quote:
Wednesday–less than two weeks after a court decision exposing that the Federal Communications Commission has no legal authority to regulate the Internet

Right off the bat, that's a hilariously broad reading of FCC v. Comcast, which was a decision about ancillary jurisdiction that didn't even touch on statutory jurisdiction. Not off to a promising start.

quote:
Advocates of heavy regulatory control over the Internet seem to have proposed just that. According to this revised history, policymakers regulated the Internet until the last administration turned it over to corporate controllers.

Note how here we're talking about "the Internet."

quote:
Broadband Internet service has never been regulated like old-fashioned telephone lines. The FCC settled the matter definitively in 1998, when Clinton-appointed FCC Chairman William Kennard demolished the same reclassification arguments being made today in that year’s report to Congress.

And here we're talking about "broadband internet." No doubt because ignoring the existence and rise of the Internet through the entirety of the dial-up era is convenient for the author's point. Also convenient: treating a report to Congress as "definitively" settling the matter.

quote:
Notably, the Kennard report itself did not represent a departure from earlier policy with respect to the non-regulation of Internet services. It even noted that the 1996 Act left in place the framework created in the Carter-era by the 1980 Computer II decision.

Also convenient: ignoring the Reagan-era Computer III decision which expressly required Baby Bells who acted as ISPs or affiliated with ISPs to share their lines with independent ISPs.

quote:
The agency went on to affirm the treatment of broadband Internet as an unregulated information services at every opportunity, including cable modem service in 2002, DSL in 2005 and mobile broadband in 2007.

Now these are definitive. Which is why they're glossed over extremely quickly because they happen to more or less confirm the story he wants to refute. Hey, speaking of Computer III, guess when that common carrier requirement was lifted? LINK

"In the past, the Commission required facilities-based providers to offer that wireline broadband transmission component separately from their Internet service as a stand-alone service on a common-carrier basis, and thus classified that component as a telecommunications service. Today, the Commission eliminated this transmission component sharing requirement, created over the past three decades under very different technological and market conditions, finding it caused vendors to delay development and deployment of innovations to consumers."

Gosh, we sure wouldn't want that. I can just see the FCC in 2005. "If we lift these regulations, phone companies will finally be motivated to replace their old copper wire with new fiber optics and keep DSL from being left in the dust against cable!"

This post was edited on 11/18/14 at 4:02 pm

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Posted by NC_Tigah

Carolinas

Member since Sep 2003

124547 posts

Posted on 11/19/14 at 7:02 am to Iosh

quote:
If by "salient," you mean "full of equivocation," then sure.

No.
I meant what I said.

"Salient" was in reference to your claim that "the FCC has regulated the Internet since its inception." If by "has regulated" you meant "has attempted to regulate" then perhaps I'd agree. Otherwise, no.

quote:
The proposed rules are only shifting the regulation from one statutory authority to another

which was a decision about ancillary jurisdiction that didn't even touch on statutory jurisdiction

Not entirely clear. Could you expand and clarify here?

==============

Disagreements surrounding "Net Neutrality" remind me of an exchange in the 1980 New Hampshire GOP primary:

quote:
With the other candidates in single digits, the Nashua Telegraph offered to host a debate between Reagan and Bush. Worried that a newspaper-sponsored debate might violate electoral regulations, Reagan subsequently arranged to fund the event with his own campaign money, inviting the other candidates to participate at short notice. The Bush camp did not learn of Reagan's decision to include the other candidates until the debate was due to commence. Bush refused to participate, which led to an impasse on the stage. As Reagan attempted to explain his decision, the editor of the Nashua Telegraph ordered the sound man to mute Reagan's microphone. A visibly angry Reagan responded, "I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!"

In general, it seems net neutrality boils down to a who is "paying for this microphone" equation.

Broadband providers such as Comcast, Cox, Time-Warner, etc. argue that after spending billions of dollars on their networks, they should be able to manage their systems to offer premium services. If their business structure is founded in high-def TV, and that was the premise of their network, then they should be able to provide that service first and foremost.

They argue that to do so, it may be necessary to prevent high-bandwidth applications from freely hogging capacity. If high-bandwidth applications require extra capacity, owners of these broadband networks insist there should be an associated charge. On the service, is that an unreasonable request?

Goggle, itself a capacity-hog via youtube, and which has designs on building its own ultra-high capacity network, has sided with the government, and against its broadband competitors. Obviously the various other high-bandwidth capacity hogs, Netflix, Skype, etc. have done the same. They each side with the concept they are entitled to a "free lunch" on the broadband system's tab. Why not?

Ultimately, the issue boils down to design and control of broadband access at municipality level though. Cable companies have, for the most part, been granted local monopolies. That is a problem. In fact, that is the problem. Their capacity, quality, and service are reflective.

Should broadband companies be required to service bandwidth hogs at all costs? No! Nor though should they be granted shields from competition. When a true competitor eventually enters those markets, i.e., fiber carriers, improved satellite services, etc, the game will change. Capacity will be improved. Costs will go down. Competition is the solution.

Now then, how do we best arrive at such a solution? Do we get there by telling new entrants they can spend billions in infrastructure, but the government reserves right to interfere with their service once they've done so? Is that really the best way to encourage new market entrants? I'd argue that it isn't.

Conversely, if it really wants control, the government itself could lay in ultrahigh capacity networks as a national infrastructure project. It could maintain net neutrality over its own network to its heart's content in that case. Of course, for the "you-didn't-build-that, someone-else-did-that-for-you" Obama crowd, actually building something is probably anathema. Given such creative impotence, it is no doubt better to let someone else "build that", then criticize and regulate the results. Hence the desire to "shift the regulation from one statutory authority to another".

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