And even if you have multiple companies willing to spend such sums, you run into the same problems that you did with cable, data, and telephone competition in that property owners and local governments don’t want buildings, streets, and sidewalks constantly torn up to install multiple lines, many of which are likely to be abandoned after a few years.
I’ll also add the examples of Europe, Japan, and South Korea. The competition there comes because the governments themselves lay most of the infrastructure, thus massively lowering the barriers to entry.
Legislation alone is going to do squat. I suppose we could propose a massive government infrastructure spending project and let companies use the resulting lines, but if we won’t fund roads and bridges, I doubt internet service is going to get much attention.
ETA: Ascenray adds a good point. And that’s why government itself is a preferred method for handling the infrastructure. Let them handle the last mile problem and largely separate infrastructure from service provided. The government charges each provider for use of the physical network and the companies compete for customers to make money. Like roads. Let the government build the roads and let companies use them (paying via tolls, gas tax, and other taxes) to make money. And that’s how it’s worked in other countries to good effect. Unfortunately, we already allowed the telcos local monopolies, making this proposal difficult to implement.
This is not only a naïve viewpoint, but one that has been debunked by recent history. When your aim is a level playing field and healthy competition in a service that depends on heavy infrastructural investment, regulation has to come first.
The FCC refused to set standards for mobile telephone service, deciding that we should let the free market operate and wait and see what happens, and the result is that the United States has far worse technical standards for mobile service than most places in Europe and Asia. And it’s very difficult to go back and improve technical standards after the fact, because tons of money and effort has already been sunk.
For one, how about requiring cables be open to all companies? Isn’t that what the AT&T breakup required?
We’re paying for just internet, because that’s all we want from Time Warner Cable. A major concern of mine is that a the post-NN world, the old principle of the lowest common denominator, so familiar from the world of mass entertainment, would begin to prevail online as well–“if everyone doesn’t want it, then nobody gets it”, as Paul Fussell once said to explain the sad state of the American beer market in the early 1980s. Today the Internet is the quintessence of a-la-carte content, but if TWC can favor some sites and disfavor others, the world wide web as presented by it could begin to resemble their version of cable TV. With regard to foreign websites I would have, as a consumer living in L.A., all the Spanish-, Farsi-, Chinese-, and Korean-language sites I could handle, but not so much with German language sites, because hardly anybody around here can read German–if everybody doesn’t want it nobody gets it. In such a scenario, we will again become “prisoners”, so to speak, of our geographic location, now even more so than before the advent of the internet, because of the subsequent decline of the press and concurrent near-disappearance of newsstands large enough to carry foreign newspapers and magazines.
I get emails from The Motley Fool, which seems to position itself as a younger, hipper WSJ, leaving aside the question of whether such a thing is possible. TMF is always urging its readers to invest in this industry or buy that stock, so I know it isn’t entirely unbiased. But they are all over this story, accepting it as inevitable that this really is the end of net neutrality and enthusiastically pushing the investment opportunitythat will apparently result.
It’s only one appellate court in the smallest appellate court district in the country. Is the expectation that the SCOTUS will simply rubber-stamp the appellate panel’s ruling when this case reaches them, as it inevitably will?
Siva Vaidyanathan said on WNYC’s “On the Media” that there’s virtually zero political capital to push net neutrality through at this point.
What makes you think otherwise? The Supreme Court declines review of far more controversial decisions than it grants review of. (“Rubber stamping,” to the extent that it happens, is in the form of summary affirmation, which is relatively rare. More often, the Supreme Court says nothing at all.)
And while I have heard plenty of criticism of the outcome of the decision, I have heard little criticism of the decision itself.
Finally, I don’t understand what the size of the court is relevant. It’s the court that reviews administrative rulings. So regardless of its size, it’s THE court for these matters.
Fiber can (and is) run on poles. Underground is preferred because of how much fewer disruptions there are (car into pole, branch onto wire, etc.).
And as expensive as it is to run in suburban/rural areas, the cost of running in urban areas is higher. New York City’s underground facilities have become a nightmare as demand as far out paced any expectations from when conduits were originally installed.
The cables have to be available, but not for free. Unless you are mandating neutrality in access (see how it pops up again?), there’s no reason the company that owns the physical infrastructure shouldn’t charge more to competitors.
As it happens, the long distance phone case is actually a poor example. Local carriers were, in theory, separated from long distance providers and couldn’t provide both, though a single parent company - like AT&T - could have separate divisions that did both. The local baby bells (by mandate) had to provide equal access/rates to any of the long distance providers. And of course, that still didn’t end attempts at anti-competitive behavior. And the local baby bells still had regional monopolies.
At some point, neutrality needs to be built into the network. Either physically (by having a non-partisan group control the last-mile infrastructure) or mandating it by regulation or law.
- Legislate rules intended to increase competition (without mandating neutrality)
- …
- Competition
Step 2 is where the magic happens, and I haven’t seen you provide a proposal that shows any mechanism by which it should work. It seems rather that you want to have neutrality legislated without calling it by that name, which is exactly what happened with the long distance case.
There’s a very good reason they shouldn’t, regardless of how the FCC regulates it. It’s monopolistic pricing and it’s illegal under federal antitrust law and could be prosecuted by the FTC. A company that holds a monopoly (acquired through legal means) is not allowed to use that monopoly to harm competition.
True enough, but I don’t trust those companies any further than I could throw 'em.
I don’t think it’s be too hard for them to obfuscate actual pricing behind walls of discounts, differential pricing for different times of day, and any number of other tricks. Not that such a company couldn’t eventually be caught, but it often takes some blatant monopolistic practices (like Microsoft) to get charged and even then the lawyers can throw bunches of wrenches in the process (like Microsoft). In the mean time, the public suffers and the offending company reaps massive rewards.
It’s why I have always preferred divorcing physical infrastructure of the internet from the companies that provide internet service to normal consumers (sort of like the dialup internet services of the 90s). But that ship sailed a long time ago. I really don’t know how to fix that issue, but I do know I support net neutrality to keep things from getting too bad while we think about it.
I didn’t know any of this.
I think the future looks rather bleak, because I can’t see how this won’t lead to the Internet looking like pay TV, where there will be tiers and packages of preselected websites. The URL window will be gone, or if it’s still there we may type something in only to see a 403 error because "Dear Subscriber: Your current internet service package does not include the website you have selected.
Instead we’ll have a sandboxed internet, like the old AOL.
Siva Vaidhyanathan says it’s already happening — Net Neutrality and You | On the Media | WNYC
You don’t think they’ll try to pull that kind of stuff under NN? “Ooops, the Netflix router just happened to be down again.” At least with open cables you’ll have a company (the one attempting to get access) fighting on your side. Netflix might try to fight but they have to prove they’re not being targeted and they’ll have to do it with every ISP.
I’m not against NN in principle, I just think there are better ways.
The problem with nationalizing the last mile hardware is that the HARDWARE is where we want the innovation. Google is laying fiber. Verizon is laying FIOS. Other phone companies are rolling out FTTN setups. Et cetera. The service provided over that hardware, however, should be completely content neutral. It needs to allow all the little people who pay $5 a month for a website the ability to compete against Microsoft or IBM if they have the next big program. Or Uncle Jimmer’s Local Grocery Store competing against Kroger’s or WalMart’s websites.
Sure they will. But it’s an extra hurdle.
Better ways of doing what exactly?
You keep missing the point. Net neutrality isn’t supposed to be a panacea that fixes all the internet’s ills, but you continue to argue as if it that’s the claim. For the N-th time, that’s not the claim. You are the only one arguing from that basis.
I don’t believe that opening the last mile hardware precludes additional innovation in that regard. If a company believes it can make money by offering faster service it will do so.
I suppose, but it’s harder to prove NN violations than open hardware violations.
No, I’m not missing the point. I know what you are trying to accomplish with NN. I believe it’s the wrong way to do it for reasons I have explained. Competition will do it better and have additional benefits.
Your explanation, so far as I can tell, amounts to this:
… which is not an explanation.
If they can make money by simply being an ISP without maintenance costs, they will do so. And the infrastructure will fall behind. We got, for instance, basic phone service to every home. But once you left metropolises, you’d find a crapload of 1970’s era and prior wiring. One place I lived in the boonies had THREE WIRE run to all of the homes, cased in a fabric jacket with only a bit of plastic as insulation. If I recall correctly, it was 16 gauge, too. This is the same state as the internet hardware. The farther from the profit centers, the less advanced the equipment.
So, okay: the last mile hardware is nationalized. This brings up several problems:
A) Which last mile hardware? The cable networks? The phone networks? Only independent internet service networks?
B) How will the new last mile hardware look? Will we as a social framework pipe fiber to each premises? A node near homes with copper being the last little bit? A secondary cable network?
C) How much do we sink into running internet wiring to everywhere plus yearly maintenance? $12? 1.2 B? 12 B? 120 B? We can easily hit all of those numbers for a nation this size.
I assume you didn’t read this post?
Don’t we have the same sort of specification problems with NN? How do we measure NN? How do we prove that an ISP is specifically targeting a provider and not just exhibiting incompetence? What about situations where the technology leads to inherent differences? (E.g. to NYC users Netflix servers on the West coast will be slower than Comcast servers on the East coast.) Are ISPs allowed to offer tiered service? If so, what tiers? Who watches all the ISPs for compliance?
To answer your questions:
A) Good question. I’d say anything that supports broadband is potentially fair game. What were the regulations when AT&T was broken up?
B) Sounds like a technical question for the ISPs.
C) How were the phone lines handled after the breakup? Could we model something like that?