Title II A Potentially "Dangerous" Turn, Says Dvorak

"There is a proposal afoot developed by Sen. John Kerry that could undermine free speech on the Internet," says technology analyst and commentator John Dvorak. The proposal is to regulate broadband access as a regulated common carrier service, like telephone service.

You can ask yourself whether you think such a change would lead to more, or less, innovation; more or less investment; more or less choice. You can ask whether a 1934 method of regulating a stodgy monopoly service is appropriate in the 21st century for Internet services.

You can ask yourself whether having more choices, rather than less, is the likely outcome of such a move. You may ask yourself whether application priorities routinely available on private networks used by businesses, or application acceleration, as practiced by hundreds to thousands of content providers already, is a good thing or a bad thing to be forbidden.

So here comes the great idea from John Kerry: reclassifying broadband services as "telecommunications services" rather than "information services."

"This is the worst possible outcome as the FCC will eventually regulate the Internet like it does all the entities under its jurisdiction," says Dvorak.

"Why would we want the FCC to regulate the Internet?" Dvorak asks. "It's a terrible idea."

By redefining information services to telecommunications services, the Internet as we know it will be neutered as the FCC begins to crack down on foul language, porn, and whatever else it sees fit to proscribe, he argues.

"No matter the net neutrality outcome, it has nothing to do with increasing broadband penetration and speeds," he says. "It's a total scam invented to censor the Internet once and for all.

"I'm surprised people, no matter how idealistic, cannot see through it," he says.

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Internet Oversight Needed, Just Not Title II

"Should the FCC have sway over the Internet?" a Washington Post Co. editorial asks.

For the past eight years, the FCC has rightly taken a light regulatory approach to the Internet, though it believed it had authority to do more. Now that the agency has lost in court, some advocates in the technology industries are urging the agency to invoke a different section of law and subject ISPs to more aggressive regulation, until now reserved for telephone companies and other "common carriers."

Such a move could allow the FCC to dictate, among other things, rates that ISPs charge consumers. This level of interference would require the FCC to engage in a legal sleight of hand that would amount to a naked power grab. It is also unnecessary: There have been very few instances where ISPs have been accused of wrongdoing -- namely, unfair manipulation of online traffic -- and those rare instances have been cleared up voluntarily once consumers pressed the companies. FCC interference could damage innovation in what has been a vibrant and rapidly evolving marketplace.

Some oversight of ISPs would serve the public interest as long as it recognizes the interests of companies to run businesses in which they have invested billions of dollars. Transparency and predictability are essential to encourage established companies and start-ups to continue to invest in technologies dependent on the Internet. ISPs, for example, should be required to disclose information about how they manage their networks to ensure that these decisions are legitimate and not meant to interfere with applications that compete with the ISPs' offerings.

Congress should step in to strike the appropriate balance. Enacting laws would take some time, but the process would allow for robust debate. In the meantime, any questionable steps by ISPs will be flagged by unhappy consumers or Internet watchdog groups. If ISPs change course and begin to threaten the openness of the online world, Congress could and probably would redouble its efforts.

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Net Neutrality: Time for Evidence-Based Policy

By Thomas W. Hazlett, published in the Financial Times

A federal appeals court has bopped the Federal Communications Commission yet again. In Comcast v. FCC – the “network neutrality” case – the agency was found to be making up the law as it went. In sanctioning the cable operator for broadband network management it found dubious, the Bush-era FCC exceeded its charter. Cable modem services and digital subscriber line (DSL) connections provided by phone carriers compete – officially – as unregulated “information services.”

Congress could now mandate broadband regulation. This could have happened four years ago, when the Democrats took majority control and announced that they would impose network sharing mandates. That has not happened, and – with unemployment running at above 9 per cent – is not likely now. Net neutrality is seen, bluntly, as a jobs killer. That’s one take Congress has actually gotten right.

Alternatively, the FCC could flip its own rules, going back to a DSL regime discarded in 2005. But it would have to go further, extending “open access” to cable broadband, something is has always rejected. In 1999, when AOL and phone carrier GTE lobbied hard for cable regulation, Clinton-appointed regulators stood firm. “We don’t have a monopoly, we don’t have a duopoly,” stated FCC Chair Bill Kennard, “we have a no-opoly.” Forget regulation, encourage investment, get amazing new stuff.

But “open access” rules for DSL remained. These permitted phone company rivals to lease capacity at rates determined by regulators. It was not until February 2003 that the major requirements were ended. In August 2005, remaining rules were scrapped. A test was created. Deregulation would further investment and deployment, or quash competition and slow broadband growth. FCC member Michael Copps predicted the latter. He challenged the Commission to see if the policy would “yield the results” anticipated. “I’ll be keeping tabs,” he warned.

Yet, the market’s verdict is in – and the proponents of regulation have ignored them. Obama economic adviser Susan Crawford, arguing in the New York Times for broadband re-regulation, said that ending government DSL mandates was “a radical move… [that] produced a wave of mergers,” raising prices and lowering quality.

It is simply untrue. Mergers, governed by the FCC and antitrust agencies, have had no material impact on broadband rivalry. And the rate of broadband adoption significantly increased following deregulation. This pattern continued a trend.

Cable, unregulated, led DSL in subscribers by nearly two-to-one through 2002. Then, with DSL deregulated, phone carriers narrowed the gap, adding more customers, quarter-to-quarter, than cable operators by 2006. The spurt in DSL growth relative to cable modem usage takes place at precisely the time the former was shedding “open access” mandates, and cannot be explained by overall changes in technology. In short, DSL subscribership was up 65 per cent by year-end 2006 compared to the predicated (pre-2003) trend under regulation.

The story in ultra-high-speed fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) services is similar. There was virtually no deployment until the Commission, in late 2004, declared that fiber networks would not be subject to access regulation. That move, according to industry analysts, unleashed investment. FTTH is now offered to over 15m homes, and networks are capable of supplying 100 MBPS downloads, on a par with services delivered anywhere.

Not only has access regulation been shown to retard advanced networks, the Internet is loaded with “non-neutral” business deals where Internet Service Providers (ISPs) give preference to favored firms or applications. These negotiated contracts rationalize resource use, and drive incentives for innovation.

Data flows, unregulated, across large backbone networks that pay no fees to exchange their traffic, but collect billions from smaller networks that must fork out to inter-connect. This pay-to-play structure pushes networks to invest, grow, and cooperate.

Cable TV systems reserve broadband capacity for their own branded “digital phone” services. This special “fast lane” provides a premium service not available to independent VoIP applications. It has also transformed the competitive landscape, helping to forge fixed line competition for over 100m US households -- what the 1996 Telecommunications Act tried failed to do via network sharing mandates (tossed out by a federal court in 2004).

And the corporate history of Google offers a landmark date: on Feb. 1, 2002, the company’s search engine popped up as the default choice on 33m AOL subscribers’ home page. The coveted spot was purchased; the young firm mortgage its future to outbid search engine rivals. An application provider paying the country’s largest ISP for preferred access to its customers. That may not be a violation of net neutrality. But if not, many lawyers will be very busy explaining why.

Today’s FCC Chair, Julius Genachowski, has made a pledge: the Commission’s “processes should be open, participatory, fact-based, and analytically rigorous.” That would be a refreshing approach. In addressing new regulations for broadband, let’s first see how these markets actually work, and how well the last batch of network sharing mandates performed.

Let’s all keep tabs.

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The Very Best Android Phones For Each Carrier

As it turns out, some think the "very best" Android devices available on any U.S. mobile carrier are made by just one company: HTC. The firm seems to be betting its future on Android, and from the looks of things, is doing a heck of a job rolling out top of the line Android devices for every leading U.S. carrier.

The Very Best Android Phones For Each Carrier

For T-Mobile customers the most future-proof choice is a Nexus One. For Sprint 4G customers, it is the HTC Evo. At AT&T the top device is the Nexus One. Verizon customers should get the HTC "Incredible," at least when it goes on sale on April 29, 2010.

A Canadian's Take on U.S. Net Neutrality: Big Company Ploy to Squash Competition

The biggest companies in major markets generally tend to favor heavy-handed regulation, says a Canadian IT consultant.  That's why Google, among others, has spent tens of millions pushing for “net neutrality” regulations in the United States, he argues. That's an unusual twist on the debate. 

"Just go ahead and net neutrality on your own network and for your own users. Day one you’re going to find that net neutrality requires you to give incoming porn packets exactly the same forwarding priority on your network as text messages to sales or voice traffic for the CEO’s office - and as soon as you decide to block one set while giving the other a priority boost, you’ll have both demonstrated the fundamentally Orwellian nature of the whole net neutrality sales pitch and turned yourself into one of its opponents."

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Google Enhances Docs

I admit I do not use Google Docs as much as I used to, only because so much of what I write is uploaded directly to a Web site, or in some cases sent as an email message. That's wasn't the case several years ago, when the primary form of document I was required to create was a "Word" document.

I still sometimes need to do a bit of modeling, create a presentation or create a document, so it isn't as if an office productivity suite does not get used, they simply get used less, as most of my daily routine involves creating Web-compatible content.

The exception seems to be that I frequently must capture a graphic or chart of some sort from a .pdf file or Web page and reformat it as a picture for insertion into a post. In that case I find myself using the presentation software simply to launder an image into a .jpg file. That wasn't why presentation suites were created, but that is how I generally will be found using a presentation program, day in and out.

But there is another point about new developments to Google Docs. Lots of people are required to create documents in a word processor, read or create spreadsheets and presentations on a regular basis. And, up to this point, with some salient exceptions, that has meant using Microsoft's "Office" suite.

Google Docs has been useful for students and some enterprises, but has not matched Office feature for feature and with equal and transparent functionality. Most of us still find the default format for any shared bit of work is "Word" for documents and "PowerPoint" for presentations and "Excel" for spreadsheets.

But any attacking company will start low and then gradually begin to enhance the utility of a competitive offering, and that is what Google is doing with Docs.

These Days, It's All About Mobility

These days most innovation happening in applications, features and devices is happening in the wireless realm or in the world of over-the-top applications. That can be discomforting for some.

I recently moderated a panel of application developers and enablers recently and asked where they panelists believed there were opportunities to work with "service providers" such as telcos and cable companies. There was an initial awkward silence, then some mutterings even I cannot remember. But I think that tells the story: over-the-top application providers largely assume the existence of broadband; broadband is not a required "partner" in the delivery.

People in the telecom or cable or satellite business hate the term "dumb pipe," but it resonates because it sums up the essential nature of today's application environment, captured by the term "loosely coupled."

And matters might change even more. The Wi-Fi-only version of the iPad does not require any sort of relationship with a wireless access services provider. In fact, if, as some believe, devices such as the iPad wind up being devices picked up and used casually, when people are sitting on a couch in their homes, and not primarily as a substitute for a netbook or notebook PC, there might never been a need for such relationships. People will simply use their at-home Wi-Fi connections.

Still, it is hard to ignore the fact that most innovation these days is happening in the mobile space.