One says absurd, the other says extreme…
What each has in common is an attempt to deride the other perspective and cast
issues in terms of us v. them, with bellicose rhetoric rather than simply
stating ones ideas about how we should move forward with supporting evidence in
fact. What we see in the continuing drama of the Birkmaier vs Manfredi
bickering is just more of the same divisiveness that is so pervasive in our
politics these days.
Frankly, the debate over this issue is complex, and I don’t have a definitive
answer, but even the conservative in me recognizes that there is value in some
degree of regulation, and I don’t see the matter as so clearly intrusive
government.
Please, gentlemen, be so.
Leonard Caillouet
Gainesville, Florida
From: opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of Craig Birkmaier
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2016 8:32 AM
To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [opendtv] Re: Net Neutrality: Government Control of Your Internet
Service | National Review
On Jun 21, 2016, at 8:27 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx> > wrote:
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
It is clearly aligned with a less intrusive view of government
regulation, but ultra-right-of-center clap trap is absurd.
Not absurd. It's simply a biased article. An unbiased article would have put
the question in context, explaining how we have had neutrality mandated on
public communication networks for more than 100 years. There are too many
people out there, knee jerk "black helicopter" paranoids, who believe that the
FCC is trying to make the Internet non-neutral.
Such is the nature of discourse in our nation today. One cannot argue a
position without the other side calling it extreme...
But this is not.
The article did not need to dredge up the history of Title II, and the history
of regulating utilities as natural monopolies. Just because the government
regulates one industry, whether necessary or not, is not justification to
impose similar regulations on another industry.
What is far more important is that the principals of network neutrality were
already in place and being managed by a thriving marketplace with innovation
and competition. We did not need a government regulator to step in and turn the
Internet into something it is not, to justify regulating it.
Keep in mind, this was the third attempt by the FCC, and it is still likely to
be appealed. If there is any justification for the government to get involved,
it should fall on Congress to establish appropriate rules for the road. This
cannot happen under the current regime, as Obama would veto such a bill - he
clearly wants the FCC to be able to regulate Internet "speech," and strongly
supported the Title II approach.
Neutrality of the Internet is assumed and expected from the vast majority of
people, Craig. That's how this topic has to be explained.
Exactly. We have many guiding principle that flow from a greater authority than
the government. The Constitution was deliberately designed to limit the power
of a centralized government.
The government does not "permit" capitalism - it is assumed that we have a free
economy and the people expect to be able to engage in commerce without the
government regulating how business is conducted...
At least that was the plan a few hundred years ago. And it worked, better than
any economic system in history. But now the system is being crushed with
regulation and bought and paid for legislated competitive advantage.
The cable industry just won a huge victory, even as they feigned opposition.
Unfortunately, that's the way things work now.
The only possible question SHOULD be, does it require the FCC to ensure that
neutrality be maintained? And I would have said no, it DID NOT require the FCC
in the past. Their hands off policy was fine, in the past. Until the emergence
of TV content distribution via IP streaming, from sites independent of the ISP.
And then, as one might have expected, the funny business started.
But that is a complete canard. The industry worked through these issues as it
should have. It was not reasonable for companies like Netflix to expect a free
ride when they started flooding ISP interconnections with asymmetrical traffic.
You might argue that the tactics Comcast used to negotiate appropriate peering
agreements were heavy handed, but in the end, Netflix and others have agreed to
pay their fair share for the traffic they are generating.
It did not take the FCC to do this. What's more, we have appropriate
institutions in place to deal with bad actors. The court system can deal with
issues when companies use anti-competitive tactics. And there are multiple
Federal agencies that already had the authority to deal with these competitive
issues.
It has changed radically over the years. Remember when long distance
was a metered by the minute service?
Apples and oranges.
No Bert. A regulated monopoly versus market based competition.
Neutrality does not mean that the price must be government regulated.
Neutrality means that the provider cannot discriminate, filter, or otherwise
treat service differently, depending on the CONTENT.
But they can and do today, as the article pointed out. The problem with TV
content was the congestion it caused at critical interconnection points. The
old peering agreements were no longer adequate to deal with this highly
asymmetric traffic. Even more to the point, the load on the wide area network
was inappropriate - there were far too many very similar streams clogging up
the backbone and the interconnection points.
The solution was to RE-ENGINEER the network to deal with this new traffic
issue; to move the source of the most popular bits close to the edge via
co-location agreements with the ISPs. A free marketplace can work these things
out, as it has since the Internet was commercialized.
People fully expect this to continue to be the case. But the culture of most
the current batch of broadband providers is anything but neutrality.
So you say. If that is true, which I doubt, why would you want to entrench
these providers by creating another regulated oligopoly, rather than
encouraging new investment and competition? Maybe it is just the "culture" of
government regulation, allowing a new infrastructure to be created via robust
competition before they moved in to regulate and tax it?
That's false, Craig. The "new infrastructure," unless and until wireless
broadband becomes ample enough to compete with cabled broadband, is every bit
as monopolistic and anti-competitive as any telco infrastructure ever was, and
for the same reasons. You cannot credibly install multiple such networks in
every neighborhood or building.
Ahhhhh... The good old natural monopoly argument.
But it clearly is not true. We were seeing competition and new investment,
which slowed dramatically after the Title II decision. We saw Google Fiber
beginning to expand. We saw the telcos deploying FTTH. And we are seeing
wireless data extend the Internet, not only via the wireless telcos, but
millions of WiFi hot spots, many being deployed by the cable industry.
And in some areas we have local governments get into the game as well, although
with limited success. For every profitable deployment we have seen a failure,
which in turn allowed Google to walk in and get infrastructure at a fraction of
the cost of deployment.
While there are those, like you, who champion government regulation, there are
many who believe it's time for the government to get out of the way. We have
seen huge industries created simply by deregulating small blocks of spectrum.
First with cordless phones, and now with WiFi.
One could easily make the case that the government has created a spectrum
shortage, to drive up the price when they sell or lease it. Clearly the FCC has
protected broadcasters who pay little for spectrum that they use VERY
inefficiently.
I would suggest, that if you wanted real competition in broadband, it would
make more sense to place some of the spectrum we are about to recover from
broadcasters into unregulated use for wireless broadband, rather than selling
it to the telco oligopoly.
Having cabled broadband service from a single provider, in most locations, or
at best two, did not "free us" from anything at all.
Just the way the politicians like it.
As far as I'm concerned, if the rule has to be that all of your unwalled
Internet traffic has to be delivered at "best effort" priority level, that's
good enough.
It was not good enough for Netflix. Their best effort contracts with CDNs were
causing significant issues, some of which required a different approach, with
co-location of servers to handle congestion issues. Is it FAIR that Netflix can
afford to deploy edge servers, while a small streaming start-up must live with
best effort delivery?
This does not mandate that everyone buy the same amount of bandwidth, nor does
it restrict how the MVPD/ISPs must manage their walled-in traffic. It only
applies to the not-walled-in Internet part of your service.
Exactly. The marketplace was dealing with this. Just as the marketplace us
finally dealing with opening up MVPD networks to third party devices...
I have posted this full article separately, but here is the most important part:
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/06/17/a-cable-industry-compromise-would-let-you-ditch-your-cable-box-forever/>
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/06/17/a-cable-industry-compromise-would-let-you-ditch-your-cable-box-forever/
For weeks, cable providers such as Comcast have been resisting a federal
proposal that would force them to make their channels available to anybody who
wanted to design new user interfaces for them. Instead of browsing the channel
lineup through cable-provided menus and devices, consumers should have access
to a greater variety of choices, argue the regulators who proposed the move.
Now the industry has come out with a counterproposal that it hopes will keep
away the toughest of the regulations proposed by the Federal Communications
Commission. In meetings with top agency officials this week, representatives
from Comcast, AT&T and a slew of industry organizations offered a compromise.
The deal would allow consumers to get rid of their set-top boxes altogether,
saving the roughly $230 a year on average that households pay for the box.
Through an app designed by your cable company, you would be able to search and
view all kinds of content not limited to your regular cable lineup; instead,
you would also be able to access Netflix-style streaming video content right
from the same app. Consumer advocates say this form of integrated search that
unifies cable and streaming programming benefits consumers.
The reality here is that we can use political pressure to get industries to
deal with thorny issues in competitive markets. In most cases the compromises
reached by free market competitors are much better for consumers than the
market distortions (and oligopolies) that result from excessive government
regulation.
The most important aspect being, the MVPD/ISP cannot block such neutral traffic.
Never happened here. If you want to see what happens when the government gets
involved in regulating the Internet, just look at China.
We've been over this a ton of times. Let's go the next step, Craig, rather than
always back to square 1.
We're were much better off at Square 1 than we are now with Title II.
Regards
Craig