FCC Delays Net Neutrality Over Mobile, ‘Managed’ Services
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By Ryan Singel
- September 1, 2010 |
- 4:29 pm |
- Categories: Broadband, Net Neutrality
Federal regulators are putting off efforts to regain authority over the nation’s internet providers while they seek renewed public input on net neutrality.
The delay shows the intractability of the debate over wireless and wireline openness rules, and the ongoing shock waves of last month’s joint policy proposal from Google and Verizon to create a framework for Congress to enact new competitive rules for ISPs. That proposal in turn seeks to fill a vacuum left by a federal appeals court, which effectively stripped the FCC of its authority to oversee broadband earlier this year.
The delicacy of the negotiations to reassert federal control of the internet were made clear on Wednesday when the FCC announced that, due to unnamed recent events — a clear reference to its failed talks and Google and Verizon’s recent policy “compromise” statement — it needs even more comments on “what framework will guarantee Internet freedom and openness, and maximize private investment and innovation.”
Specifically, the FCC wants feedback on whether ISPs should be allowed to build special web services for their own customers (.pdf), or if they should be prevented from competing directly with companies that create services for the general internet and thus depend on unbiased service from network providers.
At stake is an arcane administrative ruling issued during the Bush administration that reclassified internet providers as “information services” rather than “telecommunications services.” The FCC is specifically authorized to regulate only the latter. Now anti-regulatory factions, which naturally include the giant telecom monopolies that control the fixed and wireless broadband markets in the U.S., are fighting tooth and nail to keep the distinction intact, and the FCC off their turf.
Until the FCC finds a way through the thicket, there is still no federal authority that can prevent your ISP from dictating what browser you use, what brand of mobile phone computer or router you plug into the network or blocking your favorite website or protocol.
Your ISP and mobile phone company can make their services go faster than their competitors without fear of federal regulators fining them, and they can throttle your connection at any time, for any reason, without having to explain to anyone why they did it.
Free market groups argue that’s fine, since the market is competitive enough that ISPs will have to play fair with their customers. Others argue that the very basis of the internet is a transport layer that simply works, tries its best and doesn’t play favorites, and letting large telecoms muck with that puts all the innovation of the last two decades and those of the decades to come at risk.
Google and Verizon had long been at opposite ends of the net neutrality debate. Google, which makes its money on the web, wants the government to ensure that people have the right to use whatever services, devices and applications they want, and that wireless and traditional wired ISPs should be required to act as disinterested conduits — simply ferrying packets back and forth. Innovation, according to Google and many net neutrality supporters, happens in the development of applications and services, not in the network itself, regardless of whether that network is cable or 3G.
But telecoms including Verizon, the nation’s largest wireless company and one of its biggest fixed broadband companies, protest that such rules would be heavy-handed, reduce innovation and throttle investment in new infrastructure, especially in the wireless world.
Making good on an Obama campaign promise, the FCC announced last fall that it was going to formally adopt six broad principles of so-called net neutrality. The first four had been established informally in 2005 for cable and DSL customers: People would have the right to use whatever legal online services, devices and applications they wanted, and Americans would have the right to choose service providers from among various competing ISPs.
FCC head Julius Genachowski, a law school classmate of President Obama, wanted to add two more rules: One, broadband providers cannot discriminate against services or applications by slowing them down, and two, broadband providers must tell customers how its engineers manage the network congestion.
The FCC also wanted apply some of the rules to the growing mobile broadband industry, something that Skype and Google had been fighting for. That fight included a $4.6 billion bet by Google that forced Verizon to buy wireless spectrum with open access rules applied to it. (The FCC has never ruled one way or the other if the original rules applied to wireless.)
Translation:
There is an election coming up, and we really don’t want this being an issue. We will look at it after the election.
I am all for the FCC undoing the reclassification.
Everywhere else in the western world, ISP’s fall under the rules of telecommunication providers.
Except in the US.
FCC needs to do the following;
Outlaw Monopoly/duopoly agreements that allow ISP’s to torpedo municipal fiber projects
Outlaw Monopoly/duopoly all together.
Free market people want their way? Fine ! Free market it is! Anyone can build and supply an area.
Competition is the surest way to sort this out. Let the market do what it should, and remove the artificial barriers to new players getting into the market and laying their own fiber.
Wasn’t google going to build their own network? Did that not work so now they decided to pay for ISPs to give them the speed they want?
>>>Free market people want their way? Fine ! Free market it is! Anyone can build and supply an area.
This “would” work, if the current providers can essentially instantly torpedo anyone trying to come into an area with their status as incumbent rather easily. The current provider owns the pipes, and just refuses to lease them out to a new provider. And a new provider can’t really lay their own fiber, it’s not cost efficient enough for anyone, especially with local governments. Those officials would in most cases say, “We just had Comcast rip up this road and block traffic for 2 weeks, and now you want to? Permit denied.” And that’s if they’re NOT in the incumbent’s pocket, and just getting paid to deny it anyway. Free market solution would work, if it were possible. As is, it’s definitely NOT possible. The FCC should be able to dictate pricing as well based on ACTUAL conditions.
Cost of bandwidth goes down, price of bandwidth goes up? That makes absolutely NO SENSE, except for pure greed, “profits were too steady at 3.2 billion!, We want profit GROWTH to line our jacuzzis with platinum, RAISE THE PRICE”
Net-neutrality is something worth fighting for. And by “fight”, I mean someone needs to organize a national strike. A full week of everyone refusing to work should make it pretty clear to the government that the internet needs to remain open.
The FCC should totally take control and force competition. Pardon my french, but fuck the ISP’s.
This net neutrality business worries the crap out of me.
Seriously, am I one day going to have to decide which internet “package” I want to get for my browsing habits? It might be a little stretch, but if it is un-regulated to insure neutrality, I see the companies making headway towards something like that of cable. Much like cable is today, the net would eventually be reduced to the likeness of a couple sites (IE: channels) you will browse (IE: watch,) and a bunch of crap fodder, just like cable is.
It would probably go something like:
“Introducing the all new “Knowledge Package” by Verizon! The Knowledge Browsing Package includes unrestricted access to: Discovery.com, wikipedia.com, askjeeves.com, youtube.com AND access to EVERY Angel fire website! For no additional charge! Call and speak to one of our Service Reps NOW! $29.99 (Introductory Rate, Bandwidth Charges Still Apply)”
Unfortunately, I have no faith in the government’s ability to hinder this from happening. There are just too many corrupt politicians and too much money flowing to them for them to stop this.
I know it sounds kind of doomsdayish, but at the same time, still seems plausible.
This reminds me of yesterday’s “Pearls Before Swine”
http://comics.com/pearls_before_swine/2010-09-01/
This nice man has a petition:
http://www.alfranken.com/index.php/splash/netneutrality
GO SIGN IT
@EntropySquared – It is already going that way.
Why should Comcast, TimeWarner, or any other cable company allow any kind of video streaming on their networks? Right now they don’t think they can get away with blocking competing video services. As soon as they can they will either block them, or demand some monthly per user fee. Any cable company would much rather have you pay them $6 per movie. In their minds they own the wires, so they have the right to determine what you see.
Let the FCC undo the bogus reclassification. The “information providers” are the content owners, not the telecos that own the wires.
the problem here is that many service providers block any form of bit-torrent because the higher up of these places equate bit-torrent with pirating movies, games, music and other things. This assumption is being done by people with a lot of money but not a lot of brains or knowledge of the technology. many of the big gaming companies, and especially MMO companies, use BitTorrent to push out game patches, beta client code for testing and many other things that are perfectly legal yet people like Verizon and Comcast throttle anything coming across these ports and protocols because some big wig money person told them to since it’s pirating.
Along the line of net neutrality, I fell that people should have choice in what provider they use. The lines should be available to everyone or a system should be put in place to allow the ease of laying down new lines.
As for the special services being allowed, I’d agree with that but there should be a stipulation that if and ISP wants to make a hulu-clone app/service they can but they are not permitted to throttle or block hulu to force the use of their app/service. this allows for competition and will promote innovation.