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Saturday, December 21, 2002
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Broadband
wars I. The battle to build and keep broadband neutral is an
important issue to me. I go a couple rounds on the FT.COM site about it here.
Maybe it is just me, but these debates are never satisfying. The thrust
of Tom Hazlett's final response is that cable is much better than DSL,
so don't regulate cable. On cable, see the next post. But even ignoring
the logic of the claim, we should not forget: However good cable is,
does it begin to match the broadband options available elsewhere. Again,
here in Japan: 100 mbs for $50 a month; 12 mbs for about half that.
What cable company comes even close to that? [Lessig Blog]
Broadband
wars II. If you want to get an idea about how bad the broadband
future will be, you need only read this letter
from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association describing
how good (from their perspective) the broadband future will be. NCTA
wrote this letter to the FCC to criticize a letter filed by the
Coalition of Broadband Users and Innovators. This Coalition, which
includes Microsoft and Disney, told the FCC that it needed to assure
that broadband remain neutral[~]that carriers not be permitted to
discriminate in the service they offer based on the application or
content the user wants. This letter from the Coalition was great and
important moment in the debate about broadband. I've been critical of
Microsoft and Disney in the past, but they deserve all the credit in the
world for taking up this fight. If neutrality is lost in the broadband
platform, that means the end-to-end design of the internet will be lost
as well. And that would profoundly weaken the potential for innovation
and growth on the network. The NTCA letter confirms the worst. After
arguing at first that they are providing neutral service anyway (a
claim which itself is false: have you checked your TOS re: servers?),
they then go on to defend their right to discriminate however they
wish. And they defend it by pointing to Microsoft: If Microsoft is
allowed to cut special deals with partners, why shouldn't the cable
companies? The level of ignorance here is astounding. We are four years
into this debate, and apparently the cable companies have yet to even
understand the argument they are attacking. The difference between
Microsoft bundling products at the edge of the network, and the cable
companies bundling preferred service in the middle of the network, is
the difference between an end-to-end network and the Ma Bell network
the internet replaced. This letter confirms that the cable companies do
not begin to understand the value of end-to-end neutrality. It confirms
precisely the claim of the Coalition: that left to its own devices, the
dominant broadband provider in America (slow and expensive though it
may be) sees no reason in the world why it shouldn't corrupt the basic
internet design. Robert Sachs, president of the NCTA, is an
extraordinarily bright man. He is also apparently a very busy man, for
there is no way he could have written the letter he signed. The NCTA
should spend some more money hiring press people who have taken the
time to understand the arguments they want to rebut. Meanwhile, we,
broadband users of America, need to wake up to the broadband
environment four years of do-nothing-ness have produced. [base "]Open access[per thou]
has been a failure in the United States (though a total success in
Japan, where competition has driven prices down and service up: 100 mbs
at $50 a month); the cable companies are, as we said four years ago,
the single dominant provider of broadband in America. Their service is
slow; it is getting more expensive; and now they claim the right to
corrupt the basic design of the network they increasingly own. My last
book was pessimistic: It was not pessimistic enough. [Lessig Blog]
5:28:29 AM 
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conference on the next really big thing that could really change everything — spectrum. We're holding a conference on March 1 at Stanford about spectrum policy. If that sounds boring, then you really need to pay a bit more attention to the next extraordinarily important policy issue affecting innovation and growth. There is about to be a very significant shift in how spectrum is managed. One school says it should be propertized; another says it should be treated as a commons. Read: auctions vs. WiFi; or more auctions vs. mesh networks. The question for the conference is which model makes most sense. The day will end with a "moot court" which will be judged by FCC Chairman Powell, Judge Alex Kozinski, economist Harold Demsetsz, and possibly Senator Barbara Boxer. Go here to learn more. [Lessig Blog]
5:13:02 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Russ Savage.
Last update: 5/8/06; 8:58:01 PM.
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