John Chen, CEO of struggling Blackberry, has asked Obama in an open letter to extend the idea of net neutrality beyond the ISP’s to the mobile app developers as well, requiring that all apps be made available on all mobile device platforms including the Blackberry OS. One of the reasons the Blackberry platform has fallen off a ledge over the past 5 years is that the availability of apps is woefully poor.
Idea sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it: asking the government to force other companies to spend money and potentially incur losses from the use of their own intellectual property and assets just so other businesses might benefit from it. Sounds about as ludicrous as net neutrality rules on their own.
It’s about carriage of information and not about how it’s used. Net neutrality is making the Internet effectively a public utility (electricity, water, sewer, roads, etc.). The consumer remains with the choice on how/when to access/use that utility.
Blackberry is dying because they are too slow off the mark to innovate and stay in the game. Other tools are better. Other tools come to market faster, are upgraded faster. As a consequence, people create apps for the better tools and not Blackberry.
Net Neutrality means, in layman’s terms, that ISPs do not have the legal right to act like customs agents. They charge a fee to transport data, but they are not allowed to charge you more just because that data is important or valuable, or to refuse to transport your data altogether.
This is not comparable to what Blackberry is demanding. Blackberry is not demanding that you allow people to download your program onto a Blackberry, they are demanding that you write a new program that will run on that Blackberry.
It’s the difference between saying, for example, that a book delivery service cannot charge you extra just because the book you want to ship is the Koran, and saying you’re not allowed to publish any book unless it is translated into French.
Exactly. Net neutrality means treating the Internet as public infrastructure, regulating it like a public trust and in the public interest, as we do with the radio spectrum or public lands and waterways. The alternative is that the Internet becomes a corporate asset that can be manipulated by conglomerates who own both ISPs and content providers, in order to extort maximum profits for both and stifle competition for content.
The problem is that the infrastructure is not public. It was constructed by private companies with their own capital. There are numerous competitors. The infrastructure is a corporate asset. If the returns of owning such assets are so great, then other competitors will enter their markets and prices will come down.
Not even true. At least in the US. Or Western Europe and East Asia.
In the US, the companies laying down that infrastructure often got significant aid from public sources from local to federal. These include help with tax breaks, subsidies, levy of end user fees for infrastructure development, local monopoly protection, help with rights of way, among others.
And in East Asia and Western Europe, governments often built the infrastructure or significantly subsidized it.
Barrier to entry is high.
Google has managed it in a few places, but Google is a multibillion dollar company that can afford to risk a few billion dollars on projects with high overhead and low potential to make money for several years. And even then, it picks and chooses markets that indicate they are willing to help with many of the above issues, especially access to rights of way and stays away from markets where potential barriers to entry are especially high.
You actually can’t get that many competitors enter the market. We don’t allow people to lay down cable willy-nilly. That significantly limits even the potential for competition, sometimes down to none.
That’s assuming there are billion dollar companies that can’t find less risky investments to make. At least the phone and cable companies indicated they couldn’t have made it work in the past unless they got lots of help from government.
ETA: Look at public/private things like toll roads. Being against net neutrality is attempting to charge Wal-Mart trucks higher tolls than Target trucks. Or striking a deal with FedEx to allow them a special ‘fast lane’ for a negotiated fee, and neglecting maintenance on other lanes. We could allow that, too, but we recognize it’s not really in the general interest.
First of all, this is simply untrue for many areas of the country. Many areas have one or maybe two options for broadband internet access.
And, none of that has anything to do with the analogy fail by John Chen.
Is it your position that Net Neutrality is a bad concept or is it that if you support Net Neutrality, you should also support mandating that all apps developed for one ecosystem must be developed for all ecosystems?
To me, those are separate things. If this is just a rant against Net Neutrality, have at it (although I disagree with you). If you think that Chen is making a valid point, can you explain that? Preventing ISPs from discriminating against some data sources seems completely different from forcing software developers to develop apps for all ecosystems (Symbian? Firefox OS?)
So was the telephone system. But out of necessity it had to become a regulated monopoly in which the carrier’s responsibilities and limitations were clearly delineated. Absence of net neutrality would be the equivalent of calling Giovanni’s Pizzeria and not being able to reach it because the telephone system redirected you to AT&T Pizza instead, or otherwise gave it highly preferential treatment. I don’t care who “owns” the telephone lines, radio transmitters, or Internet infrastructure – it is a public trust.
You cannot have “numerous competitors” in a domain that depends on wired infrastructure and last-mile monopoly; at best, there is DSL and cable and sometimes resellers, but even the right of resellers to buy bulk bandwidth usually has to be enforced by regulatory authority.
So every company that receives a tax break is subject to having the government nationalize parts of their operations, just because some other business doesn’t like paying for their service?
And if you live in butt fucking Montana and you don’t have a Starbucks there, the government should make sure you get one? No, the better answer is if your community doesn’t have broadband, then you as a community can decide to put in a municipal owned broadband network, not force ISP providers to build out into unprofitable markets.
In most communities there are multiple ISP options, whether that’s ATT, Verizon, Comcast, Cox, etc. with multiple overlaps in most markets.
If Comcast owns the pipe, they can charge whatever they want to transmit on it. If they chase away customers that’s their fault. Getting Netflix is not a right. And if Netflix wants to access it’s customer base across Comcast’s pipe, then they better work it out with Comcast.
The same issue exist with carriage fees on cable and satellite networks. If ESPN and Dish can’t come to agreement, then Dish may drop ESPN. Then Dish customers have to decide, do I stay with Dish without ESPN or do I switch to cable or Directv. But the government doesn’t step in and interfere in those negotiations.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with Net Neutrality.
Absolutely, and Net Neutrality doesn’t change that. All Net Neutrality means is that, whatever price Comcast decides to charge, it has to be the same price for Netflix and Hulu that it is for anyone else using their cables.
Not an option for many. Many state have laws preventing it, actually, including South Carolina, Georgia, Minnesota, among others. The providers, naturally, are lobbying hard to expand this to as many states as possible.
That’s well and good if real competition exists. Comcast got their local monopolies in the first place because it was considered to be a public benefit to give it to them.
If they want to charge what they want to whoever they want, let them pay governments back for all the tax breaks and subsidies they’ve received along the years, along with any back rents for the rights of way they use and user fees for infrastructure development.
And that still doesn’t address the basic fact that companies can’t just lay down wiring wherever they please, meaning competition really can’t exist without direct government intervention. Actually, the existing last mile infrastructure couldn’t itself exist without direct government intervention, so it’s not exactly a sterling example of free market principles, either.
If we’re giving these companies government support, a reasonable set of neutrality rules is fine. Net neutrality is not about limiting what Comcast can charge but telling them to treat customers fairly - for example no customer-specific (streaming Netflix vs Disney/ABC vs Comcast/NBC, for example) shaping of traffic.
And that’s still separate from Blackberry. I have no idea what that guy was going on about, but it’s not net neutrality.
70% of the US population has access to two or more ISPs with speeds of 10Mbps or greater, and 88% of the US population has access to two or more ISPs with speeds of 3Mbps or greater (which the FCC considers basic broadband).
Where in the commercial code does it say that all businesses must charge the same amount to every customer? Are attorney’s required to charge all clients the same hourly billing rate? Do manufacturers of commodities charge all of their customers the same rate regardless of volume taken or longevity of the supplier customer relationship?
The answer to all of those questions is “no”. So why should ISP’s be subject to such price regulation when other industries are not?
Huh??? That has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality, just like your irrelevant example in the OP, because whatever Blackberry might be up to has nothing to do with it, either. Net neutrality is about treating the Internet as a communications medium that offers a level playing field to all participants.
Sure, there may (or may not) a case to be made in some circumstances for requiring a company, in return for a license to operate a telecom infrastructure in highly profitable areas, to also service less profitable ones in the public interest, but that is a completely different issue. At least, that’s not net neutrality as I argue for it.
That an irrelevant analogy, too. There are limited circumstances in which there is a public interest here that the government should safeguard and does; in the US, for instance, IIRC the FCC has must-carry rules for local channels, and in Canada the CRTC has must-carry rules for major new channels. Beyond that, I couldn’t care less if Dish and ESPN or DirecTV and some movie channel are at each other’s throats over rates. It’s not the same thing. It’s absolutely crucial that the Internet be content-agnostic.
Are you kidding me? If were it not for government subsidies, not a single ISP would have been able to get off the ground. The infrastructure may not be public, but it should be, and characterizing the Internet as a success of industry and private companies is madness. Not only that, but the fact that it was so heavily subsidized makes it very difficult for anyone else to get a foothold unless they are similarly subsidized, and not only do many people not see the point now that the internet is there, but those existing companies are major lobbying entities, and they are liable to fight tooth and nail to prevent competitors from getting a foothold.
Look, lemme put it to you this way. The only significant new entity on the ISP scene is Google. Google. You know, third-biggest company in the world? They’re offering a vastly superior product, are competing with companies that everyone hates, and they’re not exactly wrecking the market. What’s wrong with this picture?
Nothing is being nationalized. There’s a difference between confiscation and regulation. Just because you can’t do whatever you want with what you have doesn’t mean you don’t have it.
You know, I love how your response when shown how bad this argument was was to say, “Well change your laws”. Yeah, and once we do that, this argument will start to be relevant! :rolleyes:
Except that the internet is a matter of public interest. It affects all of us. Getting Netflix is not a right, but the guy who suddenly finds he can’t access McDonalds.com to send in his resume without the Comcast Gold expansion has every right to complain.
Yes! And there’s a fundamental difference between broadcast television (and starbucks, and mobile apps, and whatever the next phenomenally dumb analogy you want to think up is) and the internet. The internet is a lot closer to land line phones, back when they were still relevant. A market where competing is made virtually impossible without government approval by nature of how the technology worked (and all the cables that had to be laid through), and where the continued and fair functioning thereof was clearly a matter of public interest. Imagine if Bell had started delaying/interfering with people’s calls to certain businesses they didn’t like - would that have been kosher?
It’s now 2015. Internet access has become a necessity, as much as any other basic utility. Net neutrality is simply about the government ensuring that the companies providing this necessary utility treat all Internet traffic equally, whether it’s Netflix, Hulu, The Straight Dope, YouTube, your little brother’s blog, your sister’s Tumblr, or your favorite porn site. No “fast lanes”, no “slow lanes”. Just “lanes”. Nothing more, and nothing less.