Net Neutrality

Matt Stoller has a post up at MyDD dated June 14 titled (with ironic accuracy) “Please lie to me about Net Neutrality” in which he gives the following as an example of unwarranted site blocking that shows the need for net neutrality regulations: There’s a pervasive myth that there has been no discrimination on the internet against content companies. That is simply untrue. For one, Craigslist has been blocked for three months from Cox customers because of security software malfunctions. ...

USA Today technology columnist Andrew Kantor has changed his mind, and no longer supports net neutrality regulations: Not too long ago, I was very much on their side. “Imagine you make a phone call to a friend,” I wrote then, “but instead of hearing it ring, you get a recording: We’re sorry, but the person you are calling has not paid Verizon to carry his or her conversations. But I was wrong. ...

Ed Brayton’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars has an excerpt from an article in Christianity Today by Yale Law School Professor Stephen Carter, a well-known black Christian conservative who authored the book Confessions of an Affirmative Action Baby. In the article, Carter is arguing against the common demonization of the ACLU by Christians, pointing out that while he disagrees with the ACLU on the establishment clause, they are also a big defender of the free exercise clause and have consistently supported Christians in free exercise court cases: More to the point, the ACLU is often right about the First Amendment’s free exercise clause, taking on fights that others refuse. It might surprise some critics that the ACLU defends the free speech and free exercise rights of, well, Christians.The larger point of the article, however, is to condemn the mode of argument that characterizes those who disagree as irrational, dishonest, or evil simply in virtue of that disagreement: I am more concerned about a habit of mind that seems to be growing among my fellow Christians, both political liberals and conservatives. That is, we seem to mimic the secular world’s conflation of disagreement with wickedness, as if not sharing my worldview places my critic outside the realm of rational discourse…I’ve seen similar habits expressed by people on both sides of the net neutrality debate. For example, in Matt Stoller’s presentation at the YearlyKos convention, he admits that he doesn’t understand the relevant technical issues (and proceeds to demonstrate it by suggesting that “non-neutrality” will cause dropped calls, when in fact it’s non-neutral QoS that will prevent them). He asserts that it is fun to beat up on “these bad people” and that it is very important that Mike McCurry be personally vilified. That’s explicit endorsement of irrationality, of emotional demogoguery over fact and reason, and should be condemned by everyone in this debate. Ed Brayton concludes: But rational people, people who care about truth and accuracy, must fight this tendency. We must try and evaluate every claim using the same criteria. Does the evidence support it? Are the conclusions drawn from the evidence logical? Any claim that fails to meet those criteria should be rejected, regardless of whether it supports our agenda or not. Likewise, any claim that withstands that scrutiny should be accepted as valid, regardless of whether it supports our agenda or not. None of us will ever be Mr. Spock, but we should strive to evaluate all arguments as though we have no stake in the outcome. Some, like the STACLU crowd, make no attempt at all to do so; we should not emulate them.I agree.

For those looking for a series of arguments in favor of network neutrality, blogger Douglas Ross has put together an index like mine of his postings on the subject. I’ve not read all of them, and have disagreed with most of the ones I have read (e.g., Ross thinks it’s OK to ban QoS because it can’t possibly work, even though it does work and is in use in major Internet backbones like Global Crossing’s; we had an extended exchange in response to my list of Phoenix-area broadband options). So check out his writings, and think critically. If you think he’s got some good arguments for imposing net neutrality regulations, let me know.

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.

On June 9, the Hands Off the Internet blog posted an entry (http://handsoff.org/tiered-service/turf-battle/) about one of my posts, but it was deleted by June 10. I wonder if they noticed my Creative Commons license, considered their use to be commercial, and decided not to risk a violation? In my opinion, their excerpt would be fine under fair use. Here’s the post, from Google cache. Turf Battle June 9, 2006 at 9:21 am - Tiered Service, Net Neutrality, Debate, Internet Legislation, Consumer Benefit ...

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.)

Richard Bennett at the Original Blog has criticized Free Press’s list of network neutrality facts, arguing that most of them are fictions, e.g.: PSEUDO-FACT #1: Network Neutrality protections have existed for the entire history of the Internet. REAL FACT: Actually, there is no legal precedent at all for the anti-QoS provision of the Neutrality regulations, and many commercial Internet customers use QoS today. Even the Internet2 Abilene network tried to use it. ...

Declan McCullagh interviews Verizon’s Thomas Tauke on net neutrality. A key Q&A: What do you think of the tone of the debate, and the appearance of pro-Net neutrality spokespeople like <news:link id=“6074096”>Moby</news:link> and Alyssa Milano? Tauke: I think it’s one of the stranger debates I’ve ever been involved in. It’s almost like we’re debating what is beauty and how do we define it and regulate it? The problem is that everyone has a different definition of Net neutrality. If you look at the four major companies that are supporting the Net neutrality arguments, there are three distinct definitions of what Net neutrality should mean. The question becomes which way do you think the market will better develop? If government sets policy today that dictates how the market develops? We think it should develop in the free market space, and government regulation should come in when a problem becomes apparent. ...

Martin Geddes has written a very interesting post at his Telepocalypse blog titled “You won’t like this, not one bit," but I do like it, very much. He links to his past statements on network neutrality, and then asserts that “over time, the architecture of the telecom system will resemble the political system around it.” He compares the U.S. government to the EU, and the irony that the planned federalism of the U.S. (where the states would run things their own way, competing with each other and evolving better rules in the process) has been supplanted by much stronger federal government setting most of the rules at a national level, while the EU, composed of nations of a much more collectivist/statist variety, has evolved into a collection of “competing regulatory regimes and voluntary cross-border cooperation compared to the centrally planned US communications economy." For good measure, he throws in a comparison to networks: “That means the EU constitution is “edge-based”, and the US one doesn’t scale. Oops. Hey, just skip a generation and move straight to anarchism: peer-to-peer contracts, and a state whose only function is to enforce them.”