According to this source:
[ul]
[li]Are these assessments correct?[/li][li]If they are, is this harmful?[/li][li]And is this part of a general pattern - along with executive orders, legal reinterpretations, non-enforcement of laws etc. - of a president who is unusually reluctant to accept limitations on his own power?[/li][/ul]
I’d say it’s not unprecedented. The FCC is quasi-independent, like the SEC Commissioners or the NLRB board or similar bodies the President gets to appoint them to fixed terms and they aren’t directly accountable to him (i.e. he cannot fire them) and the terms are staggered such that usually only a two-term President could have appointed the entirety of the board. This is to remove them partially from the executive chain of command and give them some degree of independence.
However, they are appointed by the President and are part of the executive branch, and they aren’t life terms. The reason for that is the political process is supposed to have some oversight of them. In general it’s extremely common for the White House to make its desires known to these independent bodies, in certain circumstances. Often through the government’s lawyers filing briefs or other such items with the board. It is probably not typical for the President to so publicly say how he wants such a board to act, but I wouldn’t buy that it’s unprecedented–there is a long history of Presidents using their influence on these various quasi-independent executive boards so I’d be surprised if this is the first time a President did so in a press release/speech.
The best resolution to net neutrality is technical, where everyone gets a connection that is so fast that the practical difference between premium-channel content and regular-channel content is at most a few seconds that nobody will notice anyway.
Obama is just fed up that neither Tom Wheeler nor his predecessor Julius Genachowski have done anything about what he regards as a vital issue, and that both seem to have – as usual – caved to industry demands instead of doing their job to protect the public interest. I was just reading a New Yorker article on the subject that has a rather different take than the WSJ, summed up as follows:
I disagree with that. Even technology advances to the point where you could download content at an acceptable pace, net neutrality is necessary to force your ISP to actually provide the service. Net neutrality is necessary not to prevent rationing of a finite resource, but extortion.
Note that both Julius Genachowski and Tom Wheeler were appointed to their office by President Obama, and Wheeler had a long career as a cable company lobbyist before being appointed. It’s interesting to try and paint Obama as the Lion here when he knowingly appointed these guys. But Genachowski actually tried to get some net neutrality policies through, and when they were contested in court the Federal courts ruled that without making ISPs Title II Common Carriers the regulations Genachowski was trying to promulgate exceeded what was legal in the telecommunications acts that create the FCC and were thus invalid.
Given that precedent I actually suspect the only two paths to meaningful reform would be classifying ISPs as Title II Common Carriers, or they would need to get the telecommunications act itself changed.
Also Obama’s proposal really just means more money for the likes of Netflix and Amazon Instant Video etc, it’s not really consumer friendly:
For one I think trying to cherry pick it will run the FCC in trouble just like it did when Genachowski was Chairman, I suspect a court would hold if you classify them as Title II Common Carriers then they have to fully be Title II Common Carriers, not some special hybrid (which is what Genachowski essentially tried to do during his chairmanship, classify them as still not common carriers, but impose some of the restrictions of Title II anyway.)
For two, we want rate regulation on broadband services. My gas or electric company basically can charge me this: price of the energy/gas + transportation + approved feeds + special recovery costs + profit. We know to very fine detail what all those other things are on the list, and then public authorities get to decide what level of profit utilities earn. [Utilities earn comfortable profit margins, nothing like Apple or Google, but unlike Apple or Google they operate as government protect monopolies with essentially guaranteed profits.]
With broadband it works more like this, they charge me: whatever they want. They can impose data caps at will (utilities cannot do that, typically), and those caps need have no relation to really anything other than the ISP’s desire to maximize profit. The ISP says they need datacaps for network integrity issues, but there’s never been any evidence to support that. There is no direct, known linkage between infrastructure expansion and maintenance and rate increases. This is because internet service right now is not rate regulated, it’s “whatever the market will bear”, and since most markets have extremely limited competition that number is basically whatever point on the s/d curve the ISP believes will maximize its profit.
We want rate regulation of ISPs, I care a lot less about Netflix and “prioritized” services, because in the real world we’ve seen very little of that and where it happens it’s not really hurt consumers versus brutally high broadband rates that hurt everyone every single month.
The whole fight over net neutrality is some what of a victory for ISPs. Most ISPs largely comply with the concept anyway, and the ones that don’t aren’t making much money off of not doing so. They just want the option going forward in case they decide to monetize the concept of prioritized routing on a much larger scale than they have. The real light should be shone on the actual price scheme, lack of competition and data cap system and etc, which isn’t strictly related to net neutrality but is a lot more important.
I don’t know the details, but how serious is Obama? Like with the EFCA or higher minimum wage he was only in favor of those things as long as he knew he couldn’t get them passed (before he was president, and when the GOP controlled congress). When he actually had the authority to do it he balked.
So is this net neutrality something he is serious about or is he just trying to con his base again?
Where resides the authority to make that classification?
I don’t know how you can say it’s not consumer friendly. Netflix and Amazon can afford to pay ISPs for special “fast lanes” and have a large enough consumer base to spread the cost around. What it does is create a barrier to entry for the smaller companies that can’t afford it and still be able to compete, lessening competition in the marketplace which is almost always bad for the consumer.
I am looking for a cite but IIRC the court that overturned the FCC’s net neutrality rules explicitly stated that the ability to enforce net neutrality was ALREADY within the purview of the FCC.
The problem was the FCC was trying to have it both ways and the court said no. If they are not a Title II Common Carrier then the FCC could NOT enforce neutrality rules as the law was written.
BUT!
The FCC already has the right, on its own with no act of congress needed, to classify the ISPs as Title II Common Carriers.
Easy-peasy.
Under current law the FCC could classify ISPs as Title II Common Carriers, any changes to the law itself that governs the FCC’s behavior would obviously have to come from Congress. ISPs would fight the Title II classification in court just as they fought Genachowski’s regulations, but IMO it isn’t likely they would prevail.
Because in the current environment this is largely a non-issue. Netflix to my knowledge is the only company that has struck any kind of preferential routing deal with ISPs, and that went into effect very recently. I’ve not seen evidence that lots of smaller video services were being held back before that, and none emerged. The issue with video services is it costs a mountain of money from the content creators to get into the game, so to be honest it’s never going to be a field where small start ups get involved.
Further, without net neutrality part of these deals between services like Netflix and ISPs is the ISP can agree to not “count” Netflix packets against a customer’s data cap. Without an agreement like that the ISPs can really squeeze customer’s out of being able to use services like that by simply lowering the datacaps from where they are now. It’s not happened yet, but the ISPs by and large are still formulating how they want to deal with entities like Netflix, which both make their internet service more popular but compete with their video service. The ISPs want to avoid rate-regulated billing, which would actually benefit from people watching a ton of Netflix.
I’m not saying net neutrality isn’t part of a large scheme that is required to make the Internet better, I’m just saying it’s likely that net neutrality regulations (as currently defined) would likely show little noticeable benefit to customers and possibly would degrade their enjoyment of the things they use now.
To try to exonerate Genachowski and blame it all on the courts via the “telecommunications” principle grossly misrepresents the situation.
There is a regulatory distinction between Internet “information services” which means things like Google and Facebook and all the other Internet apps and “telecommunications services” which was understood to include the underlying Internet transport services until the FCC itself reclassified it in 2002. In that year, Michael Powell, Bush’s appointee to the FCC chair, reclassified the Internet as a whole as an “information service” in a fit of deregulatory frenzy. This classification made the court decision inevitable and doomed Genachowski’s already-flawed net neutrality rules.
As others have said, the matter of classification is entirely within the purview of the FCC. Genachowski could have reversed Powell’s ill-advised ruling and failed to do so, and that is the crux of the issue.
BTW, as a reward for his good work, Powell was later made CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the cable industry lobby group. Genachowski meanwhile has gone on to become a partner and managing director at the Carlyle Group, a huge private equity and leveraged buyout firm with interests that include telecommunications and media.
Rate regulation is a legitimate need but it’s entirely separate from the need for net neutrality rules – one doesn’t preclude the other.
It’s also worth clarifying that net neutrality is about more than just prioritized bandwidth. There are a lot of other games that ISPs can play to skew the marketplace to their advantage – site blocking, redirection, and protocol blocking among them. With regard to the latter, ISPs have already been engaging in it: one was found to be blocking VOIP, which I believe the FCC overturned, and others have been blocking or throttling bit torrent protocols. The deep packet inspection technology that enabled these things was starting to become ominously omnipresent until it started to gather public attention in a big way. It has the potential to give broadband providers absolute control over what kinds of communications are and are not allowed, and to either block certain protocols or severely degrade them. Those are all pretty disturbing prospects that would arise from lack of regulation.
No. But I’m sure the upcoming investigations into President Obama’s “tyranny” will win the Republicans many new admirers. (You should have kept it technical.)
Remember YouTube was at one time a small startup. Google bought them for $1.65 billion. More recently Twitch.TV (formerly Justin.TV) was small startup that was recently bought by Amazon for about $1 billion. Hell, Netflix came out of nowhere to beat down Blockbuster. Who knows what would be next?
Comcast is so far playing (mostly) nice and not being a gatekeeper and charging fees because if they run around looking like a big bad guy now they will spur resistance. But if they win at the FCC then all bets are off and they are free to squelch whatever they want and you can be damn sure they will.
Your description is not accurate. Netflix struck a preferential routing deal because ISPs were purposely slowing down Netflix traffic to gain leverage. Customers of ISPs already pay ISPs for the bandwidth used to deliver video on their end, and they pay Netflix for the hosting and bandwidth on their end, so it really was not in the consumers’ interests for their ISPs to slow down a service consumers were already paying for in an effort to try to get Netflix to also pay for it. Note that no ISPs have dropped their prices as a result of the increased revenue from Netflix.
There is a chart on this page (which also has a good primer on what net neutrality actually is) showing how much various ISPs slowed down Netflix during negotiations.
http://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/flowers-netflix1.png?w=610&h=475
What Comcast did to Netflix is extortion. Shame on those who defend this, say it’s “not a big deal,” and idiotically conclude that it won’t happen in the future. Why the hell anyone trusts the ISP’s after this blatant, deliberate extortion is beyond me. Get a grip.
Then what’s the hold-up in getting the reclassification?
Netflix being slowed down isn’t so straight forward, and I suggest the string of posters that clearly do not know much about the Net Neutrality issue and are just reading talking points educate themselves a bit further. There’s nothing but unsubstantiated rumors that Verizon, Time Warner, or Comcast were ever intentionally slowing Netflix traffic. Instead what looks a lot more likely is that as Netflix traffic increased, those companies intentionally refused to expand connections with the third party services that served Netflix’s content up. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in what I think is a disingenuous position then demanded direct connections to the ISP networks (which actually involves physical Netflix hardware in ISP data centers, paid for and managed by the ISP) for free. Instead the ISPs insist on being paid for those direct connections. Ultimately Netflix came to a deal with a few of the ISPs for the direct connection.
YouTube, Twitch, and all those others are actually not a counterpoint to Netflix. None of those services have content libraries that cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year in licensing fees. The only comparable service to Netflix is Amazon Prime Video and to a lesser extent Hulu (Hulu is a bit different for a few reasons, and has a much more limited movie library but more robust access to current television programming.) I repeat the movie/tv show distribution system isn’t something any startup will ever come in and get involved in. Because you can’t just fund something like that with a couple million bucks in venture capital. Starz alone was demanding like $300m from Netflix for their library (thus why the Starz association with Netflix ultimately ended.) It is a tangential point, but there is really no argument that net neutrality is needed to protect the next streamer of licensed Hollywood content. Anyone with enough money to get into that space is going to be backed by a Fortune 500 company and would be coming in with enough cash to muscle in, they wouldn’t be plucky startups. In fact Netflix was never a streaming startup, they had an extremely large and profitable DVD-mail delivery business that generated capital for them to invest in the streaming business. The DVD mail delivery business was amenable to a startup, since you could scale pretty easily and starting out you costs are just DVD purchases (more similar to the small video store slowly growing franchises.)
I never said the courts were entirely to blame, I just said it’s odd to Lionize Obama when the current FCC Chairman and his predecessor both were appointed by Obama. Genachowski, like I said, made a good faith effort on net neutrality rules. Simply overturning a 2002 FCC policy would not have, in fact, guaranteed the FCC would have prevailed in its suit against Verizon. Saying that suggests you’re not intimately familiar with the Verizon suit.
Net neutrality isn’t actually nearly a big enough deal to be commanding attention over the issue of slow speeds, lack of competition, lack of regulated rates, and ultimately lack of access to true high-speed Internet for many Americans. Prior to 2010, Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T wanted to comply with Genachowski’s net neutrality rules (Comcast had less choice since it had signed an agreement to do so as part of getting clearance for a merger.) They counseled Verizon’s CEO to not sue the FCC. Their reason? Treating all packets equally still left them in a very good place, and they didn’t see a ton of monetization off of the alternative. They probably figured they could also push their own IP Video services effectively enough that they weren’t super worried about trying to squeeze Netflix with various net neutrality violating behaviors.
It is telling as to just how good the status quo is for the ISPs that they were all (other than Verizon) happy to sign on for net neutrality. Their big reason for not wanting to see Verizon win is that they feared it could ultimately lead to Title II Common Carrier classification (exactly what appears to be happening.) This to me really shows the obsession with net neutrality is a weird thing promulgated by techie writers who don’t care about issues like rural Americans and their lack of access to high speed Internet (not just rural Americans, but lots of poor urban Americans with low income too by the way), largely because all these techie writers live in San Francisco and New York.
