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"If Wheeler does propose to reclassify ISPs and regulate them under Title II of the Communications Act, that would be a stinging defeat for ISPs"

I feel this adversarial perspective is unnecessary. Title II is good for anyone who wants to build a good Internet Service Provider.

If you're an ISP, and you don't want to build a good ISP, that's bad for your business with or without Title II. Title II just provides a foundation for protecting customers of such idiots while they are in the process of going out of business.

It would be a stinging defeat for the main major actually existing ISPs, all of whom have been actively fighting any net neutrality regulation and have especially opposed the idea of Title II reclassification.

The adversarial perspective may slightly imprecise in identifying the one side ("ISPs" as opposed to "the major ISPs now in existence"), but is otherwise an accurate description of the facts.

It would be a stinging defeat for their expensive lobbyists, who will be fired.

Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, and Verizon won't change much.

A lot of people forget that AT&T, Verizon, and Google put forth Net Neutrality legislation that was perfectly good, but limited temporarily to "wireline" services, because they wanted time to regulate wireless.

That was like three or four years ago, so the argument at the time that we couldn't wait for wireless regulation is completely insolvent, since we also still don't have wireless regulation, and Title II is unlikely to cover wireless services, at least in this round - though I could be proven wrong.

Look, I'm an anti-capitalist, anti-corporate activist, but most people, fellow engineers included, have no idea what they're talking about with Net Neutrality. Most people are protecting the interests of Netflix, who is a major corporation with a massive technology budget dwarfed only by its' massive budget for paying the MPAA.

But please, keep regurgitating Netflix's talking points about how noone will be able to start a company in their basement ever again - an odd complaint, since before Comcast throttled Netflix to something like 70% of the total Comcast network, Netflix themselves may have been causing problems for people trying to launch companies from basements or garages, or just check their e-mail.

Title II is a victory for the internet, it should be a utility, I've been saying this for the entire 20 years of my career since I was involved in Time Warner's beta test of Roadrunner and noticed that as an entertainment service, it wasn't regulated like my ISDN line.

But the way this is all going down, it's clear to me that something is happening behind the scenes, and I think it looks like Netflix pouring water into a bucket with a few drops of Net Neutrality.

> Title II is good for anyone who wants to build a good Internet Service Provider.

So that'd mean it's good for, at most, anyone who isn't in the set { Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, ... }.

No, not really. It would likely commoditize the service of providing Internet addressable IP routing and set it on a path for cutting all of the margin out of the business for the ISP, while likely doing nothing to cut the overall cost of the combined service to the consumer. The companies that own the lines would still take the lion's share of the profit under a title II scenario - they'd just take it in different ways than they do today. Line sharing rules weren't effective for DSL, and I don't see how the same dance played out 15 years later would have any different results.

We need to do something, I just don't think title II is the right way to go.

Define "good internet service provider"? ISP's are businesses. Businesses exist to make money. Regulations like net neutrality push in the direction of turning ISP's into "dumb pipes" and there's no money in building "dumb" anything, and certainly not enough to justify the tens of billions of dollars ISPs invest every year into their networks.[1]

Differentiation and bundling is something you see in many areas of the tech sector. Facebook doesn't open up their platform and infrastructure for anyone to access however they want. They carefully control the points of entries onto their service, and affiliations with other services, etc.

At the end of the day, users are willing to pay, e.g., $15/month for Netflix, and don't care about who gets what part of that money. Fights over net neutrality and copyright are about how this $15 gets split up between: content creators, infrastructure providers, and user-facing websites.

[1] If you look into the actual finances of cable and fiber, you'll find, for example, that both Verizon FiOS and Charter would be losing tons of money if they didn't bundle video services along with internet access.

Sonic.net is, for my money (and they get my money, rather than Comcast or someone else who would sell me a fatter, but less capable or otherwise somehow restricted, pipe for less money), a perfect example of a "good ISP".

What makes them good? They act like a dumb pipe. They don't block things. They don't log things. They don't throttle things. They don't care what I use my service for. They fix things when things break. They stay out of my way.

And, somehow, they manage to bring in enough money that they're deploying FTTP trials in multiple cities.

> there's no money in building "dumb" anything

Historically, there have been many successful utility providers that earned a lot of money producing simple products. Telephone companies, power companies, and oil refineries, neither won a stronghold by producing "smart" products. Most however did produce illegal monopolies.

>At the end of the day, users are willing to pay, e.g., $15/month for Netflix, and don't care about who gets what part of that money. Fights over net neutrality and copyright are about how this $15 gets split up between: content creators, infrastructure providers, and user-facing websites.

This is incorrect, the actual fight is about killing Netflix as a business. The idea is to gradually force Netflix to raise their prices to a point where it no longer seems to be a cheap alternative to cable/satellite television.

What I don't understand is how exactly ISPs managed to be declared not utilities.

Does no-one remember the really old acoustic coupled modems where you had to literally pick up the phone (utility) and place it on the receiver? All that happened was that we started plugging the phone line directly into an integrated modem - it's still going down the phone line for most people.

An ISP is a telecoms provider and should technically already be regulated as one...

Sort of?

ISPs ran on top of telecom service, which itself ran on telecom infrastructure, not that differently than any business that received phone calls, except it utilized telecom more heavily.

Later, with DSL, service was provided over the same infrastructure telecom used, blurring the line a bit. Additionally, by this point, the internet was becoming more important to daily life.

Now, we have telecom and other services offered on top of the network service which is provided on infrastructure designed for networks, not telecom.

So I would say, yes, an ISP is a telecoms provider, but they didn't really start that way.

Edit: I'm being sort of loose with "telecom" here. I'm using more in the "what we regulate" sense than the "what the word means" sense.

I don't even think telecom is ambiguous or used loosely in this regard; comcast provides telephone service, and "telecom", short for "telecommunications", is defined as "communication over a distance by cable, telegraph, telephone, or broadcasting."

So in this, every single ISP is a telecom

I'm pretty sure telephone lines are indeed today regulated as utilities. That's why I can get DSL service from a company other than Verizon, even though Verizon owns all the phone lines in my neighborhood.

No one ever put the phone modem on cable networks, though, or fiber optics, or wireless. None of those are regulated as utilities, so the only service providers on those lines are the companies who own the lines. This is a big reason Verizon has sunk almost all of their recent investment into FiOS and wireless.

It's not really that simple - try to remember how cable companies started. The basic idea is that if you lived in a remote area and the TV signal was blocked by mountains, you and a bunch of your neighbors would build a tower up on a ridge with an antenna and some signal boosting equipment. Then along came satellite TV (think 6m dishes, not DirecTV), so instead of a terrestrial antenna, the coax cables hooked up to a satellite dish.

This is pretty much how cable worked until the mid-90s: cable wasn't much more than a way to broadcast satellite video content using hardware that was tunable by consumer TVs. Cities had been granting exclusive licenses for years and nobody thought much of it. Regulation was unnecessary because the market was so heavily fragmented, and even the huge players didn't serve more than a few hundred thousand homes. Since satellite dishes were relatively cheap and needed to be placed in every market, there was no benefit from economies of scale, and thus no market pressure to consolidate.

Enter DOCSIS. Cable companies figured out they could sell bidirectional 10mbps Internet connections with very few modifications to their infrastructure by utilizing unused frequency bands along with signal compression and encryption. This was in the days before ADSL, and most customers were on 56k dialup, so it was a big leap. ADSL was already obsolete by the time it was widely available, and cost the telcos significantly more to deploy than DOCSIS did for the cable companies. DOCSIS adoption happened very fast - and it was a lot cheaper to deploy DOCSIS if you had already done it before.

Internet access DOES benefit from economies of scale since terrestrial connections are far faster than satellite ones, and can be aggregated to take advantage of time sharing effects. Therefore it made sense to start connecting the various cable systems across the country, and massive consolidation happened faster than the regulators were able to react. Add in a dash of the deregulatory fever that started in the late 90s under Clinton and continued under Bush, and you have a recipe for hands-off regulation of an industry that didn't need regulation only a few years prior. Nevermind the FCC was so preoccupied with sorting out the ILEC/CLEC mess that they totally missed cable sneaking in the back door of their outdated regulatory framework.

Anyway, regardless of how you feel about the issue now, it's pretty easy to see how we got where we are today. All of the decisions made sense at the time, because we couldn't foresee how things would play out when we were in the moment.

TLDR: Cable used to be harmless and fragmented until DOCSIS came around in the mid 90s. The government wasn't used to things happening at Internet speed, so by the time it became apparent that cable companies were competing with traditional telcos, it was too late.

Does anyone else see Title II as potentially opening the door to more competition?

From a recent article: http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/01/google-letter-fcc-title-i...

> Mountain View pointed out that if broadband internet access is declared to be a Title II service, then Google Fiber should be granted the same access as other utilities to poles and other essential infrastructure. It went on to say that doing so would actually "promote broadband deployment and competition."

> Does anyone else see Title II as potentially opening the door to more competition?

One group for sure: the established ISP oligopoly. That's why they're ready to fight tooth and nail to prevent it.

There are still a bunch of details like franchises and redlining. There's also the natural monopoly argument.
Still not sure what you do in an overbuilding scenario. Those poles have physical restrictions such as weight and volume. You can't have 10 different telcos serve a neighborhood: there would just be too much gear on the pole. So how do you decide who gets the space on the poles? The sensible argument says you put them up for bid in an auction, but then the incumbents still have a huge sunk cost advantage.
This is exactly why Republicans want to fight it. The number of Republicans that subscribe to and believe in the opinions of The Economist are rather small.
We MUST have true competition and instead of localized monopolies. This is the issue.

Government Regulation can potentially be very scary, but monopolies are 100% scary and even Libertarians should be against them.

How many driveways does your residence have?

You're fighting a pretty tough natural monopoly to get multiple sets of competing wires. That we have both copper and coax is a relic from the days where they could each only carry specific type of signal.

A form of competition could be fostered by making the wire layers into utilities that wholesale to transit providers. However, it already is this way on the telco side. In most areas, there is little third party interest for investing in competing transit networks, so the ILEC is left as the only provider. Perhaps there would be more interest if latest gen technologies were (de)regulated in the same way, but that undermines investment in new physical wires.

I think the more fitting comparison would be this:

How many roads does your driveway open onto? Just one, right?

Now, would you rather that be a public and regulated road, or a private road where the road owner can set up a tollbooth at the end of the driveway and even charge you extra for driving a Toyota instead of a Ford?

Most people don't need wires. In a normal density neighborhood, wireless on the pole would serve most people's needs. I am absolutely in favor of the last mile being owned by the people and ISPs competing for services and bandwidth. That also means that cross town traffic would be extremely low cost (free or a couple bucks a month).
Interest in CLEC DSL fell off because interest in DSL fell off in general. It just can't compete with cable or fiber for bandwidth.

If the coax and/or fiber lines were open to competitive carriers, I bet there would be quite a bit of interest.

Look at UK. The wire is owned by a third party that rents the use of the wires for your service. So we only need one fiber and one copper wire.

P.S. I live int he city I don't have a drive way the street is my park lot :)

I'm confused by your post. Are you in favor of government regulation or against?

Historically, government regulation is what has been used to create and maintain monopolies and cartels. The regulation is often pitched under the guise as being for the public good, but is then used for quite the opposite. This trick has been played time and time again in American History.

Tariffs, patents, copyrights, and regulatory capture are all mechanisms that corporations use to grant themselves the privilege of monopoly and protect themselves from competition.

Quoting Rothbard in "Left and Right" [1]:

> Orthodox historians have always treated the Progressive period (roughly 1900-1916) as a time when free-market capitalism was becoming increasingly "monopolistic"; in reaction to this reign of monopoly and big business, so the story runs, altruistic intellectuals and far-seeing politicians turned to intervention by the government to reform and regulate these evils. Kolko's great work demonstrates that the reality was almost precisely the opposite of this myth. Despite the wave of mergers and trusts formed around the turn of the century, Kolko reveals, the forces of competition on the free market rapidly vitiated and dissolved these attempts at stabilizing and perpetuating the economic power of big business interests. It was precisely in reaction to their impending defeat at the hands of the competitive storms of the market that business turned, increasingly after the 1900's, to the federal government for aid and protection. In short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market. Both Left and Right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and anti-business. Hence the mythology of the New-Fair Deal-as-Red that is endemic on the Right. Both the big businessmen, led by the Morgan interests, and Professor Kolko almost uniquely in the academic world, have realized that monopoly privilege can only be created by the State and not as a result of free market operations.

[1] http://mises.org/library/left-and-right-prospects-liberty

Not all regulation is the same.
monopolies are 100% scary and even Libertarians should be against them

The libertarian position is that monopolies are an ill, and that it is government that creates them.

Title II would be exciting and a big change. I think it's a good thing, but I can't help but be a little worried about the unforeseen consequences.
Most people here, myself included, are too young to remember what the world looked like when other industries were regulated under rules similar to Title II. It's a 1970's style, "ask permission before you do anything" regulatory framework. Such regulation was applied to airlines, trucking, railroads, etc.

One of the most exciting things happening right now is the disruption of retail with vendors like Amazon shipping directly to consumers. None of that would have been possible if it weren't for air cargo deregulation, which allowed UPS and FedEx to come into existence: http://mercatus.org/publication/unleashing-innovation-deregu....

I understand some people want net neutrality, but this is a bad way to go about it.

I'm not too young to remember that. Air transport regulation isn't a particularly good comparison. The current wireless cell phone industry is a much better comparison, because it's already regulated under Title II. If that really meant "ask permission before you do anything," cell phone providers would be having to go before the FCC -- or state commissions -- to introduce new service plans or even change existing ones. They do not.

I think it's too easy to leap on the "regulation bad, deregulation good" bandwagon; in practice, it's rarely that clearcut. Look at phone company deregulation in the 90s and the rise of CLECs, Competitive Local Exchange Carriers -- CLECs would never have existed without deregulation, right? That's true, yet it turns out that what created the first C was actually new regulation: incumbent LECs were required to share their networks with competitors. If that sort of "government interference in the market" had happened in the early 2000s with data communications, the end result might well have been having half a dozen different ISPs to choose from no matter where you lived, rather than a choice between your single cable company and your single phone company. (Of course, like what actually happened to CLECs, there's also a good chance that the lack of regulation meant nothing would prevent a series of ever more massive corporate mergers leaving us with the same lack of choice we had before deregulation, but never mind.)

What is a good way to go about it?

Because from my perspective, there's more than enough accumulated capital / lobbying / entrenched market positions to make disruption of the market a pipe dream.

In that case, I consider slapping "too burdensome" regulations and then later parring them down the lesser of two evils.

Is or isn't internet access important enough to be treated as a utility? That's what Title II asks in my opinion.

If so, then sort out the implementation details later.

(Disclaimer: In a semi-related note, I support the ACA for the same reasons. Is universal health insurance important enough to codify in law? If so, work on the details after you get that point down on paper.)

> It's a 1970's style, "ask permission before you do anything" regulatory framework.

No one yet who has made this claim has established that Title II classification would mandate the FCC to use that kind of regulatory framework, though I don't think there is any dispute that Title II classification could support such a framework.

Of course, rather than arguing about abstractions, we can argue once actual regulations are proposed, at which point -- and only at which point -- will we actually discussing anything other than what someone speculates might be the proposed regulatory framework.

> Most people here, myself included, are too young to remember what the world looked like when other industries were regulated under rules similar to Title II. It's a 1970's style, "ask permission before you do anything" regulatory framework

Wheeler is not going in that direction. There's much more detail in the Ars article: http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/title-ii-for-interne...

An excerpt:

------------------

Wheeler went in to a little more depth about the upcoming proposed rules, which he says will be circulated within the Commission on February 5 and voted on on February 26. The chairman—who formerly led cable and wireless industry trade groups—said that in the '90s he worked on the industry side as the FCC crafted section 332 of the Communications Act dealing with mobile services and he implied that the section informed the way the FCC has structured the proposed rules.

“It just so happens that 20 years ago I was the guy that negotiated on behalf of the wireless industry to establish Section 332," Wheeler said.

“Section 332 says that wireless should be regulated under Title II as a common carrier, except that the FCC is instructed to forbear from onerous provisions and inappropriate provisions of Title II, except for section 201 and 202, which is just and reasonable, and Section 208, which is consumer protection," he added.

Sections 201, 202, and 208 include requirements for reasonable rates and practices, a prohibition against unjust or unreasonable discrimination in rates and practices, and the establishment of a complaint process. Wireless voice—but not data—is regulated under Title II. The FCC could reclassify both fixed and wireless broadband as Title II if it so chooses.

”So I say to myself, 'ok there is a way to do Title II right, and sure there are many ways to do Title II that would thwart investment, but there are other ways to do Title II,'” Wheeler told Shapiro on stage. “We ought to take a look at how that fits together with consumer protection.”

Wheeler urged listeners to look at the wireless industry under Title II to see how the FCC might enforce it. “There is no need to file tariffs, there is no need to file all these informational activities,” Wheeler said. “The problem we had at that time [in the 90’s] was the wireless industry was having to go before state commissions to change rates.” Having the FCC approve all rate changes, Wheeler seemed to imply, is not what he wants. Obama has also said the FCC should not impose rate regulation.

”We’re gonna have rules that say—we're going to propose rules that say, 'no blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritization,' and that there is a yardstick against which behavior should be measured, and that yardstick was 'just and reasonable,'" he said.

The problem is that we don't have competition because you have to dig up the ground. And, everything else which requires that you dig up the ground is regulated (electricity, water, sewage, etc.)

The ISPs did this to themselves with crappy service which they then tried to enforce by regulation (lobbying, sweetheart laws to stifle local deployments, etc.) The ISPs created the openings, and now they're going to have to live with the problems.

Other countries have to dig up the ground too, and they have competition. And no, not every of those countries has public last-mile infrastructure, the ISPs actually build it themselves.
One thing is for sure, if the define broadband as 25/3; mentioned elsewhere; and do similar for "unrestricted access" or whatever terms they use you can guarantee that is what you will get and likely the most you ever will.

Welcome to mediocrity by regulation. So the new baseline will be less than what I have now and what I have now can cost more since it exceeds the requirements... they can even brand it "ultra" or "extreme".

As soon as ISPs go under such regulation they all arrive at the lowest common denominator.

This is what scares me the most because I fear Title II may be used to open the Internet to greater regulation. Hopefully this fear is unfound.
They are foreseeable. This sort of regulation ensures that only big players (incumbents) will play, because it tilts advantage to those with better lobbyists. http://clipperhouse.com/2010/02/22/net-neutrality-and-preser...
I'm concerned about QoS. Will it be legal to throttle HTTP for voice traffic?
what are some of the possible consequences of title 2?
Interesting. The race is now on between Wheeler's Title II proposal and Congress Republicans' rumored Title X proposal [0].

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/12/19...

My pessimistic prediction: FCC will go for Title II, a legal shitstorm will ensue, it will be determined somehow that they don't have the right to regulate ISPs in that way, then ISPs will start charging per-service and home internet will basically be like cell data plans, but worse (Google Maps requires the maps and navigation package!).
I'm a bit worried that these stories floating around about title 2 being imminent will give the monopolies time to throw more money at the problem to make it go away.

i.e. "convince" Wheeler or get congress to pass a bill.

Or it could be a ploy by Wheeler. Make noise about full regulation, then make the carriers think they have won some concession when he negotiates and implements something lesser.

I feel like this has been the Obama Administration's plan all along, and that everything else has been mostly political theater - mostly to make ISPs look bad and force them to shoot themselves in the foot.
I disagree. My suspicion is that Tom Wheeler wants to dive deeper into the powers of government. By dragging out a decision on net neutrality he has brought the media spotlight to himself. Just think about how many people now know his name. He could probably run for a simple office now and win.
The large American ISPs (i.e. cable and telephone companies) have made an enormous mistake with their recent attempts to create artificial network congestion to extract rent, and I'm glad that the FCC seems to think that this isn't acceptable behavior. I still wish that the resolution wasn't government regulation.

Everyone should be able to access the Internet, at a reasonable cost that covers their usage and makes a reasonable profit. No packages, plans, quotas or other nonsense -- no limits whatsoever. The fundamental costs of building a network lie in the instantaneous bandwidth provided and the oversubscription ratio, not in how many bits you move in a month or whether your data is going to this site or that site. This is not how things work right now for a lot of people.

Likewise, everyone should be able to serve content to these users, on equal footing relative to the legitimate costs that are being paid. If I'm YouTube, then I should pay (or make a mutually beneficial agreement to peer) for my transit, and my upstream providers should be incentivized to provide quality service (at risk of being replaced). This is how things work right now for most sites.

I think the root problem is that there is competition on only one side, the service provider side, where you can choose from tens or hundreds of transit partners. This side is undergoing substantial consolidation (not good), but I believe a significant part of that is because they have to keep getting bigger to compete with Comcast, et. al. It's an arms race.

End user connectivity, on the other hand, has already been extremely consolidated since the late 90's. There is almost no real competition in most markets, even if multiple providers exist.

Yes, a lot of people have two or more choices for ISPs at home or work. Generally it's between the phone and the cable company (AT&T and Comcast where I live). AT&T is not competitive on performance with Comcast at all, not even remotely close. There are two other good options (who I always try to do business with, when I can) in the area: Sonic.net and Webpass. They are either limited in terms of performance or in availability (or both), and their respective userbases are a fraction of AT&T's or Comcast's. They both support network neutrality.

Why do they support it when AT&T and Comcast don't? I think it's because they aren't monopolies who were gifted substantial control of Internet at public expense, they aren't trying to be paid two or three times for the same bandwidth, and they aren't trying to prop up giant unrelated dinosaur businesses on the backs of their Internet service fees. They're both in one business, and they compete for that business, and they know that if they fail to perform adequately then they will lose that business.

This is what we need to bring to all ISPs everywhere in the country, and we need it way more than formal network neutrality laws. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner did not build the Internet, so why do they get disproportionate control over it by virtue of having some buried copper that runs to my house? It is inconceivable to me that we might allow any of them to acquire more subscribers and more territories. They should be broken up.

If a company is allowed to have a monopoly in an area, fine. Maybe that makes sense. They should not be allowed to have a monopoly (or duopoly) that spans half of the country though. Chop up Comcast ala Standard Oil: one Comcast for every state (or even better, for every major metropolitan area) they operate in. They may still try to play shenanigans with Internet connectivity, but their bargaining power is now vastly reduced.

One thing that disturbs me about the Net Neutrality discussion is that nobody's talking about what we might be giving up. I've learned a lot about unintended effects of regulation. I have some ideas about what those might be, like reduced infrastructure investment by the ISPs, but as a community this discussion seems absent. Are there others out there that are concerned about the unforeseen consequences like I am?

In particular, it feels like Net Neutrality will remove the incentive for video streaming services to put investment into new and improved compression algorithms.

I worry about streaming video squeezing out simpler tcp/ip.