FCC, FEC look to ruin the Internet • Tammy Bruce • Ajit Pai

originally posted by: greencmp
I am certain of that one thing, that the free market (private property in the means of production with minimal or nonexistent economic intervention), unimpeded and unmolested is the best way to manage the production and distribution of goods and services.

The problem here is that 100% free markets are unsustainable. In any economic exchange one side wins and one side loses. When one body wins enough, they are able to gobble up the competition and create a non competitive environment. Market forces are very powerful but they're not a solution to every problem and this is one of those problems. One day in the future we will get to that point again, but we can only get to that point if we take steps to limit telecom power right now. Preserving Net Neutrality is that step.

I have really only relatively recently concluded that antitrust action is not a viable solution and, frankly, it is the only state action which I might contemplate. It is, however, nothing more than a disruption of a functioning system if there is no financial benefit to consumers in its implementation. I have come to believe that such a bloated monopoly would not be able to hold on to its market share when there is no legal preclusion to direct competition from smaller, more agile and necessarily more innovative upstarts. It would persist until its specification is no longer competitive.

Antitrust action would be great but as I mentioned it's just not practical right now. We could take a company like Verizon and divide them up into a lot of different companies, but the issue comes back to who provides backbone access. Those are the key players here and large or small, these companies will always be local monopolies unless we duplicate infrastructure. That means that on some level we need regulation no matter the size of the companies, and Net Neutrality is a very good regulation because it's already there, has low overhead, and is a simple enough concept that it can be defined in a single clear and concise sentence.

So we're back to the main problem. We have two options here, we have Wheeler's plan or we have Verizon's plan. Wheelers plan leaves us with a mechanism to have an actual market based solution in the future where as Verizon's plan doesn't and makes it harder to take action against them in the future. I see this as a pretty easy choice as to which we should support.

a reply to: greencmp

“net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem.” -Ajit Pai

Ajit Pai either has no idea what he is talking about or he is just spouting right wing propaganda. To see the problem all he had to do was to look into what Comcast did to Netflix. That is why Net neutrality is needed so conglomerates like Comcast can't extort more money out of their customers.

a reply to: buster2010

You should know that they aren't trying to extort money out of their customers, they are extorting money out of your content providers.

You should be interested in defending the only mechanism which promises to expand choice and throughput.

Just out of curiosity, do you believe 'net neutrality' should be defended or created?

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: greencmp
I am certain of that one thing, that the free market (private property in the means of production with minimal or nonexistent economic intervention), unimpeded and unmolested is the best way to manage the production and distribution of goods and services.

The problem here is that 100% free markets are unsustainable. In any economic exchange one side wins and one side loses. When one body wins enough, they are able to gobble up the competition and create a non competitive environment. Market forces are very powerful but they're not a solution to every problem and this is one of those problems. One day in the future we will get to that point again, but we can only get to that point if we take steps to limit telecom power right now. Preserving Net Neutrality is that step.

I have really only relatively recently concluded that antitrust action is not a viable solution and, frankly, it is the only state action which I might contemplate. It is, however, nothing more than a disruption of a functioning system if there is no financial benefit to consumers in its implementation. I have come to believe that such a bloated monopoly would not be able to hold on to its market share when there is no legal preclusion to direct competition from smaller, more agile and necessarily more innovative upstarts. It would persist until its specification is no longer competitive.

Antitrust action would be great but as I mentioned it's just not practical right now. We could take a company like Verizon and divide them up into a lot of different companies, but the issue comes back to who provides backbone access. Those are the key players here and large or small, these companies will always be local monopolies unless we duplicate infrastructure. That means that on some level we need regulation no matter the size of the companies, and Net Neutrality is a very good regulation because it's already there, has low overhead, and is a simple enough concept that it can be defined in a single clear and concise sentence.

So we're back to the main problem. We have two options here, we have Wheeler's plan or we have Verizon's plan. Wheelers plan leaves us with a mechanism to have an actual market based solution in the future where as Verizon's plan doesn't and makes it harder to take action against them in the future. I see this as a pretty easy choice as to which we should support.

This is a common misconception (not intentionally being a jerk here, just pointing out that this perception is widely held).

Equitable exchanges do not have losing participants. They are always comprised of voluntary parties who's best interests are better reflected in the realization of the exchange than not.

What you are thinking about is mandatory compromise which guarantees that both parties will be disappointed with the transaction.

originally posted by: greencmp
Equitable exchanges do not have losing participants. They are always comprised of voluntary parties who's best interests are better reflected in the realization of the exchange than not.

What you are thinking about is mandatory compromise which guarantees that both parties will be disappointed with the transaction.

Both parties can walk away from a deal happy, that doesn't mean that the exchange was fair. Economic exchanges are near zero sum (not quite zero sum due to inflation). Eventually certain companies get enough positive exchanges that their business grows beyond that of their competitors. This isn't always a bad thing, but when you follow it to it's conclusion you end up with only a few or even one company in any given sector. We have been watching this happen in banking for the past 15 years, and it happened very rapidly with our ISP's in the early 2000's.

This is a big part of why the telecom's are such an issue today.

a reply to: Aazadan

The crux of the misunderstanding is that I think you have some flawed economic presumptions. The pie in not finite.

What you are describing is what happens when finite pie advocates manage infrastructure allocation.

The most productive, most efficient and least wasteful methods of production are only discoverable through widespread independent innovation out of which a 'best practice' or 'industry standard' can be identified and described though, the resulting standard is ephemeral.

originally posted by: greencmp
a reply to: Aazadan

The crux of the misunderstanding is that I think you have some flawed economic presumptions. The pie in not finite.

What you are describing is what happens when finite pie advocates manage infrastructure allocation.

The most productive, most efficient and least wasteful methods of production are only discoverable through widespread independent innovation out of which a 'best practice' or 'industry standard' can be identified and described though, the resulting standard is ephemeral.

Over time the pie is not finite, at any given moment in time however it is finite. There is a finite demand and there is a finite amount of money in the system. In the case of internet service where each household needs exactly 1 account, the demand has a limit equal to the number of households in the country. In reality the demand will be slightly less as not everyone will take advantage of the service. From here you run into some more issues, one in particular is that the US is a relatively rural nation, our densest city is New York City and it has a population density half that of Seoul, SK. This means that it takes more infrastructure to bring internet service to each person, this significantly increases costs and creates a much higher barrier to entry. Best practices don't apply to US internet deployment because the rural nature of our population prevents those practices from being practical, that's why technologies like whitefi hold such appeal in the US despite their much slower speeds when compared to wired networks.

a reply to: Aazadan

quote from Aazadan It's irrelevant who owns the last mile. It's all about the backbone network that spans the country/world. This fiber optic backbone was built by the feds and given to the ISP's, after the ISP's took the money to build it and then refused. Even if you own all the copper wire in a town you must still go through the major ISP in order to connect it to the rest of the country and by doing so, you become subject to their terms and conditions.

Some regulation is needed because the telecoms operate as monopolies.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

I didn't know that the backbone was so over loaded. Can't there be parallel pathways? If the economy weren't ruined, this would be the time for a new player to build its own backbone. Or maybe just a piece of the backbone that has the worst bottleneck in it.

Back in 1990's, whenever the internet was mentioned in the MSM it was called "free".

Nothing is free. Tax payers and megacorporation customers payed for the backbone. The 'free' backbone was a gargantuan hook inserted into the media stream, to keep the internet under central control. A legacy of the centralization of the 20th century. A finger in every pot.

Now that the back bone is aging, the companies that would normally be upgrading and expanding it want to regulate its use instead. That is the goal of a cartel, to cut production and raise the price per item.
The cartel situation is the genuine monopoly monster. Cartels must be enforced by governmental regulation, or else the first player to get new technology, or some other advantage, will take over the artificially high priced market. Any regulation is the first step down the road of bad internet monopoly.

The road could lead all the way back to typewriters and carbon paper copies before its ended.

Samizdat (Russian: самизда́т; IPA: [səmɨzˈdat]) was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader. This grassroots practice to evade officially imposed censorship was fraught with danger as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying censored materials.

Essentially, the samizdat copies of texts were passed among friends, such as Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita or Václav Havel's essay The Power of the Powerless. Techniques used to reproduce these forbidden texts varied, from making several copies of the content using carbon paper, either by hand or on a typewriter, to printing on mainframe printers during night shifts, to printing the books on semiprofessional printing presses in larger quantities. Before glasnost, the practice was dangerous, because copy machines, printing presses, and even typewriters in offices were under control of the First Departments (KGB outposts): reference printouts for all of them were stored for identification purposes.

en.wikipedia.org...

German typewriter makers such as Bandermann and Olympia have cited climbing sales amid NSA spying revelations.

"We sell about 10,000 [typewriters] every year," Bandermann manager Rolf Bonnen told The Local. "We’ve seen an increase because Brother left the market [in 2012],” he added. The company's sales jumped by one-third over last year since 2012.

Triumph Adler, which is part of Bandermann, began advertising its typewriters as 'Bug proof. NSA proof” in 2013 in order to attract more consumers.
rt.com...

Parents used to say to the younger generation, "You have no idea how easy you've got it", even on TV.

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: greencmp
a reply to: Aazadan

The crux of the misunderstanding is that I think you have some flawed economic presumptions. The pie in not finite.

What you are describing is what happens when finite pie advocates manage infrastructure allocation.

The most productive, most efficient and least wasteful methods of production are only discoverable through widespread independent innovation out of which a 'best practice' or 'industry standard' can be identified and described though, the resulting standard is ephemeral.

Over time the pie is not finite, at any given moment in time however it is finite. There is a finite demand and there is a finite amount of money in the system. In the case of internet service where each household needs exactly 1 account, the demand has a limit equal to the number of households in the country. In reality the demand will be slightly less as not everyone will take advantage of the service. From here you run into some more issues, one in particular is that the US is a relatively rural nation, our densest city is New York City and it has a population density half that of Seoul, SK. This means that it takes more infrastructure to bring internet service to each person, this significantly increases costs and creates a much higher barrier to entry. Best practices don't apply to US internet deployment because the rural nature of our population prevents those practices from being practical, that's why technologies like whitefi hold such appeal in the US despite their much slower speeds when compared to wired networks.

Wifi using dish antennas to communicate with towers would speed up the rural connections. It costs $120 a month for unlimited wifi downloading now. In the locations where it works, it is almost always (90% of the time) better than satellite, in my personal experience. cyberonic.com...
That price would come down if it became standard practice. Big receivers would also reduce the power output requirements of the cell towers, which has been a health concern.

Fiber optics would expand more slowly, on a case by case basis.

Much of the problem with infrastructure expansion and upgrading is due to the 2,000% inflation since 1900 that has sucked almost all of the entrepreneur money out of the general population. Central planning has that effect, every time.

originally posted by: Semicollegiate
I didn't know that the backbone was so over loaded. Can't there be parallel pathways? If the economy weren't ruined, this would be the time for a new player to build its own backbone. Or maybe just a piece of the backbone that has the worst bottleneck in it.

Not really, no. You have to understand how bandwidth is sold. It's sold on the idea that you're never going to use even 99.5% of your potential amount. If an area has 1 gigabit line they don't divide that up into 16 mb lines split among 64 customers which would allow everyone to use 100% of their bandwidth at all times, instead they'll sell 50mb lines to 1000 customers. If everyone maxed out at once you would need 50x more bandwidth than is available, but this works because not everyone maxes out at once.

The issue here comes that in the past few years people have been downloading far more data. The big culprit today is streaming video but just a few years ago you may remember alarms over internet superusers that were downloading terabytes of TV shows per month through torrents, while everyone else used very little. They were labeled the top 0.1% bandwidth hogs. When you browse normally your data usage happens in a burst, you goto a webpage, the webpage downloads over 2-5 seconds, and then you spend 10 minutes reading it. If you spend 10 minutes on the page that means you spent 5/600 seconds downloading, so your connection is only operational 0.08% of the time. This means the ISP can use that bandwidth on other customers for the remaining 99.92% of the time.

That all flies out the window with streaming video, instead you are constantly downloading new video packets to display and buffer. Suddenly your bandwidth usage goes up by 20x while your ISP is obligated to provide the same speed to you.

The ISPs can address this by putting down more lines, particularly over the last mile connections that act as bottlenecks but that's expensive. Instead they would rather encourage you to not use that bandwidth. This not only lets them prevent competing content providers from showing up, but lets them charge you for cable TV service.

The backbone itself isn't overloaded, there's plenty of bandwidth there, it's the last mile connections that are overloaded. However those are prohibitively expensive to lay down, and even if you do the backbone providers don't want to give you access to compete with them.

Ultimately we're going to have to break them up with antitrust laws, but that's going to be a long and messy process and before we can do that we need the ability for alternative companies to compete on last mile connections and we need legislation that can get us to that point. The only way we can get to that point is to start restraining the companies now... the telecom's have way too much power.

To give you an idea of the type of negotiating power they're operating with, they have in the past threatened to shut down internet access to the major banks and wall street costing them billions of dollars per day unless they get their way with legislation. A lot more than money is being thrown around behind the scenes with these companies. The telecom's have the ability should they wish to financially ruin every person in the country by shutting down electronic commerce and potentially destabilize the government by disrupting the rest of our infrastructure from communicating. They have a ridiculous amount of power, it would be a "very bad thing" to give them more.

originally posted by: Semicollegiate
Wifi using dish antennas to communicate with towers would speed up the rural connections. It costs $120 a month for unlimited wifi downloading now. In the locations where it works, it is almost always (90% of the time) better than satellite, in my personal experience. cyberonic.com...
That price would come down if it became standard practice. Big receivers would also reduce the power output requirements of the cell towers, which has been a health concern.

Fiber optics would expand more slowly, on a case by case basis.

Much of the problem with infrastructure expansion and upgrading is due to the 2,000% inflation since 1900 that has sucked almost all of the entrepreneur money out of the general population. Central planning has that effect, every time.

You're misunderstanding rural in this context. The US has a lot of small towns that are moderate distances from each other. Our population densities are among the lowest in the developed world. Compared to Europe and Asia we are very rural. I'm not using the word in the context we're used to it here in the US which means a single home isolated from others. I'm talking about areas like where I live, a town of 9000 people that's 30 miles from the next town in any direction. Small towns like this are very expensive to provide services to and require the telecoms who eventually do come in and provide service to make an upfront investment that will take 60 years to break even and another 40 to turn a reasonable profit (hence the reason for 100 year monopolies). These areas are dense enough that your solution isn't practical but sparse enough that cables can't be run efficiently. The US is full of areas like this.

a reply to: Aazadan

I had fully expected ethernet over power lines to take care of a lot of the type of communities that you describe.

There isn't much of a technical hurdle involved in implementing it so it must be due to regulation that no one thought it would be a worthwhile investment to connect your town that way.

originally posted by: greencmp
a reply to: Aazadan

I had fully expected ethernet over power lines to take care of a lot of the type of communities that you describe.

There isn't much of a technical hurdle involved in implementing it so it must be due to regulation that no one thought it would be a worthwhile investment to connect your town that way.

I've heard of the technology but it's getting a bit outside of the areas I'm more knowledgeable about, networking in general is a weak subject for me. I'm reading the wiki but I'm not really finding a reason why it's not in more widespread use. Most notably, it seems Australia is using this technology for significant parts of their national ISP that everyone seems to love, especially given how bad they had it just a few years ago.

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: greencmp
I am certain of that one thing, that the free market (private property in the means of production with minimal or nonexistent economic intervention), unimpeded and unmolested is the best way to manage the production and distribution of goods and services.

The problem here is that 100% free markets are unsustainable. In any economic exchange one side wins and one side loses.

In every voluntary exchange both parties gain what they want. There would be no voluntary exchange otherwise.

When one body wins enough, they are able to gobble up the competition and create a non competitive environment.

No one body can do that without charging the lowest profitable price. If their price goes higher, then new competitors have an opportunity to take a piece of the market away.

Market forces are very powerful but they're not a solution to every problem and this is one of those problems.

This problem was made by government intervention. The backbone should have been private, researched and built by the money taken out of the private sector by taxes and inflation.

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: UnmitigatedDisaster
Did something change? Last I saw Wheeler was proposing to reclassify the internet as a utility and regulate it as such. This is a good thing.

That's still the plan, but it's not up to him. It's a committee of 5 people, he's on board with his plan but all that means is that the decision comes down to the other 4 members and the ISP's are spending a lot of money to get their way. Atleast 3 of the 5, so 2 of the remaining 4 need to side with Wheeler. On top of that, even if the law does pass the Republicans can make this a major part of their 2016 agenda and repeal it should they win by stacking the FCC with their people.

I'm going to be honest here, what the FCC is doing is nothing short of a federal power grab. They want greater influence so they're trying to put the internet under their domain, before the internet they were a fringe agency. The thing is though, the rules they're proposing are actually quite reasonable and make a lot of sense. More than that they're good for businesses and good for consumers. The ideal solution would be that we get these rules, but that Wheeler and the others involved in voting don't end up with control over it, that would let them be more objective. We don't live in an ideal world though, and we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. What Wheeler is proposing is good, much better than what the ISP's are proposing.

Nice reply, and shows I wasn't missing something haha - I was worried for a minute.

I agree with you on the FCC though. It is a bit of a power grab on their part but it's in the best interest of the people, compared to the alternative. Years ago when they created the first set of Net Neutrality rules it was in our best interest then too, and I think Wheeler is very cognizant that this is the only real option for them to maintain it. Whether or not he truly is in our best interests is open to debate, but so far his track record with the FCC isn't bad, and again: regulating it as a utility puts it beyond the private interests of ISP's.

I'll admit I was glad to see this, read about it, then put it out of my mind a week or two ago when it was announced, I figured it would go smoothly with the rest of the chair. Pretty embarassing to start ignoring it as an IT professional, but it's been busy lol.

a reply to: Aazadan

Wireless, dual/repurposed copper, infrared/laser... the list really goes on and on.

I personally think a fleet of Fiber/Bus/Pipe Laying Machines (FLMs, BLMs, PLMs?) which methodically replace road, lane by lane with whatever the most efficient bus or pipe is necessary and reconstructs the surface in one fell swoop is possible. Just don't get in front of it.

But, alas, I guess we will have to give all of that up because we decided to do it one way decades ago and we are committed. The only way out of the hole is to keep digging.

originally posted by: greencmp
a reply to: Aazadan

Wireless, dual/repurposed copper, infrared/laser... the list really goes on and on.

I personally think a fleet of Fiber/Bus/Pipe Laying Machines (FLMs, BLMs, PLMs?) which methodically replace road, lane by lane with whatever the most efficient bus or pipe is necessary and reconstructs the surface in one fell swoop is possible. Just don't get in front of it.

But, alas, I guess we will have to give all of that up because we decided to do it one way decades ago and we are committed. The only way out of the hole is to keep digging.

We were supposed to do this with the Recovery and Reinvestment funds. The states had other ideas for the money though.

originally posted by: Semicollegiate
This problem was made by government intervention. The backbone should have been private, researched and built by the money taken out of the private sector by taxes and inflation.

We tried to make it private. We researched it with tax dollars, taxed the money, and then gave it to the ISP's to build the network. The ISP's took the money, said the project was impossible, and used the money to fund a sequence of mergers that left us with their current monopoly status.

While we did this, the government had to once again tax the money for a backbone and then build it themselves. Once it was built, we gave it to the very ISP's who previously ripped us off.

a reply to: Aazadan

I am still not seeing any reason to think that further enabling entrenched power will liberate us.

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: Semicollegiate
This problem was made by government intervention. The backbone should have been private, researched and built by the money taken out of the private sector by taxes and inflation.

We tried to make it private. We researched it with tax dollars, taxed the money, and then gave it to the ISP's to build the network. The ISP's took the money, said the project was impossible, and used the money to fund a sequence of mergers that left us with their current monopoly status.

While we did this, the government had to once again tax the money for a backbone and then build it themselves. Once it was built, we gave it to the very ISP's who previously ripped us off.

I would say they taxed, not we taxed.

Comcast has built a nation wide network. The whole internet should be like that, without the local monopolies.

I think it would be said, by the progressives, that the central planners didn't see the home micro computer coming during the central planning in the 1960's. IBM apparently didn't see the microcomputer ahead, although IBM was being sued by the government for being a monopoly at the time of the microcomputer revolution, and so IBM didn't want to make any more money in those days.

IBM could have made a lot more backbone than it did.

"Net Neutrality" is the beginning of the end of the internet. The end will either be a slow fadeout to totalitarianism, most likely pleasant for awhile; or a crash, not likely but it would offer a new beginning.