FCC

I received an email from the ACLU yesterday, informing me that they’ve jumped in on the net neutrality debate. Unfortunately, they badly misrepresent the facts: FREE THE NET: WHY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT NET NEUTRALITY The keys to the Internet have always been safely in public hands - until last year, when the FCC suddenly repealed longstanding Internet principles of “neutrality” and non-discrimination.The ACLU is going to make the erroneous claim that I’ve debunked repeatedly on my blog (see the Net Neutrality Index)–that the common carriage requirements on telcos constitute “net neutrality.” They will ignore the fact that cable companies–the main providers of consumer broadband Internet access in the U.S.–have never been common carriers and have never been bound by these requirements. With the blessing of the Supreme Court, a handful of profit-driven telecoms and cable companies now could effectively shut down the 21st Century marketplace of ideas by screening Internet e-mail traffic, blocking what they deem to be undesirable content, or pricing users out of the marketplace. The ACLU is going to argue that we need to create a new bureaucratic regulatory apparatus, giving sweeping new powers to the FCC to interfere with freedom of Internet providers to enter into voluntary contracts with each other and manage their own networks, and specifically prohibiting differential pricing on tiered levels of service and the ability for providers to enter into arrangements with content providers to subsidize consumer bandwidth. Historically, Net Neutrality protections filled the free speech gap. Since those protections were removed last year, nothing prevents network providers from discriminating against Internet users and application and service providers in terms of content, quality of access, and choice of equipment.This is doubly false–the common carriage requirements applied only to the last-mile consumer network connections, not to the ability of ISPs to filter; and it is false that “nothing prevents” ISPs from taking actions which would cause them to lose customers. If you’re like many people using the Internet, you don’t think about whether your Internet Service Provider is intentionally slowing down or speeding up your access to Yahoo! versus Google. Without Net Neutrality, your ISP could do just that. Imagine if your phone company was allowed to own restaurants and then provided good service and clear signals to customers who called Dominos and static and frequent busy signals for those calling Pizza Hut. It sounds outrageous, but it would be entirely possible if the telephone system wasn’t regulated under the “common carrier” framework. The telecoms and cable companies that provide Internet network services, including AT&T, BellSouth, Comcast, Qwest, Sprint, Time-Warner/AOL, and Verizon, have spent over $100 million lobbying Congress and the FCC to eliminate established Net Neutrality protections.Remember, cable companies have never been common carriers, yet this hasn’t been a problem. Why create new regulations and give more power to a government agency that has a history of not only working on behalf of the big incumbents (rather than promoting competition, which is what is needed) but of engaging in actions designed to cause discrimination against certain forms of content through censorship? It makes no sense. The assault on Internet freedom will only get worse. The FCC imposed Net Neutrality protections in merger agreements for certain network providers such as SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI, but those protections expire in 2007. And in July 2006, the FCC declined to include any Net Neutrality protections in Comcast and Time-Warner’s acquisition of Adelphia Cable. The pattern of the FCC opposing Net Neutrality is expected to continue, as network providers continue to consolidate into an even smaller pool of Internet gatekeepers. Without the vigorous non-discrimination principles in place before 2005, a few corporate conglomerates will control everything that you can say or do on the Internet. Net Neutrality is needed, and it is needed now.The above argument is a mish-mash of fear-mongering about things that haven’t been an issue, misrepresentation of what regulations have been in place, wild unsubstantiated claims (“a few corporate conglomerates will control everything that you can say or do on the Internet”?), and a failure to look at the actual substantive issues in the network neutrality debate. Their website contains further misinformation: ...

Paul Kouroupas has written an interesting series of posts about the state of telecommunications regulation around the world. He postulates a hypothetical company, CoolCo, that is an ISP that wants to sell Internet access, voice over IP, email, instant messaging, and web hosting to residential customers, while not owning any of its own transmission facilities. CoolCo wants to expand its services to include dedicated circuits for business customers, and is majority owned by U.S. investors with a Thai investor who owns 15% of the company. Kouroupas then looks at how CoolCo would fare in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the United States with respect to licensing requirements, license fees and other fees, foreign ownership restrictions, tariff, contract and pricing rules, interconnection rights and obligations, and the efficiency and effectiveness of the regulatory process. He begins with Europe–licensing requirements are nonexistent; operators must simply “register and abide by a set of basic consumer protection obligations and regulations.” License fees are nominal and consistent across the entire EU. There are no universal service fees or foreign ownership restrictions. There are no tariff requirements, no contract requirements beyond “conformity to basic legal precedence,” no pricing rules “other than basic non-discrimination requirements.” No regulator approval is required to set prices. Interconnection is mandatory, some states require unbundling of services by the incumbents. The regulatory process is relatively efficient and does not consume the bulk of CoolCo’s resources. In Latin America, Kouroupas looks at Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela, the countries where Global Crossing operates, and shows that there is a large amount of variation between countries, with Argentina, Brazil, and Chile being more open and adaptable, and Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela having more heavy-handed regulation. All have licensing requirements, with the less-regulated three and Peru requiring only a single license for CoolCo’s offerings, while Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela require separate licenses for each service offered. All have license fees as a percentage of revenue, ranging from 0.5% to 3%. Universal service fees fall in the same range. Only Mexico has foreign ownership restrictions. Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela heavily regulate prices, tariffs, and form of contracts. Most countries require some form of interconnection, but in Mexico the incumbent (Carlos Slim’s Telmex, which was privatized in the worst possible way) has been the recipient of multiple complaints for taking steps to avoid or delay the implementation of interconnection. In most countries the incumbent telco is the largest employer in the country and has considerable influence over the regulatory process, which often fails to complete by the legal time limits, leaving competitive telcos in legal limbo for months or years. Kouroupas then turns to Asia, looking specifically at Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, with a brief look also at China and India. The former countries, unsurprisingly, are more open than the latter two, though the level of bureaucracy is also high in Japan and Taiwan. China, India, and South Korea have foreign ownership restrictions, at least for facilities-based operators. Finally, he looks at the United States, which is hampered by a lack of consistency and coherent regulations, especially with respect to VoIP. Licenses are not required at the moment, but the FCC appears to have opened the door for it, and there are some specific requirements that now apply such as CALEA and E911. VoIP providers will have to contribute to the universal service fund by assuming that 64.9% of their traffic is interstate, which means paying 10.5% of 64.9% of their revenue. Foreign ownership restrictions exist, but CoolCo should not hit them at the moment due to its foreign ownership of less than 25% and its not requiring licensing, but this could change. There are no tariff, contract, or pricing rules that apply. For VoIP there are currently no interconnection rights and unbundling is limited. The regulatory process exists at both the federal (FCC) and state (public utility commissions) level. At the federal level, regulation is incredibly inefficient; at the state level it varies considerably from state to state but is generally more efficient than at the federal level and has promoted competition. The overall picture is one of uncertainty about the future. I’ve only touched on the highlights of the detail in Kouroupas’ posts, but it’s clear that CoolCo will find Europe to be the easiest region to establish business in today. Check them out.

In an attempt to offer something constructive, here’s a version of network neutrality–let’s call it Lippard Network Neutrality–that seems to me to be reasonable, providing me with what I want as a consumer of Internet services and what I would want if I were managing security for the provider of those services: 1. Nondiscrimination Companies that provide facilities-based wireline broadband (i.e., those who own the last-mile wires) to residences must provide unrestricted Internet access to their customers who wish to purchase Internet access, allowing the use of any Internet service or application that does not violate any laws or cause degradation or disruption to the service or other customers. The provider may engage in filtering for consumer-grade service in order to prevent the spread of malware and the sending of spam, including (for example) SMTP filtering or redirection to the provider’s mail services, but must allow the purchase of business-grade service under which customers may operate their own mail servers. The provider retains the right to suspend service or quarantine users that send spam, become compromised with malware, or engage in illegal activity or activity that disrupts the service. 2. Unbundling Providers must unbundle Internet access from other services sold over the same connection, so that a customer may use the entire capacity of the circuit for Internet access. These two requirements would give me what I want as a customer, as well as give the provider the ability to recover their costs, provide services that use QoS, provide additional filtering to protect their network and the rest of their customer base from malware, and so on. I think it’s quite reasonable for a basic consumer Internet service to do port 25 filtering, force the use of the provider’s mail servers, and to do network-based filtering of malware–but I would like the ability to pay extra for completely unfiltered Internet service and take steps to protect myself. And in fact, that’s what I’m currently paying Cox for today–I pay for business-grade service to my home in order to run my own servers here, though I could put those servers into a colo facility and get the same effect, which is what I would do if Cox decided to discontinue offering business-class service to residences. Because that option exists, it would not be necessary to mandate that providers must provide business class service as I described above, but I’d still want to be able to ensure that I could access my remotely hosted services from home. How this differs from what many network neutrality advocates are arguing for: 1. I don’t prohibit QoS or tiering, as that is a genuinely useful network feature where I expect to see future innovation of services that depend on it. 2. The nondiscrimination provision is written to allow some kind of less-than-full-Internet walled garden service at low cost–so long as customers can still purchase real Internet service. (I think such a service would be under competitive pressure to allow access to the full Internet, for the same reason AOL ended up allowing full Internet access–otherwise the service wouldn’t attract enough users to be a successful product offering.) 3. I don’t prohibit differential pricing for different services and classes of service. 4. I don’t set any restrictions on contractual arrangements (apart from these two restrictions), including interconnection agreements or who pays. I think that should be left to private negotiation and competition. 5. I don’t extend these requirements to other types of Internet providers such as backbone providers or those providing business services, as those are areas with plenty of competition. 6. I don’t extend these requirements to wireless providers, because I think that with sensible market-based allocation of spectrum, there could be plenty of independent competition with much less capital expenditure than for wireline deployment. I could possibly be persuaded that there is a place for common carriage requirements, especially for access circuits to businesses, which is where the last-mile providers could really engage in anti-competitive behavior against backbone providers that don’t own a lot of last-mile wires (e.g., Level 3, Global Crossing, Sprint), now that the major telco last-mile providers have each merged with a major backbone provider themselves (Qwest/U.S. West, AT&T/SBC/BellSouth, Verizon/MCI). This requirement currently exists in the law for telcos, and unlike the common carriage requirement for DSL, is not planned to go away next year. I would not put the above into the purview of the FCC, at least not with their current dispute resolution procedures which favor the telcos. Paul Kouroupas at Global Crossing (also my employer) has been arguing for “baseball-style” or final arbitration dispute resolution, where each side submits their best and final offer to an arbitrator, who chooses the best. This provides incentive for each side to try to reach the best agreement up front, as well as a process that can proceed quickly, without any government involvement or expense. This suggestion is the second point of Global Crossing’s proposed REFORM legislative agenda. (Unbundling and common carriage of bottlenecks such as last-mile access circuits are the sixth point.) Comments, criticisms? I should add that I believe what I’ve spelled out above is pretty close to what I’ve heard is in Sen. Stevens’ telecom reform bill, though I haven’t read it and I suspect he applies the nondiscrimination and unbundling requirements more widely than to residential broadband. ...

The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) has issued a report on “Security Implications of Applying the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act to Voice over IP” (21-page PDF) by Steven Bellovin, Matt Blaze, Ernest Brickell, Clinton Brooks, Vinton Cerf, Whitfield Diffie, Susan Landau, Jon Peterson, and John Treichler. This report comes at a time when the FCC and courts have already ruled that VoIP and facilities-based broadband providers must provide lawful interception capabilities under CALEA for VoIP services that are “interconnected” with the publicly-switched telephone network (PSTN). ...

The original claim of a Cox “blacklist” originated from a statement by Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher. Foremski originally wrote: Back on February 23rd Authentium acknowledged that their software is blocking Craigslist but it still hasn’t fixed the problem, more than three months later. That’s a heck of long time to delete some text from their blacklist.Now, he says (quoted by George Ou at ZDNet): I assumed there was a blacklist - I have no idea how Craigslist is being blockedIn fact, we know now that it’s a combination of a bug in a firewall driver produced by Authentium software and unusual (but not incorrect) behavior by the Craigslist webserver setting the initial TCP window size to 0. The facts of the problem came out (at least between Craigslist, Cox, and Authentium) at the time the problem was first reported, was fixed in a beta release within weeks, and has only affected Cox customers who use Authentium’s security suite. BTW, I disagree with Richard Bennett and George Ou’s remarks which attribute the problem entirely or largely to Craigslist–the behavior of the server is not contrary to the RFC. The initial SYN packet from the client to Craigslist is responded to by Craigslist with a SYN-ACK packet with window size of zero, which means don’t send me any data, only an ACK. The client then sends an ACK (completing the three-way TCP handshake), at which point Craigslist sends an ACK packet with a larger window size which the pre-fix version of the Authentium software fails to process. The initial response of the Authentium software to slow down is a reasonable and apparently desired response by Craigslist–they want new clients to hold off transmitting data (an HTTP request) until they give the OK. Authentium took full responsibility for the problem, and they were right to do so. The story from Foremski was uncritically repeated by Matt Stoller at MyDD, Timothy Karr at Save the Internet (and a couple of other blogs), and now in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), in a lapse from his normally good judgment about Internet-related matters (e.g., the Cox/Wyden Internet Freedom Act of 1995 and the Cox/Wyden Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998). Stoller and Karr went on to repeat the “blacklist” claim even after having the full story, and I don’t believe either of them has retracted the claim that this issue is relevant to the network neutrality debate. Craig Newmark complains that he didn’t get good responsiveness from Authentium, which Authentium disputes, but he has indicated satisfaction with Cox. The story has been picked up by George Ou at ZDNet (here and here) and by Glenn Harlan Reynolds at Instapundit (here, here, and here). This issue was a user software application issue that had no more to do with network neutrality than a browser incompatibility issue, a webserver disk failure, or a fiber cut. Each of these things can prevent a user from reaching some specific content, but none is imposed by the network provider or remedied by act of Congress or the FCC. Those who continue to treat it otherwise even after knowing the details are demonstrating questionable judgment and integrity. UPDATE: Craig Newmark has now stated that there was no deliberate blocking here and the Authentium explanation is correct. I’ve exchanged a few emails with him asking whether the behavior of the Craigslist.org webserver is specifically intended to regulate the rate of new HTTP connections (and whether the behavior is coming from something like an application-layer switch negotiating the TCP handshake); he said he’s passed that on to his technical team and I’ll report here if I get confirmation or refutation on that point. One puzzling paragraph of his latest blog post is this one: One good outcome of this is that we flushed out a swiftboater (in the generic sense), and this helps me understand the way disinformation gangs operate. Unfortunately, in some blogs, a good guy has been linked with the swiftboater, which isn’t fair, and hopefully, we can do something about that.I’m not sure who he’s calling a swiftboater, who he’s calling a good guy, and who he’s calling a disinformation gang. So far as I can see, the disinformation gang in this incident has been the “Save the Internet” crowd, who still have yet to admit the clear facts of the matter. I asked for clarification, but Craig declined to identify who he’s referring to (except that he’s not referring to Matt Stoller or Timothy Karr). UPDATE: July 12, 2006: The Craigslist.org webserver has changed its behavior and no longer sends a SYN-ACK packet with a window size of 0; it now gives a window size of 4380. This change by Craigslist.org works as a fix to the Authentium issue. I wonder why they only made the change now. ...

Bush has signed the legislation raising fines on broadcast “indecency.” Adam Thierer gives the scorecard for First Amendment protections on various forms of media: MEDIA PLATFORM / FIRST AMENDMENT STATUS Newspapers = Full First Amendment protection Magazine = Full First Amendment protection Cable TV = Full First Amendment protection Satellite TV = Full First Amendment protection Movies = Full First Amendment protection DVDs = Full First Amendment protection CDs = Full First Amendment protection Satellite Radio = Full First Amendment protection Internet = Full First Amendment protection Blogging = Full First Amendment protection i-Pods = Full First Amendment protection Podcasts = Full First Amendment protection Video Games = Full First Amendment protection ...

The New Republic’s editors have come out in favor of net neutrality. As is all-too-common, their reasoning is based, at least in part, on a factual error: Under the original rules put in place in 1934, telecommunications companies can’t give preferential treatment to one set of outgoing calls over another by, say, offering static-free calling to one company’s telemarketers but not another’s. The same rules initially applied to the Internet. Telecom companies couldn’t charge website proprietors to have their content sent to consumers more expeditiously. But, last August, George W. Bush’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) exempted telecoms that provide Internet connections from these restrictions, dealing a blow to both entrepreneurship and political discourse.I’ve italicized the false statement. TNR has, like many others, wrongly inferred that rules which applied solely to telco telephony and last-mile networks have also applied to the Internet and Internet Service Providers, when in fact ISPs and backbone providers have been under no such constraints. If net neutrality proposals were limited to maintaining Title II requirements for unbundling and interconnection for common carriers (which is part of the REFORM proposal advocated by Global Crossing, which includes other points which are far more important than net neutrality for fostering competition in telecommunications), or even adding cable providers into that category, I might support them. UPDATE: I should point out that some Internet backbones have been or are owned by entities which are common carriers in virtue of the fact that they have owned and operated long-distance telephone networks. This includes MCI, Sprint, and Global Crossing (more accurately, Global Crossing Telecommunications, Inc.). However, the FCC has always held that common carriage requirements do not apply to Internet interconnection. Eli M. Noam’s 1994 paper, “Beyond Liberalization II: The Impending Doom of Common Carriage," appears to have been rather prescient. He argues that common carriage is not sustainable in a competitive environment, and looks at possible hybrid approaches that mix common carriage and contract carriage (I kind of like his “common carrier rights of way” approach, which advocates of open source will find similar to the GPL). He regretfully concludes that common carriage will go away and that the hybrid approaches are not sustainable.

The FCC levied a record-breaking $3.3 million fine against 103 CBS affiliates for airing a repeat episode of “Without a Trace” on December 31, 2004, before 10 p.m. which involved “a simulated group sex scene at a high school party.” CBS has protested on the grounds that all 4,211 complaints were submitted via the Parents Television Council and American Family Affiliation websites, and only two complaints referred to actually seeing the offending scene. (Remember, the FCC is the organization net neutrality advocates want to give the power to regulate content. The power to mandate content will no doubt bring along the power to prohibit content.)

At the Skeptics Society conference on “The Environmental Wars," Jonathan Adler gave a talk on “Fables of Federal Environmental Regulation." Adler’s talk made several points, the main ones among them being: * Federal regulations tend to come late to the game, after state and local regulations or private actions have already begun addressing the problems. The recurring pattern is that there is an initial recognition of a problem, there’s state and local regulation and private action to address it, and then there’s federalization. I can add to Adler’s examples the development of the cellular telephone industry, where private actors stepped in to allocate licenses through the “Big Monopoly Game” (a story told in the book Wireless Nation) when the FCC proved incompetent to do so itself; federal anti-spam legislation, which came only after many states passed anti-spam laws; and federal law to require notification of customers whose personal information has been exposed by system compromise (which still doesn’t exist, though almost half the states now have some kind of hacking notification law). (In a related point, industries regularly develop products that completely sidestep federal regulations, such as the SUV, interstate banking, credit cards, money market accounts, and discount brokerages. The development of the latter financial products is a story told in Joseph Nocera’s A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class.) * The causes of federal regulations are not necessarily the problems themselves, but are often rent-seeking by involved entities, which can create a barrier to other alternative solutions. Adler listed four causes of federal environmental regulations: increased environmental awareness (by the voters and the feds), increasingly nationalized politics (political action at a national level), distrust of states and federalism, and rent-seeking. He gave examples to illustrate. * We don’t see (I’d say “we tend not to see”) environmental problems where we have well-defined property rights; the environmental problems occur in the commons (cf. Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons”). I disagree with making this an absolute statement since there are bad actors who disregard even well-established property rights (or liability rules). Adler’s intent was to raise skepticism about federal regulation on environmental matters on the basis of several points: * History shows the problem already being addressed effectively in a more decentralized manner. * Federal regulation tends to preempt state regulation, creating a uniform approach that doesn’t allow us the benefits of seeing how different approaches might work–we can miss out on better ways of dealing with the issue. * The rent-seeking behavior can produce unintended consequences that can make things worse or impose other costs. While I’m not sure I agree with the implied conclusion that federal regulation is never helpful, I agree that these are good reasons to be skeptical. The preemption issue in particular is a big one. The federal anti-spam law, CAN-SPAM, was pushed through after years of failure to pass federal regulations against spam after California passed a tough mandatory opt-in law. The federal law was passed largely through efforts by Microsoft and AOL (whose lawyers helped write it) and preempted state laws which mandated opt-in or any requirements contrary to the federal law. I don’t think it’s cynical to believe that preventing the California law from taking effect–which would potentially have affected online marketing efforts by Microsoft and AOL–was a major cause of the federal legislation passing. The benefit of preemption is that it creates a level playing field across the entire nation, which reduces the costs of compliance for those who operate across multiple states. But it also reduces the likelihood of innovation in law through experimentation with different approaches, and reduces the advantages of local entities in competition with multi-state entities. It also prevents a state with more stringent requirements from affecting the behavior of a multi-state provider operating in that state, when the requirements get dropped to a federal lowest common denominator. As regulation almost always has unintended consequences, a diversity of approaches provides a way to discover those consequences and make more informed choices. Another issue is that many federal regulations provide little in the way of enforcement, and the more federal regulations are created, the less likely that any particular one will have enforcement resources devoted to it. If you look at the FCC’s enforcement of laws against illegal telemarketing activity (such as the prohibition on prerecorded solicitations to residential telephones, and the prohibition on telemarketing to cell phones), it’s virtually nonexistent. They occasionally issue a citation, and very rarely issue fines to telemarketers who are blatantly violating the law on a daily basis. In this particular case, the law creates a private right of action so that the recipient of such an illegal call can file a civil case, and this model is one I’d like to endorse. I’ve personally had far more effect on most of the specific telemarketers who have made illegal calls to my residence than the FCC has. Federal laws and regulations can be effective when they are applicable to a small number of large players who can be adequately policed by a federal agency (but in such cases those large players tend to also be large players in Washington, D.C., and have huge influence over what rules get set) or when the enforcement is pushed down to state, local, or even private levels (e.g., using property or liability rules rather than agency-based regulation). Otherwise, they tend to be largely symbolic, with enforcement actions only occurring against major offenders while most violations are left unpunished. The most effective solutions are those which place the incentives on involved parties to voluntarily come to agreements that address the issues, and I think these are possible in most circumstances with the appropriate set of property and liability rules. A good discussion of this subject may be found in David Friedman’s book, Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do With Law and Why It Matters. There seems to be a widespread illusion on the part of many people that many problems can be solved merely by passing the federal legislation, without regard for the actual empirical consequences of such legislation (or the actual process of how it’s determined what gets put into such legislation!). From intellectual property law, to environmental law, to telecommunications law (e.g., net neutrality), good intentions can easily lead to bad consequences by those who don’t concern themselves with such details. Friedman’s book is a good start as an antidote to such thinking.

This post serves as an index to the net neutrality posts on The Lippard Blog. I’ll update this post with any future posts on the subject. “Net Neutrality” (February 12, 2006) Critique of Bill Thompson’s argument for net neutrality. “Geddes on net neutrality” (February 14, 2006) Comment on and link to good Martin Geddes blog post on net neutrality. “Commoncause.org: Spamming for ’net neutrality’" (March 9, 2006) How Common Cause deluged Mark Cuban with spam after depicting him with devil horns for not backing net neutrality. “Talking Points Memo gets it completely wrong on COPE Act” (April 22, 2006) Critique of Josh Marshall and Art Brodsky’s bogus claim that the bill transfers control of the Internet to the telcos (who have a much smaller percentage of consumer Internet customers in the U.S. than the cable companies). “Misinformation in defense of net neutrality” (May 7, 2006) Critique of Adam Green and Matt Stoller who repeat the common misconception that common carriage requirements have applied to the Internet, which is the basis of their calling Mike McCurry a liar. “Net Neutrality and Last-Mile Connectivity: An Analogy” (May 8, 2006) An analogy about net neutrality and last-mile connectivity in terms of taxicabs, in an attempt to elucidate some of the major points and misconceptions. “Net Neutrality and the Pace of Innovation” (May 17, 2006) A look at the pace of innovation in the Bell System under monopoly in light of calls for nationalization of “the Internet backbone” (as though there is one such thing) by net neutrality advocates. “Misinformation from ‘Save the Internet’" (May 19, 2006) A critique of “Save the Internet”’s critique of the “Hands Off the Internet” flash animation cartoon, which seems to repeat the common confusion that common carriage requirements have applied to the Internet. “Bad unintended consequences of HR 5417” (May 19, 2006) A criticism of the Sensenbrenner net neutrality bill. “Yglesias on McCurry” (May 19, 2006) Critique of Matthew Yglesias on net neutrality guest blogging at Talking Points Memo. “Net Neutrality and Fair Use” (May 22, 2006) Disagreement with Larry Lessig about an analogy between net neutrality and fair use. (I tend to agree with Lessig on intellectual property issues, at least about the dangers of ever-extending copyright terms, lack of registration requirements, and DRM.) “Hillary Clinton and Net Neutrality” (May 23, 2006) The hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton’s support of net neutrality on the grounds of protecting free speech (as pointed out by Adam Thierer). “Consumer broadband last-mile competition in the Phoenix metropolitan area” (May 24, 2006) A summary of actual broadband options in the Phoenix area, listing eight separate providers. “Net Neutrality expands to absurdity” (May 24, 2006) Critique of net neutrality advocate Jim Durbin, who thinks corporate web filters are a violation (which presumably he thinks should be made illegal). Also comment on Glenn Harlan Reynolds on pirate WiFi in the enterprise. “Newmark vs. McCurry on net neutrality” (May 24, 2006) Comment on Craig Newmark’s debate with Mike McCurry in the Wall Street Journal, in which Newmark is mightily confused about the technical facts. “Dave Siegel on QoS and net neutrality” (May 26, 2006) Link to Dave Siegel blog post that summarizes how QoS is used in Global Crossing’s network, and to a presentation by Xiao Xipeng on the same topic. “Save the Internet: Fighting astroturf with astroturf” (May 26, 2006) How “Save the Internet” has generated astroturfed letters-to-the-editor while condemning astroturf from the telcos. I condemn both. “More on last-mile options in Phoenix” (May 27, 2006) A response to criticisms of my list Phoenix-area broadband options from Douglas Ross. “The Abstract Factory on net neutrality” (May 31, 2006) A link to a good commentary on net neutrality and astroturfing telco shills. “Kevin Drum gets it wrong on net neutrality and common carriage” (June 1, 2006) Kevin Drum repeats the common misconception that common carriage requirements have applied to the Internet. “Worst net neutrality analogy ever?" (June 1, 2006) A critique of Susan Crawford’s horrible sidewalk analogy. “George Ou explains QoS to Russell Shaw” (June 10, 2006) In a ZDnet debate, George Ou gives a good simple explanation of QoS to someone who wants to regulate something he doesn’t understand. “Martin Geddes on net neutrality, federalism, and U.S. vs. EU” (June 12, 2006) Link to a nice piece on Geddes’ Telepocalypse blog where he provides links to his past positions on network neutrality and compares the U.S. to EU, and their respective regulatory regimes to networks. “Verizon’s Thomas Tauke on net neutrality” (June 12, 2006) Quote from and link to a Declan McCullagh interview with Thomas Tauke of Verizon about net neutrality. “Bennett on Free Press net neutrality ‘facts’" (June 12, 2006) Richard Bennett shows that the Free Press’s network neutrality facts are mostly fiction, argues against the anti-QoS provision of Snowe-Dorgan and Markey in a note to Sen. Boxer, comments on tomorrow’s Senate hearing, and on Matt Stoller’s acting as a spokesman for admitted ignorance. "‘Hands Off the Internet’ writes about me, then thinks better of it” (June 15, 2006) A post from the HOTI blog about me, recovered from Google cache. (Most of the content is actually excerpted from my own blog, with a bit of HOTI commentary.) “The New Republic supports net neutrality, based on error” (June 15, 2006) The editors of The New Republic join the crowds of net neutrality supporters who incorrectly think that common carriage requirements have applied to ISPs and the Internet. “Douglas Ross’s Network Neutrality Index” (June 16, 2006) A link to an index of blog posts by an advocate of net neutrality regulation. “Demonization of adversaries is wrong, Matt Stoller” (June 16, 2006) A criticism of part of Matt Stoller’s presentation at YearlyKos. “Andrew Kantor changes his mind on net neutrality” (June 16, 2006) The USA Today technology columnist no longer supports net neutrality regulations. “Matt Stoller lies about site blocking” (June 18, 2006) Matt Stoller falsely attributes a problem between Craigslist.org and Cox’s PC firewall software to the kind of discriminatory site blocking he thinks net neutrality regulations are needed to prevent–after already being informed of the real cause. “Update on Cox blocking of Craigslist” (June 20, 2006) Update on who’s said what, and a bit more detail on the underlying problem in which I disagree with placing blame on Craigslist. “Content providers and ISPs: who really has the stronger hand?" (June 21, 2006) A look at a case of “reverse network neutrality” involving ESPN360 blocking access to ISPs. “The future of connectivity options” (June 22, 2006) Telco 2.0 looks at a variety of business models for different types of connectivity and projections for how they will change in significance over the next decade. It would be a bad idea to impose regulations which stifle innovation by prohibiting some business models. “Matt Stoller refuses to come clean” (June 22, 2006) Matt Stoller, caught in falsehood, tries to avoid responsibility for his statements and instead accuses others of being “lying liars." “A version of network neutrality I can endorse” (June 22, 2006) I attempt to put forth a minimal, non-FCC-regulated version of “Lippard Network Neutrality” that I think is reasonable, and explain how it differs from what many network neutrality advocates are supporting. “Craigslist no longer uses TCP window size of 0” (July 14, 2006) Update on the Craigslist/Cox issue. “VoIP quality degradation shows need for prioritization” (July 27, 2006) Brix Networks study shows quality of VoIP calls has declined over the last 18 months due to competition for network resources. “ACLU incompetence and misinformation on net neutrality” (November 3, 2006) The ACLU comes out in support of network neutrality, making many of the same erroneous arguments which have been debunked here before, such as confusing common carriage with IP-layer nondiscrimination. “Netroots and telecom” (July 19, 2008) Discussion about the description of the Netroots Nation “Big Telecom” panel and an Art Brodsky column about it. “New Markey/Eshoo net neutrality bill” (August 3, 2009) Brief comments on the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009. ...