take
matters — and costs — into its own hands, instead of relying on rational
policy to create an effective and fair marketplace.

In a perfect storm of corporate greed and broken government, the internet
has gone from vibrant center of the new economy to burgeoning tool of
economic control. Where America once had Rockefeller and Carnegie, it now
has Comcast’s Brian Roberts, AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, and Verizon’s Lowell
McAdam, robber barons for a new age of infrastructure monopoly built on
fiber optics and kitty GIFs.

And the power of the new network-industrial complex is immense and
unchecked, even by other giants: AT&T blocked Apple’s FaceTime and Google’s
Hangouts video chat services for the preposterously silly reason that the
apps were "preloaded" on each company’s phones instead of downloaded from an
app store. Verizon and AT&T have each blocked the Google Wallet mobile
payment system because they’re partners in the competing (and not very good)
ISIS service. Comcast customers who stream video on their Xboxes using
Microsoft’s services get charged against their data caps, but the Comcast
service is tax-free.

We’re really, really fucking this up.

But we can fix it, I swear. We just have to start telling each other the
truth. Not the doublespeak bullshit of regulators and lobbyists, but the
actual truth. Once we have the truth, we have the power — the power to
demand better not only from our government, but from the companies that
serve us as well. "This is a political fight," says Craig Aaron, president
of the advocacy group Free Press. "When the internet speaks with a unified
voice politicians rip their hair out."

We can do it. Let’s start.

THE INTERNET IS A UTILITY, JUST LIKE WATER AND ELECTRICITY

Go ahead, say it out loud. The internet is a utility.

There, you’ve just skipped past a quarter century of regulatory corruption
and lawsuits that still rage to this day and arrived directly at the obvious
conclusion. Internet access isn’t a luxury or a choice if you live and
participate in the modern economy, it’s a requirement. Have you ever been in
an office when the internet goes down? It’s like recess. My friend Paul
Miller lived without the internet for a year and I’m still not entirely sure
he’s recovered from the experience. The internet isn’t an adjunct to real
life; it’s not another place. You don’t do things "on the internet," you
just do things. The network is interwoven into every moment of our lives,
and we should treat it that way.

"COMMON CARRIER RULES ARE BASICALLY FREE SPEECH."
Yet the corporations that control internet access insist that they’re
providing specialized services that are somehow different than water, power,
and telephones. They point to crazy bullshit you don’t want or need like
free email addresses and web hosting solutions and goofy personalized search
screens as evidence that they’re actually providing "information" services
instead of the more highly regulated "telecommunications" services. "Common
carrier rules are basically free speech," says the Free Press’ Aaron. "We
have all these protections for what happens over landline phones that we’re
not extending to data, even though all these people under 25 mostly
communicate in data."

It’s time to just end these stupid legal word games and say what we all
already know: internet access is a utility. A commodity that should get
better and faster and cheaper over time. Anyone who says otherwise is lying
for money.

THERE IS ZERO COMPETITION FOR INTERNET ACCESS

None. Zero. Nothing. It is a wasteland. You are standing in the desert and
the only thing that grows is higher prices.

70 percent of American households have but one or two choices for high-speed
internet access: cable broadband from a cable provider or DSL from a
telephone provider. And since DSL isn’t nearly as fast as cable, and the
cable companies are aggressive in bundling TV and internet packages
together, it’s really only one choice. And that means the level of
innovation from these providers has almost completely stagnated, even as
prices have gone up.

Why are cellphones so much cooler now than they were in 2000? Because Apple
and Google and Samsung all had to fight it out and make better products in
order to survive. They’re competing. Comcast hasn’t had to fight anything,
at any time. It is fat and lazy and wants nothing more than to get fatter
and lazier. That’s why Comcast is spending $45 billion on Time Warner Cable
instead of integrating Netflix into its cable boxes and working with Apple
and Google and Microsoft on the real next generation of TV: when you’re the
only real choice in 19 of America’s 20 biggest markets, you get to move real
slow and still make a lot of money. It's not clear Comcast even knows what
real competition looks like.

"Unless the FCC thinks that there is a realistic chance that the deal will
reverse two decades of rising prices, it should stop the merger," writes
Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu. "Passing on savings has never been
part of Comcast’s business model." Monopolies are nice like that.

Despite the innovation in phones, the same is true for mobile internet.
There are only four major national carriers, most of whom run incompatible
networks and all of which are stronger in various regions. If you hate your
Sprint or Verizon service, switching to AT&T or T-Mobile is anything but
simple and probably requires paying off a two-year contact of some kind.
(Even T-Mobile, which is aggressively eliminating contracts for service,
maintains a number of device payment plans that require a contract.) Chances
are once you’ve chosen a wired broadband carrier and a wireless carrier that
works well in your area, you’re stuck: there are few other places to go, and
even if you have choices the high costs of switching mean you’re not very
likely to leave at all.

(And if anyone tries to tell you that ultra-expensive mobile broadband is
somehow competitive with wired service, ask that person to buy you a nice
dinner and tell you the story of when they realized dignity had a price.
You’re talking to a cable industry lobbyist; they can afford it.)

What happens in countries where there’s real competition? In the UK, where
incumbent provider BT is required to allow competitors to use its wired
broadband network, home internet service prices are as low as £2.50 a month,
or just over $4. In South Korea, where wireless giants SK Telecom and LG
Uplus are locked in a fierce technology battle, customers have access to the
fastest mobile networks in the world — up to 300Mbps, compared to a
theoretical max of 80Mbps on Verizon that’s actually more like 15 or 20mbps
in the real world.

AMERICANS PAY MORE FOR SLOWER SPEEDS THAN ANYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD And
Americans pay more for these slower wireless speeds than anyone else in the
world: in Germany, where customers can freely switch between carriers by
swapping SIM cards, T-Mobile customers pay just $1.18 per Mbps of speed. In
the US, our mostly incompatible wireless networks lock customers in with
expensive handsets they can’t take elsewhere, allowing AT&T and Verizon to
charge around $4 per Mbps each and Sprint to clock in at an insane $7.50.

American politicians love to stand on the edges of important problems by
insisting that the market will find a solution. And that’s mostly right; we
don’t need the government meddling in places where smart companies can
create their own answers. But you can’t depend on the market to do anything
when the market doesn’t exist. "We can either have competition, which would
solve a lot of these problems, or we can have regulation," says Aaron. "What
Comcast is trying is to have neither." It’s insanity, and we keep lying to
ourselves about it. It’s time to start thinking about ways to actually do
something.

[snip]

Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>

 


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