Category Archives: Competition

Slow and Expensive U.S.

Larry Cohen, President, CWA Speed is trivial, but you’d think we could do better than this:
The average broadband download speed in the US is only 1.9 megabits per second, compared to 61 Mbps in Japan, 45 Mbps in South Korea, 18 Mbps in Sweden, 17 Mpbs in France, and 7 Mbps in Canada, according to the Communication Workers of America.

— US high-speed Internet is slow, Submitted by Canada IFP, Press Esc, on Sun, 2007-05-20

And as we’ve seen, that list of countries could soon include Hong Kong and India, because they’re taking the problem seriously. More interesting was this was said to. Continue reading →

Eerily Familiar

Office of the Army Chief Information Officer The Pentagon video and blogging ban is circumventable primarily due to multiple Internet providers in Iraq:
Deployed troops can still post their videos to YouTube, despite the recently announced Pentagon ban against accessing that site and ten others from government computers. The trick, says Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, is to use your own internet access or visit one of the rec center internet cafes, which plug into separate, commercial networks. The ban, she says, applies only to the 5 million computers worldwide connected to the official Department of Defense intranet.

— Getting Around the YouTube Blockade, David Axe, DangerRoom, 17 May 2007

I suppose we could resort to going to the local Internet cafe to get around such bans if they occur stateside. Continue reading →

Reemphasizing Innovation

Pointing out the tiny little problem with globalization, namely that with fast global data networks many jobs from doctors and lawyers to clerks become offshoreable, an economist tries to look ahead:
What else is to be done? Trade protection won’t work. You can’t block electrons from crossing national borders. Because U.S. labor cannot compete on price, we must reemphasize the things that have kept us on top of the economic food chain for so long: technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, adaptability and the like. That means more science and engineering, more spending on R&D, keeping our capital markets big and vibrant, and not letting ourselves get locked into “sunset” industries.

— Alan Blinder: Free Trade’s Great, but Offshoring Rattles Me, Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal, 5 May 2007 quoting Free Trade’s Great, but Offshoring Rattles Me, By Alan S. Blinder Washington Post, Sunday, May 6, 2007; B04

If this is the case, then it would seem that promoting innovation by promoting a fast, open, and participatory Internet would be important for the U.S., and also important to the rest of the rest of the world that wants the U.S. to remain a major market.

-jsq

Chief Parsons

Gen. Custer
Chief Parsons
Chief Sitting Bull
This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. Time-Warner CEO Richard Parsons says:
“The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux Nation. They will lose this war if they go to war. The notion that the new kids on the block have taken over is a false notion.”

— The Fighting Sioux, by Gunnar Peterson, 1 Raindrop, 11 May 2007

Which is amusing enough. Time-Warner thinks the cablecos and telcos are the original natives of the Internet? I beg to differ. Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, etc. are much more in the spirit of the original creators of the Internet technology and of the people who originally commercialized and privatized the Internet. Continue reading →

Content-Delivery Supply-Chain Usefulness

Susan Crawford hits the broadband nail on the head:
What content-delivery supply-chain usefulness is broadband providing?

—For, by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, 9 May 2007

That’s the question you get if you’re in a corporate strategy meeting trying to decide where this broadband thing fits in with your core competences. That plus they’ll be thinking purely in terms of broadband, because that’s their product, not the Internet. There’s nothing wrong with that, except when there are only a couple of first-mile ISPs deciding the answer for all their users. And the answer in such cases tends to be “video on demand” or “IPTV” or “our search engine”. Corporations are designed to maximize their own profits, not to think in terms of a supply chain that delivers participation, innovation, and prosperity for the general welfare. Continue reading →

Early Termination Fees?

Does your cable Internet provider charge an early termination fee?
Several providers — including cable giant Comcast — assured us that they did not impose early termination fees, which we reported as part of our blog item.

So imagine our surprise when someone sent us a copy of a recent Comcast memo to a county official in Virginia about a looming rate increase, which, way down at the end, in a footnote, contained the following:

“Two year term agreement required. $150 early termination fee applies if any service is cancelled or downgraded during the 2 year period.”

Now That You Mention It, We Do Charge Early Termination Penalties… by Bob, hearusnow.org, at 04/18/07 01:15 PM

How could that be? Continue reading →

Industrial Internet Policy

Susan Crawford posted a laundry list of countries that have an industrial policy (she prefers economic policy) involving the Internet:
  • South Korea: “the government said where they wanted to go, invested in research and development, [and invested money and made micro loans], and they’re now seeing 70% of adults (not just kids) involved in online social networks. Very high speeds, very low cost.”
  • Hong Kong: “also not embarrassed to talk about economic policy and telecom.”
  • India: its “government ‘proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009.’”
  • Japan: Have I mentioned lately that almost every Japanese can get broadband, and usually it’s ten times faster than what we can get stateside?
Now the point here isn’t whether the specific country government policies are good, bad, etc. Continue reading →

Framing Net Neutrality

As we saw in AT&T’s Internet Predictions from 1993, the telco view of the Internet is as a telco-provided service. This is radically different from the Internet we have grown accustomed to, but it is what we are likely to get without net neutrality. Doc Searls gets to the gist:
The short of it is this: As long as we understand the Net as what Jay Sulzberger calls “some bundle of services delivered by the Telephone Company and/or the Cable Company”, we’ll not only never have Net Neutrality, but not even a conclusive conversation about it.

We also can’t have a productive conversation about it if we start with a regulatory conclusion and work our way back to businees from there.

Here’s a frame that may help: The Net is the best platform for free enterprise ever created. How do we help get that built out for everybody? I suggest that we’ve barely started, and that what Cringely gets from Comcast (and what most of us get from whatever company provides it) is still just an early prototype.

— What Net do we want? Doc Searls, 17 April 2007

If the big-telco-provided Internet were actually a free market for Internet service provision, we could maybe leave it to the market to protect Internet participants by providing open access among them. But it’s not; it’s at best a duopoly (telco and cableco) in most places in the U.S. So we need laws to provide for open access. And it would be nice if we also had more service providers, so there would be some semblance of competition.

-jsq

Telcos vs. Founding ISPs

Hands Off the Internet conflates more things that just aren’t the same. First, they quote a recent story by a college physics sophomore:
Proponents of net neutrality would like you to think that large service providers had nothing to do with inventing our modern Internet, but this notion isn’t true. Even though explorations into the Internet began at major academic universities for the purpose of research, it is highly unlikely that private companies would never have entered into the market of Internet services. Companies eventually moved into the Internet communications market, albeit backed by government protectionism through such policies as the Communications Act of 1934.

— Net neutrality not for ‘the little guy’, The only ones who would feel the burden of varying price increases would be large content providers, such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon. By Christopher S. Gordon, Daily Texan, 13 April 2007

Nope, what we want you to know is that the big telcos that are the primary Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the U.S. these days had nothing to do with inventing our modern Internet. They also had very little to do with commercializing it. The first two geographically distributed commercial ISPs were UUNET and PSINet, back in 1990. AT&T, MCI, Sprint, and all the other telcos horned in on the party years later. Continue reading →

Competition Would be Better

Some quotes from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) from 7 Nov 2006:
“Sometimes I think Net Neutrality, who knows about it?,” Waxman said at that meeting. “What’s going on now in the communications area is we are moving to a duoplet. We’ll have the telephone companies. And we’ll have the cable companies. They both have wires that go into the home. You’ll have a choice of one or the other for your telephone services, cable services, and Internet services. Those are going to be provided by one or the other.”

— Silenced: Progressive Sites Censored, by Kriss Perras Running Waters, Malibu Arts Reviews, 8 April 2007

So there’s at least one elected representative who sees a duopoly. Continue reading →