Category: Net Neutrality

Will Google be the FCC’s next target?

Truth is stranger than fiction. This report in ZDNet suggests that Google may well find itself in the crosshairs of net regulators gone wild:

Google clearly wants the FCC to make sure that other private companies’ networks are open equally to all Internet services. Now, it will be interesting to see if that applies to networks in which Google is involved.

On Friday, the Commission takes up the question of whether Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest provider of high-speed access to the Internet, is “secretly degrading peer-to-peer applications,’’ as the FCC agenda puts it.

As Multichannel News reports, Google Inc. is pressing the Commission to provide clear guidance to broadband network owners on acceptable ways of managing Internet traffic.

Google is shortly to become a network operator, a partner with Comcast in the Clearwire 4G network. Google intends to secure itself pride of place with a Google button on the Clearwire phone, a violation of all that is holy and neutral. This should be fun.

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Kevin Martin’s secret regulations

As the crescendo of criticism builds against the FCC’s pending publication of its new rules for Internet access providers, the New York Times emerges as the sole source of pro-FCC coverage. They publish a bizarre Op-Ed by Free Press chairman Tim Wu equating competing carriers with OPEC and mistaking the general trend in broadband prices – sharply down – with the trend for gas prices, which goes in the opposite direction entirely:

AMERICANS today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.

Here’s what’s happening to broadband prices at Comcast:

High-speed Internet revenue increased 10% to $1.8 billion in the second quarter of 2008 from $1.6 billion in 2007 reflecting a 12% increase in subscribers and a 3% decline in average monthly revenue per subscriber to $42.01, reflecting the impact of additional bundling and the recent introduction of new offers and speed tiers.

I’d love to see a 3% monthly decline in gas prices, even at the same volume level. But the Comcast figures show consumers upgrading to higher speed tiers (like Blast, which I measure at 28 Mb/s download speed) and still seeing an average decline in prices. Wu isn’t talking about life in the Real WorldTM.

Martin himself held a pow-wow with Times reporters, hoping to evoke some of that old-time populism that the nation’s elite daily is so good at. BITS blogger Saul Hansell reports on Martin’s faulty facts and shoddy analysis:

“The network operators can recoup their investment in the network and can charge for access to network services, but consumers have complete control over the devices and content that don’t have anything to do with investment in the underlying network,” he said.

I asked about reports that AT&T now bans all use of peer-to-peer networking software on its wireless data network. It also bans some video services, like the Slingbox feature that lets you watch your home television signal on your cellphone.

Mr. Martin declined to answer. His view is that the commission should not publish explicit regulations. Rather, it should address complaints that are made, as it did with the Comcast case.

“The commission is very careful in that we look at the particular facts that are in front of us. We are not judging the next case,” he said. “Hard and fast rules can actually be over- and under-inclusive, and they can also have adverse impact.”

Mr. Martin was asked whether the commission’s approach will push more Internet providers to start to impose caps on how much bandwidth consumers can use.

He said he wanted to reserve judgment on that trend. He seemed comfortable with Internet providers offering services with limits, so long as they are clearly stated.

So we have this new regime for Internet access providers where every move they make is to be judged according to a list of secret regulations. If ever there was a recipe for stalemate, this is it.

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Federal umpire blows a call

The Wall St. Journal joins the chorus of Bronx cheers aimed at Kevin Martin, the one-eyed federal umpire who blew a call that wasn’t even close:

Those who would use Comcast’s actions to argue for more Internet regulation have misidentified the Big Brother problem. It’s not the private sector they should be worried about. There’s no evidence that Comcast was trying to suppress a political view or favor one of its own services. By all appearances, the company’s policies were motivated by nothing more than making sure a tiny percentage of bandwidth hogs didn’t slow down Internet traffic for everyone else on the network.

Giving the government more say in network management, by contrast, introduces all kinds of potential for political mischief. Net neutrality is a slippery slope toward interventions of all kinds — not merely over access but ultimately over content. Naturally, the most powerful lobbies will have the largest sway. Mr. Martin’s decision in this case may well be driven by his own political hostility to Comcast and the cable industry for resisting some of his other policy priorities.

Mr. Martin’s bad instincts notwithstanding, the FCC’s job is not to determine business models in the private sector. The community of Internet service and content providers has proven itself more than able to work out problems on its own as Web use has exploded. If there are bottlenecks in the future, some providers might choose to block file-sharing services at certain hours of the day. Others might opt for some kind of metered or tiered pricing. Banning these options will only reduce incentives to upgrade networks and launch new services.

Regulators would do better to focus on keeping the overall telecom marketplace competitive. If Comcast customers don’t like the company’s network management policies, they’re free to take their business to Verizon, or AT&T, or some other Internet service provider. A World Wide Web run by Kevin Martin and his political friends will leave us with poorer quality and fewer options all around.

Internet users are several times more likely to suffer from slowed or degraded service on account of their neighbors than their ISPs, so Comcast’s actions have been reasonable. And as many others have noted, the regulatory role is to resolve impasses in the technical collaboration process, not to substitute political insight for engineering knowledge.

Martin blew this one, there’s no doubt about it. We need instant replay in politics.

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Policy-based Evidence-making

Andrew Orlowski has outdone himself in this admirable summary of the FCC’s expected ruling on Comcast:

The landmark decision draws together two strands of policy – one old and specific to the US, and one new and widespread.

I’ve noted before how American politics are largely fought through symbolic gestures. Think of the bitter fights over the wording on the US currency, or inscriptions on public statues. The Neutrality campaign was similarly engaged in a symbolic battle.

But the other aspect is more disturbing. Britain’s equivalent of the FCC, Ofcom, prides itself on what it calls “evidence-based policy making”. It may not always succeed, but it’s a tradition based on empiricism. With “Net Neutrality”, what we’re seeing is the opposite, where the direction is set on a hunch or intuition, or the angst of a mob, and the facts cherry-picked to support the conclusion. The definition of harm and “busting” are great illustrations. Call it “policy-based evidence-making”, if you like.

Indeed.

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The Soul of Kevin Martin

Declan McCullagh takes a good look at the legal and political issues around the FCC’s pending wrist-slap of broadband carrier Comcast in FCC probably can’t police Comcast’s BitTorrent throttling:

If FCC enforcement against Comcast is illegal, why would Chairman Martin call Friday’s meeting? Only he knows for certain, but one explanation is that if the FCC is embarrassed when slapped down by a federal appeals court two years hence, Martin will have long since departed to a lucrative partnership at a law firm or private equity firm. (This is a customary exit path for FCC chairmen: Newton Minow went to Sidley Austin; William Kennard went to the Carlyle Group; James Quello went to Wiley Rein, named for ex-chairman Richard Wiley, where equity partners made an average of $4.4 million in 2006.)

Friday’s ruling may also end up as a cautionary tale for AT&T and Verizon, which as recently as last month seemed to be egging on the FCC to take action against their cable industry rival. But the same activists that have targeted Comcast before the FCC no doubt realize that AT&T’s terms of service limit “peer-to-peer applications”; Verizon Wireless flatly prohibits them; Verizon’s Fios service blocks incoming port 80. Another term for those network management practices is “Net neutrality violations.”

Motivation is interesting, and Declan’s probably right that Martin has a trick up his sleeve. My concern about this action is the precedent it would set. If the FCC is allowed to impose any madeup-on-the-spot rule that it fancies on companies with multi-billion dollar infrastructure investments, I can’t see the financial markets being too willing to part with the cash to engage in the continual upgrade that broadband networks require. The financial markets can tolerate many kinds of risk, but the political or career ambitions of Young Turk commissioners with the power to impose arbitrary sanctions isn’t one of them. Martin should sober up and look at the big picture instead of pulling the trigger on Comcast.

Don’t regulate, collaborate

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell has written one of the most sober and sensible essays on the Internet’s present technical crisis in today’s Washington Post. With so many members of the Commission willing to jump into the breach with ex post facto rules and regulations, it’s good to see that there are some on the inside of the regulatory machine who have a sense of the Internet’s history. See Who Should Solve This Internet Crisis?

The Internet was in crisis. Its electronic “pipes” were clogged with new bandwidth-hogging software. Engineers faced a choice: Allow the Net to succumb to fatal gridlock or find a solution.

The year was 1987. About 35,000 people, mainly academics and some government employees, used the Internet.

This story, of course, had a happy ending. The loosely knit Internet engineering community rallied to improve an automated data “traffic cop” that prioritized applications and content needing “real time” delivery over those that would not suffer from delay. Their efforts unclogged the Internet and laid the foundation for what has become the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.

The Internet has since weathered several such crises. Each time, engineers, academics, software developers, Web infrastructure builders and others have worked together to fix the problems. Over the years, some groups have become more formalized — such as the Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Architecture Board. They have remained largely self-governing, self-funded and nonprofit, with volunteers acting on their own and not on behalf of their employers. No government owns or regulates them.

The Internet has flourished because it has operated under the principle that engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.

Today, a new challenge is upon us. Pipes are filling rapidly with “peer-to-peer” (“P2P”) file-sharing applications that crowd out other content and slow speeds for millions. Just as Napster produced an explosion of shared (largely pirated) music files in 1999, today’s P2P applications allow consumers to share movies. P2P providers store movies on users’ home and office computers to avoid building huge “server farms” of giant computers for this bandwidth-intensive data. When consumers download these videos, they call on thousands of computers across the Web to upload each of their small pieces. As a result, some consumers’ “last-mile” connections, especially connections over cable and wireless networks, get clogged. These electronic traffic jams slow the Internet for most consumers, a majority of whom do not use P2P software to watch videos or surf the Web.

At peak times, 5 percent of Internet consumers are using 90 percent of the available bandwidth because of the P2P explosion. This flood of data has created a tyranny by a minority. Slower speeds degrade the quality of the service that consumers have paid for and ultimately diminish America’s competitiveness globally.

The Commissioner makes many of the points that those of us who’ve been involved in the development and refinement of Internet protocols for the period since Internet Meltdown have made: new applications have broken the Internet before. After the FTP crisis was averted by Van Jacobson’s patch, the Internet very nearly ground to a state of gridlock on the early 90s when HTTP 1.0 came along and opened too many TCP virtual circuits. That problem was averted by HTTP 1.1, which used fewer VCs more efficiently. We didn’t need government mandates to solve the problem, as everyone was motivated already.

The P2P crisis is already the focus of intense industry collaboration in the P4P Working Group sponsored by the DCIA and in the IETF. Whatever orders the FCC issues on the complaints against Comcast are going to be less helpful than these collaborative efforts, and will in all likelihood retard the course of the Internet’s technical evolution.

Don’t regulate, collaborate.

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Regulate first, ask questions later

Press reports on the FCC’s vote on the Vuze/Free Press petitions against Comcast suggest a peculiar outcome, where FCC orders Comcast to stop managing BitTorrent and to also tell the FCC how and when it manages BitTorrent:

The FCC would require Comcast to stop slowing or blocking access to certain online applications, mostly video file-sharing services such as BitTorrent. The company would also be required to provide more disclosure to consumers about its network management practices and provide more details to the FCC about how it’s blocked or slowed traffic in the past.

If the FCC is convinced the management is wrong, why ask for the data? And why only ask for the data after nearly a year of investigating and three raucous public spectacles?

Vuze recently changed its business model, providing search service for piracy sites such as Mininova and Pirate’s Bay:

In addition to Vuze.com, the new search box gives users the option to search third-party web sites, with Mininova, Sumotorrent, BTJunkie and Jamendo being preselected. With the exception of Jamendo, all of these also feature unlicensed content. In fact, Mininova was sued by Dutch rights holders just a few weeks ago. But Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa told me that he doesn’t think his company could run into trouble by searching these sources. “We have considered the existing legal framework and feel comfortable about the addition of this feature to our new release,” he told me, adding that rights holders could use the search to add their platforms to the mix as well.

We have a curious outcome where the FCC is ordering carriers to provide free bandwidth to pirates.

Small, wireless ISPs are hit harder by this order than the large corporations. If they can’t manage BitTorrent, they’re out of business. Brett Glass is in that situation.

See my recent FCC Comments here.

More as this develops, but for now enjoy the debate at DSL Reports, where the nefarious scheme to allocate bandwidth fairly first emerged.

John Dunbar’s AP story is here. Pretty straight coverage.

Nate Anderson’s Ars Technica is not so straight, tilting toward an editorial.

Blog talk is here, thanks to the good folks at GoogleTM.

Adam Thierer gives props to the big gov’t-pro regulator team at TLF:

It is a difficult thing for me to say, but I am man enough to do it: I must congratulate our intellectual opponents on their amazing victory in the battle to impose Net neutrality regulations on the Internet. With the Wall Street Journal reporting last night that the FCC is on the verge of acting again Comcast based on the agency’s amorphous Net neutrality principles, it is now clear that the folks at the Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the many other advocates of comprehensive Internet regulation have succeeded in convincing a Republican-led FCC to get on the books what is, in essence, the nation’s first Net Neutrality law. It is quite an accomplishment when you think about it.

Indeed.

Bob Fernandez covers the story in the Philly Inquirer, Comcast’s hometown paper:

Consumer and advocacy groups say action by Martin is necessary to preserve First Amendment protections on the Internet and to protect broadband consumers. Free Press, an advocacy group opposed to media consolidation, filed the complaint with the FCC. It was disappointed that Martin wouldn’t fine Comcast to send a message to the industry.

But others warn that Martin’s decision, announced at a Washington news conference, advances the FCC’s powers on the Internet without new laws.

“This is the foot in the door for big government to regulate the Internet,” said Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a free-market think tank in Washington. “This is the beginning of a serious regulatory regime. For the first time, the FCC is making law around net neutrality.”

Net neutrality refers to the concept that Internet operators should treat all data traffic the same and not interfere with it – a subject hotly debated in recent years on Capitol Hill. Companies say they sometimes interfere with Internet traffic for practical reasons, like easing data jams.

Nobody ever mentions that unmanaged traffic causes more delay for users than managed traffic.

Comcast sets the record straight

In the course of pursuing its grievance with the FCC over broadband traffic management, Free Press and its allies have developed annoying tendencies to overstate the qualifications of its “experts” and to make wild technical assertions unsupported by empirical data. They pass Robb Topolski off as a “network engineer” when he was, while employed, a low-level tester of PC software. David Reed, who was in the design loop for TCP/IP in the 1970s but has gone in other directions since then, is represented as having worked continuously for 35 years on the advancement of Internet protocols. Free Press now employs Topolski and increasingly relies on him for analysis.

Comcast has finally said “enough is enough” and filed a document with the FCC addressing the inaccuracy of Free Press and Topoloski’s claims about their management systems:

• First, Comcast’s High-Speed Internet customers can and do access any content, run any application, and use any service that they wish.

• Second, our network management practices are similar to those deployed by other Internet service providers in the United States and around the world, and are reasonably designed to enable, not hinder, the high-quality user experience that the Internet Policy Statement contemplates and that competitive marketplace considerations require.

• Third, although Free Press and its consultants believe they know and understand Comcast’s network and how it manages that network, they do not, and they have made no legitimate effort to gain such an understanding (as others have recently done).

• Fourth, Comcast’s network management practices are not discriminatory and are entirely agnostic as to the content being transmitted, where it is being sent from or to, or the identity of the sender or receiver.

• Finally, Comcast’s customer service agreements and policies have long disclosed that broadband capacity is not unlimited, and that the network is managed for the benefit of all customers. Comcast’s disclosures have always been comparable to — and are now far more detailed than — almost any other Internet service provider’s disclosures.

The bottom line is this: the Internet is a web of shared communication links provisioned by statistical predictions about traffic. Any application or user which uses more bandwidth than the typical profile takes it away from others. The owner/manager of every link has a responsibility to assure fair access, and allowing applications with enormous bandwidth appetites to gobble up an unfair share of communication opportunities is a failure to own up to this responsibility.

Comcast has been charged with degrading an innovative new application, but the facts don’t support the charge. Actually, the innovative new application – P2P as presently implemented – has the effect of degrading traditional applications. Hence, P2P has to be managed.

So the only interesting questions are how. There are several members in the set of reasonable means of managing P2P traffic. The burden is on the FCC and the petitioners to show that the Sandvine system isn’t one of them, and they haven’t seriously attempted to do so.

Hiding behind wild claims and overblown rhetoric doesn’t help consumers, doesn’t protect free speech, and doesn’t improve the nature of broadband networking.

Sober analysis does, and that’s what we try to do here. Kudos to Comcast for standing up to these bullies.

Does the FCC have the authority after all?

MAP attorney Harold Feld has put together an interesting argument on the FCC’s authority to sanction Comcast over the BitTorrent management question:

If the FCC had said directly to Comcast: “If in the future evidence arises that any company is willfully blocking or degrading Internet content, affected parties may file a complaint with the Commission.” I would think we could all agree that this constituted “notice,” yes? Perhaps not notice of whether or not the behavior at issue constituted blocking or degrading — that is, after all — what the Commission determines in a complaint. But certainly if the FCC had told Comcast directly, to its face, no ifs and or buts, the above quoted line, I would hope we could all agree that Comcast had received reasonable notice that parties could bring complaints to the Commission, asking the Commission to determine whether the parties had behaved in an inappropriate manner.

Comcast rebuts this argument in a recent FCC filing.

IANAL so I don’t have an opinion on the soundness of Harold’s legal argument or Comcast’s rebuttal, but if Harold were correct, the argument would simply shift from authority to reasonable network management. The system Comcast was using made an a priori judgment that P2P was less worthy of all the bandwidth it wanted under load and unattended than interactive applications. This is not an unreasonable judgment, as a) it’s a bandwidth hog by design; and b) it was asking for more than the typical user was getting. But there are cases, to be sure, when a particular instance of P2P is not hogging, and they lead us to the empirical question about the link state at the time of the throttling. And that’s what I told the FCC in both my filing and my oral testimony.

I’m glad we have all these clever lawyers to resolve all these devious questions of authority, but wouldn’t it be simpler to know the rules in advance? That’s important because the terms like “degrade” are completely vague when we’re talking about a shared wire. Not managing P2P means that web browsers get degraded, and it makes no difference whether they’re degraded by ISP action or ISP inaction, so Comcast is screwed either way. That’s un-American.

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