A Telco Lobbyist Strikes Back...

I don't know enough about "net neutrality" to have an opinion, other than that Telco regulation is incredibly complicated. The argument against "net neutrality" is that it is a form of rate regulation, and even good rate regulation tends to turn very bad over time--witness the ICC--and I tend to think that that is a good argument.

But Telco lobbyist Mike McCurry deserves some kind of prize for claiming that what is in the interest of the side that has been writing him paychecks for eight years just happens to be "what I believe." I don't think McCurry knows enough about technology or economics to have an opinion on net neutrality--let alone a belief. I might have a different view of McCurry if he knew what the first name of Vinton G. Cerf was.

The Blog | Mike McCurry: Hostile Commentary and Net Neutrality | The Huffington Post: Reading lots of comments on my last post, I guess my point got made: the culture and discourse of the Internet is not what you would teach kids at the dinner table -- unless you kept a bar of soap handy.

On net neutrality, I feel like screaming "puh-leeeze." The First Amendment of the Internet is under assault! Oh yeah, how many of you lifted a finger to protect the First Amendment when the Washington Post and other "MSM" cited it to ferret out the truth about WMD and the wars inside the U.S. intelligence community over the pre-Iraq war (and now pre-Iran war)?...

The Internet is not a free public good. It is a bunch of wires and switches and connections and pipes and it is creaky. You all worship at Vince Cerf who has a clear financial interest in the outcome of this debate but you immediately castigate all of us who disagree and impune our motives. I get paid a reasonable but small sum to argue what I believe. How many of the net neuts out there are honest about the financial resources and special interests behind your side of the argument? Do you really believe this is good v. evil or just an honest disagreement about what will make the 'net flourish and prosper?...

As it is, I think Arianna Huffington is making a mistake in letting McCurry use her podium to do his work as a lobbyist for his clients.

Comments

[jerry]

I think it's a terrible idea -- I just don't see how to scale it to international commerce.

So let's deregulate the telcos: any peer or any US based ISP can charge whatever they want of whomeever they want for whatever they want.

How does google/youtube/amazon/ebay/etrade know which bills are accurate and which are not?

What happens when the telcos send a bill to an overseas provider and that provider refuses to pay the bills?

What happens when a Chinese telco sends a bill to google along with a French telco and the Fenwick telco (whose CTO is Professor Alfred Kokintz, inventor of the Q Bomb). Must google pay all of these bills or risk being sent up the Q bomb?

[jerry]

I sent the following to Robert Litan of the Brookings Institute who wrote an op-ed in the WAPO to strike net neutrality down so that we could build a for "millions of senior citizens and disabled Americans, among others, can have, if they want, their medical conditions monitored continuously by devices that communicate over high speed, broadband networks that can automatically alert them if they require immediate medical attention."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050101061.html

I responded:

Your article makes no sense.

Q) Where are all of Google's packet's going?
A) To consumers

Q) Does Google pay the same rate as consumers?
A) No. Google pays less per packet than consumers, and of course, Google pays quite a lot for very large pipes.

Q) So what are you saying when you claim that Google pays the same amount as consumers?
A) No one knows.

Q) Where are all of eTrade's packets going?
A) Some to consumers some to other businesses

Q) Does eTrade pay the same as a home on a DSL line?
A) See answer above for Google for packets going to consumers

Q) And the packets going to other businesses?
A) Private fiber. Not public internet

Q) And what happens when the public internet is more expensive than private fiber?
A) eTrade bails.

Q) And what happens to consumer costs when eTrade bails?
A) Goes up.

Q) And when netflix bails?
A) Goes up

Q) If Google needs more bandwidth do they pay the same rate as consumers?
A) No. They pay more because they consume more. Just like trucks pay more because they consume more. Cars: flat rates. DSL lines: flat rates. Trucks pay per weight. Google pays for bandwidth.

So what are you saying?

Q) But my hospital won't be able to monitor me 24x7 using the public internet!
A) Nonsense. If you really need a QOS can't be interrupted service, than the public internet will never be good enough. What happens to your internet line when you have a power outage? If you are being monitored, then pretty much any old pretty good line will be good enough. If you are being controlled by computers across the city, you are a fool. Get the processing power local to you, and with enough intelligence to control you during internet downtimes. Design software to be failure resilient, not to be internet dependent.

Q) But my hospital won't be able to monitor me 24x7 using the public internet!
A) Nonsense. If the people decide they need to be monitored 24x7, they can pass a tax for this purpose, to develop protocols and hardware and software.

Q) But my hospital won't be able to monitor me 24x7 using the public internet!
A) Nonsense, just because you can now charge Google more money, there is nothing that guarantees a reliable internet will be created.

You sir have wasted everyone's time with your article. Except the lobbyists that buy you cocktail weenies.

[WatchfulBabbler]

"Vince" Cerf. What is it about these ILEC shills that they don't know enough about their putative subject of expertise to be able to even fake it?

There's a WaPo chat with Billy Tauzin (former R-SBC) in which he refers to Local Access Transport Area lines as "latta lines." And this is by the (at the time) chair of the Energy and Commerce Cmte, in a chat about the Tauzin-Dingell bill!

That's not just stupid: it's stupid in a profound way, that says interesting things about the nature of American governance.

[masaccio]

"The argument against "net neutrality" is that it is a form of rate regulation, and even good rate regulation tends to turn very bad over time--witness the ICC--and I tend to think that that is a good argument."

The ICC made a lot of sense when it first came into effect, when railroads were destroying farmers. See, The Pit, by Upton Sinclair. Maybe later it didn't, when there were alternatives.

The cables are just pipelines. Why should they profit because they can segment their customer base?

[Sammy]

How do you get that he doesn't know Cerf's first name? Because he calls him "Vince"? More sloppy writing there, Bradford.

[s9]

"How do you get that he doesn't know Cerf's first name? Because he calls him "Vince"? More sloppy writing there, Bradford."

Sigh. Vinton Cerf's nickname is widely known to be Vint.

I posted my *opinion* about Internet neutrality at http://mojowire.blogspot.com/2006_05_01_mojowire_archive.html#114658487466070161

[masaccio]

Whoops, not The Pit, and not Upton Sinclair; The Octopus by Frank Norris.

[topu]

I think the telcos looked at Google's stock price and said " we need a piece of that action". It's just like the record companies, seeing Apple make a killing on ipods, saying they needed to charge more per song, even though they were making substantially more per online sales than were selling the same songs on CD.

[Dirty Davey]

My argument would be: if you put the wire into my house under some form of government-granted monopoly, then you have to follow net neutrality rules.

That certainly applies to my cable, power, and phone/DSL lines. If a new company comes along and pays for its own build-out in a competitive market (no government grant of territory), then they might have a claim on avoiding this sort of regulation. But that's not what I see happening.

[Anon]

The net neutrality argument is simple. Imagine that red states want to charge extra road tolls to cars with license plates from blue states. Suppose that Walmart (headquartered in Arkansas and known for conservative views) took over the nation's telecom system and wanted to ban all calls/internet traffic to abortion agencies, cutting them off entirely from the telecom grid.

Internet traffic is not commerce. It is the means of commerce. It's not a store; it's the market itself. It's not a truck full of Walmart crap; it's the road on which that truck drives. All economists should be (and are, if they've looked into it) in favor of level playing fields in these sorts of situations - i.e., regulators which make sure the butcher's one-pound scale actually measures one pound, which make sure the gas station pump actually dispenses one gallon. There is simply no question: this is unilaterally favorable to commerce, there's no downside at all.

[joshb]

on your last point, McCurry's argument was so utterly bizarre and unconvincing that maybe Huffington was employing a rope-a-dope strategy in allowing him to huff away and then leaving himself open to pummelings like yours.

probably not. but, this sure seems to be the way it worked out.

joshb

[Thane Walkup]

A lot of this "network neutrality" stuff is coming up because major ISPs are trying to find value-added services to tack on to their systems, and keep finding themselves outclassed by third-party systems. Take, for example, Comcast versus Vonage. Vonage charges $25 a month (and they're actually one of the more expensive VOIP providers) for unlimited service inside the continental United States. Comcast charges $35 a month for the same product.

How did Comcast compete? By doing something screwy with their routing tables that prevented Vonage from working properly for a month or so. Not so bad for those of us that have alternative means of connection such as DSL, but for people in apartment complexes where Comcast has entered into an exclusivity agreement, well, they're just stuck.

If you want network neutrality, then the internet service market needs to be segmented, in much the same way that the dialup ISP market used to be. Physical layer providers (I.E., agencies that provide the actual copper/fiber for communications) should be forced to divest themselves of any internet service, telecommunications, or media transport functionality. They are allowed to compete for customers based on their own offering's reliability, top speed (up/down), and latency. Any internet service provider could purchase a drop and provide actual internet service to individuals at an added cost, combined with any particular restrictions they wanted to put on the network - but since ANYBODY would be able to purchase a drop, this lowers the barrier to entry a fair bit and allows for real competition in the ISP market.

In addition, these are the companies that we already gave $200 billion of government pork to in order to roll out "universal broadband" that never got rolled out.

http://www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm

I say screw 'em. They're interested in turning the internet back into Compuserve/AOL - nothing but one giant PUSH medium like television.

[me]

From Dr./Sir Tim Berners Lee

As a preface I must say this person is the most brilliant visionary I have ever had the pleasure of hearing speak in person.

In a Q & A my favorite was when he was asked why didn't he go to private industry and make millions. He replied that he had a chair at MIT, what more could he possibly want.

"Neutrality of the Net
Submitted by timbl on Tue, 2006-05-02 15:22. :: Public Policy and the Web

This is an international issue. In some countries it is addressed better than others. (In France, for example, I understand that the layers are separated, and my colleague in Paris attributes getting 24Mb/s net, a phone with free international dialing and digital TV for 30euros/month to the resulting competition.) In the US, there have been threats to the concept, and a wide discussion about what to do. That is why, though I have written and spoken on this many times, I blog about it now.

Twenty-seven years ago, the inventors of the Internet[1] designed an architecture[2] which was simple and general. Any computer could send a packet to any other computer. The network did not look inside packets. It is the cleanness of that design, and the strict independence of the layers, which allowed the Internet to grow and be useful. It allowed the hardware and transmission technology supporting the Internet to evolve through a thousandfold increase in speed, yet still run the same applications. It allowed new Internet applications to be introduced and to evolve independently.

When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone's permission. [3]. The new application rolled out over the existing Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work very hard still, to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform. It must not discriminate against particular hardware, software, underlying network, language, culture, disability, or against particular types of data.

Anyone can build a new application on the Web, without asking me, or Vint Cerf, or their ISP, or their cable company, or their operating system provider, or their government, or their hardware vendor.

It is of the utmost importance that, if I connect to the Internet, and you connect to the Internet, that we can then run any Internet application we want, without discrimination as to who we are or what we are doing. We pay for connection to the Net as though it were a cloud which magically delivers our packets. We may pay for a higher or a lower quality of service. We may pay for a service which has the characteristics of being good for video, or quality audio. But we each pay to connect to the Net, but no one can pay for exclusive access to me.

When I was a child, I was impressed by the fact that the installation fee for a telephone was everywhere the same in the UK, whether you lived in a city or on a mountain, just as the same stamp would get a letter to either place.

To actually design legislation which allows creative interconnections between different service providers, but ensures neutrality of the Net as a whole may be a difficult task. It is a very important one. The US should do it now, and, if it turns out to be the only way, be as draconian as to require financial isolation between IP providers and businesses in other layers.

The Internet is increasingly becoming the dominant medium binding us. The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do. It is the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true.

Let us protect the neutrality of the net."

http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/132