The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
says there’s no need for net neutrality:
FTC Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras said that without evidence of “market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area.”So in a “market” where the average customer has at most two choices, we’re supposed to wait for a market failure? Continue reading
Sometimes not listening to customers can be fatal to an industry:
While there are factors outside of the labels’ control — from the rise of the Internet to the popularity of video games and DVDs — many in the industry see the last seven years as a series of botched opportunities. And among the biggest, they say, was the labels’ failure to address online piracy at the beginning by making peace with the first file-sharing service, Napster. “They left billions and billions of dollars on the table by suing Napster — that was the moment that the labels killed themselves,” says Jeff Kwatinetz, CEO of management company the Firm. “The record business had an unbelievable opportunity there. They were all using the same service. It was as if everybody was listening to the same radio station. Then Napster shut down, and all those 30 or 40 million people went to other [file-sharing services].”How close were they? Continue reading— The Record Industry’s Decline, Record sales are tanking, and there’s no hope in sight: How it all went wrong, by Brian Hiatt and Evan Serpick, Rolling Stone, Posted Jun 19, 2007 2:29 PM
The net in the U.S. is so slow even the mainstream media have finally noticed:
The USA trails other industrialized nations in high-speed Internet access and may never catch up unless quick action is taken by public-policymakers, a report commissioned by the Communications Workers of America warns.Of course, we’re not going to get internationally competitive speeds until there are some serious structural changes in the ISP “marketplace”, producing more competition somehow. And broadband isn’t the point; Internet access is. Plus speed alone is trivial; without choice and participation it’s nothing. But speed helps draw in participants, and once we’re online, speeds lets us do more things. So it’s good that USA Today is paying attention; maybe its readers will, too. Then maybe they’ll ask for something better than two turtles.The median U.S. download speed now is 1.97 megabits per second — a fraction of the 61 megabits per second enjoyed by consumers in Japan, says the report released Monday. Other speedy countries include South Korea (median 45 megabits), France (17 megabits) and Canada (7 megabits).
“We have pathetic speeds compared to the rest of the world,” CWA President Larry Cohen says. “People don’t pay attention to the fact that the country that started the commercial Internet is falling woefully behind.”
— U.S. Net access not all that speedy, By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY, posted 25 June, updated 26 June 2007
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Susan Crawford pithily describes the current Internet access market:
The duopoly is something like Shamu and Godzilla on hire for televised wrestling – giant beasts gently swatting at one another for the cameras. They aren’t competing, these giants. There is a clear failure in the market for highspeed internet access in this country.What is to be done? Continue reading— Moving Slowly in the Fast Lane by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, Tue 19 Jun 2007 10:29 PM EDT
Here’s an interesting exercise in framing net neutrality:
On the one side are traditional media – phone and cable companies, the carriers – in rare agreement. They do not want to be regulated, and they want to preserve the profitability potential that protects their network upgrades. They are therefore joined by some hardware tech firms. On the other side is what might be called the internet-industrial complex – consisting of idealistic net community folks, small start-ups, large Silicon Valley corporations pretending to be both – and Hollywood, in another strange bed fellowship.Note “internet-industrial complex”, in analogy to Eisenhower’s phrase, “military-industrial complex”. Yet the cablecos and telcos are said to be “in rare agreement” when actually they have long been acting on the same side on this issue; after all, it’s in both their (short-term) interests to keep the number of players down. With no competition, there’s no real market, and thus no real competition (which long-term means they won’t be competitive with their international competitors,The US Congress is in the middle; by the latest count six bills are pending, and while none is likely to be passed for now, the process itself has been a boon.
— A third way for net neutrality, By Eli Noam, Financial Times, 29 August 2006
I don’t usually blog
the same article twice, but Cringely said something
else important (the all-caps emphases are his):
Now let’s look at this in the context of net neutrality. For the cable companies, at least, it probably doesn’t matter. That’s because while cable Internet service and cable VoIP service both use the CMTS, it is easy for the cable company to configure its VoIP product as completely separate from its Internet product. IF YOUR CABLE OPERATOR WILL SELL YOU VOIP SERVICE WITHOUT INTERNET SERVICE, THEN NET NEUTRALITY DOES NOT APPLY.The various VoIP companies better be worried about this trick, because it’s all the incumbent duopoly really needs to say their own VoIP is an essential public service and any others are interfering with public safety. Continue readingIf excess Internet traffic causes problems for the VoIP services of these cable companies, they can prioritize their own VoIP packets with impunity because VoIP isn’t defined as an Internet service. And for that very reason, packet prioritization can — and will — occur even if the broadband ISP has signed an agreement promising net neutrality.
The next level of this ploy is to validate the un-Internetiness of the VoIP system through public service interconnects like 911. “Should calling the police get priority treatment?” will be the question and most courts won’t say “no.”
— Beyond Net Neutrality: If at first you don’t succeed, change the game. Robert X. Cringely, I, Cringely, April 6, 2007
Joe Trippi thinks the Internet changes politics from spin to something better:
Internet activism is spelling the end for the age of spin, the online campaign guru Joe Trippi will warned two British politicians, suggesting that the rules for dealing with “old media” no longer apply.Dave Weinberger suggests more or less the same thing, somewhat less optimistically, Continue reading…
“Command and control … [is] a disaster in the peer-to-peer social network world.”
— Does the Internet Spell the End of Political Spin? By Tania Branigan, The Guardian. Posted June 15, 2007.
Cringely gets pessimistic:
In the end the ISPs are going to win this battle, you know. The only thing that will keep them from doing that is competition, something it is difficult to see coming along anytime soon, rather like that lemonade-powered sports car.Is he just whining? Continue reading— Beyond Net Neutrality: If at first you don’t succeed, change the game. I, Cringely, Pulpit, April 6, 2007
While we’re on the general subject of
postal and Internet rates and a free press,,
let’s look at who owns the U.S. media:
In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. … When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world’s largest media corporation.This might be worth remembering the next time you hear that the market will sort out any problems and there’s no need for regulation. Would that there were a market so that that could be true.In 2004, Bagdikian’s revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations — Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) — now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric’s NBC is a close sixth.
— Number of corporations that control a majority of U.S. media, Media Reform Information Center, accessed 21 June 2007
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John Robb quotes an Estonian on a basic point:
“This is not some virtual world. This is part of our independence. And these attacks were an attempt to take one country back to the cave, back to the Stone Age.”A society is its communications, and increasingly the Internet is the matrix of those communications. Such communications are virtual only in the same sense that society is virtual. And it doesn’t take an attack by a foreign power to disrupt those communications. Too few ISP owners can reduce participatory communications to limited broadcast, just as has already happened in radio.
Linnar Viik, an Estonian government IT consultant to the Washington Post.Internet Systems Disruption, John Robb, Global Guerrillas, 21 May 2007
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