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version seven. http://demongin.org |
A Bow Shot Bringing War
Or, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Net Neutrality and Love the Com...cast."
Tuesday, 2010-11-30 | On the Internet, Politics, Television, Zona Roja
| If there's going to be a Linux-like miracle to counteract innovation-threatening broadband business models, then, at a minimum, miracles must not be a crime. |
| Lawrence Lessig |
Net Neutrality
For all of the confusion that seems to surround the idea, Net Neutrality is based on a simple concept: a neutral network is one which delivers any content to any user in the most efficient manner possible and, for the good of businesses and consumers alike, access to the Internet ought to be provided by neutral networks.Those in favor of Net Neutrality want to put laws on the books that would compel Internet Service Providers to deliver all content to all users at an agreed-upon rate: if you pay your ISP $50 for 1.5MB of bandwidth every month, you should be able to download whatever you want without being assessed additional fees or having your throughput[1] limited when downloading certain types of content.
The ultimate consequence, according to those in favor of Net Neutrality, is that if ISP's are allowed to use fees and throughput restrictions to arbitrarily control access to content that costs them no additional cost to provide, the private companies who provide Internet access will use these arbitrarily determined access controls to create a divided Internet. One Internet will be cheap, fast and, thanks to strategic partnerships and corporate alliances, come to represent a direct data pipeline between consumers and the companies who are willing and able to pay ISP's to deliver their content quickly and cheaply. The other Internet will be unbeholden to private, corporate interests, even if it is slow, expensive and difficult to use.
Such a state of affairs, according to those who support Net Neutrality, will reduce the Internet from an invaluable communications tool and platform for innovation to a corporate-controlled advertising space. This two Internets scenario, furthermore, is inevitable if the government does not regulate ISP's and require them to administer neutral networks.
Those opposed to Net Neutrality hold the position that the private companies which provide Internet access should be allowed to charge their customers special rates for delivering certain types of content or refuse to deliver certain types of content at full speed. The idea is that if ISP's choose to provide low-cost, high-speed access to preferred content and high-cost, low-speed access to objectionable content, the consumer is always free to take his business elsewhere. Those opposed to Net Neutrality argue, more or less, that the market for Internet service ought to be allowed to regulate itself.
The ultimate consequence, according to those opposed to Net Neutrality, is that if American ISP's are regulated by the Government--you know, the inefficient and corrupt Government that can't seem to regulate any industry without shaking down hard-working Americans and stifling the innovation that would otherwise flourish thanks to the competitive spirit that inheres to unregulated markets--then Americans will eventually come to be stuck with a heavily-regulated, inefficient, state-run Internet that doesn't so much resemble a Super Highway as it does a DMV.
At the time of this writing, 2010 is nearly over and supporters of Net Neutrality and their opponents have spent the better part of it battling one another to what amounts to a standstill. In April, a federal appeals court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission had no authority to restrict the manner in which ISP's provided their service. Then, in September of this year, FCC had regrouped and begun to advance a new proposal for how they ought to be allowed to regulate ISP's.
But by then, of course, it was September and the height of election season, and you just plain couldn't find anyone who wanted to engage in any political discourse more sophisticated than the slappy-fight, cable news "culture wars" of Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann.
And so there came to be something of a detente.
Election 2010
As of the 2010 elections, we the American tax-paying people are the proud employers of what is called a "divided Congress": Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives to Republicans, though they still maintain control of the Senate. Sure, we've got a Democratic president, but his party now lacks the ability to ride roughshod over the opposing party.Among the Democrats who ran for House and Senate seats and lost were 95 who supported Net Neutrality, either by signing certain documents or by voting on certain legislation.
As anyone who lived through this election cycle can tell you, anti-incumbent sentiment was at an all time high and the Tea Party--a "political movement" invented and financed by a freaky cabal consisting of a pair of eerily reptilian silver-spoon robber barons, everyone's favorite billionaire tyrant, Rupert Murdoch and their shadow network of overseas investors--was an insurgent force to be reckoned with, storming America's proverbial statehouses, deposing incumbents and toppling...whatever.
By now, the dust has mostly settled and, predictably enough, the fiery campaign rhetoric has been abandoned in favor of the torpid, muted language of work-a-day government. And for all of the insurging, deposing and toppling that supposedly went on, things look remarkably similar to how they looked before the elections: Republicans--regardless of whether they identified as Tea Party or not--are still trying to throw anyone they can under the bus if it'll win them a campaign contribution from a major corporate player and Democrats...are basically on the same trip.
I am told they self-segregate according to tie color. Or something similarly meaningless.
At any rate, now that Congress is getting back to business as usual--now that opponents of Net Neutrality far outnumber its insurged/deposed/toppled supporters and now that the pro-corporate GOP controls the House--the stalemate between supporters and detractors of Net Neutrality looks like it will not hold much longer.
There has been, in short, a sea change in the Net Neutrality debate, even if nothing changed any place else in Congress.
The Biggest Assholes in the Universe
With the help of the hivemind, I found a press release on the Internet this morning from an Internet backbone provider based in Colorado called Level 3 Communications. If you don't know what an "Internet backbone provider" does, the basic idea is that they run the data centers that make the Internet possible: they are the companies that the biggest players in data pay to make the Internet an integral part of your daily life. Level 3, as it happens, is a partner of NetFlix, and a major piece of the infrastructure that allows NetFlix to stream movies to its customers.At any rate, here is what Level 3 had to say this morning:
On November 19, 2010, Comcast informed Level 3 that, for the first time, it will demand a recurring fee from Level 3 to transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast's customers who request such content. By taking this action, Comcast is effectively putting up a toll booth at the borders of its broadband Internet access network, enabling it to unilaterally decide how much to charge for content which competes with its own cable TV and Xfinity delivered content. This action by Comcast threatens the open Internet and is a clear abuse of the dominant control that Comcast exerts in broadband access markets as the nation's largest cable provider.Emphasis mine.
If you are not a NetFlix subscriber or if you do not use your videogame console to take advantage of NetFlix's on demand content, you might not immediately see the angle. Here's the angle:
- Comcast has a product called Xfinity. The Xfinity product is Comcast's HD, on demand content solution. You can watch HD cable and pay Comcast per movie to watch movies on demand. Xfinity is delivered by cable to user's homes. It also provides limited access to the Internet.[2]
- NetFlix, in addition to their DVD-by-mail business, also streams movies to customers' videogame consoles. This makes their product competition for Comcast's Xfinity product. For about $20 a month, I can stream as many movies and television shows as I want to my Nintendo Wii. The audio and video fidelity aren't great, but you can't beat the all-you-can-eat pricing or the increasingly broad selection. To get this data to my house, I pay SpeakEasy $60 a month for Internet access and they don't ask me any questions about what I download.
- By passing a mandatory fee along to backbone providers such as Level 3 who are partners of Comcast's competitors, Comcast engages in classic--literally textbook--anti-competitive behavior: by charging Level 3 special fees in order to deliver NetFlix content to Comcast customers, Comcast is attempting to use its existing leverage over its customers to inhibit their access to a competing product[3].
Regardless of how much you already have Comcast, you might not know that Comcast is aggressively seeking other sorts of service monopolies wherever it can. Comcast, for example, is currently attempting to acquire NBC: Al Franken is attempting to initiate an antitrust investigation of the acquisition (which, though details are still emerging, seems especially sleazy, even for Comcast).
Conclusion
This is how Net Neutrality figures into your life. If you are opposed to it--because you're afraid of government intervention in the form of FCC regulation or because you believe that government regulation stifles innovation--you are in favor of Comcast, their monopolistic ambitions, their anti-competitive behavior, their lousy, over-priced, under-performing service and, ultimately, you are a proponent of a future where you pay them a premium for services that could easily to be provided in a cheaper and more efficient manner in a world where Net Neutrality is the law of the land.Finally, I would like to make the implicit explicit and state that Net Neutrality is a real thing impacting actual markets in which you--a person who reads random blogs on the Internet--are almost certainly a participant.
Even if you don't use NetFlix or care about on demand content, you should be able by now to see how Comcasts chickens will one day come to roost in your own living room: today they crowd NetFlix out of the on demand business, tomorrow they purchase NBC and on Thursday, they are literally the only game in town and you are paying them several hundred dollars a month for high speed access to crateandbarrel.com while Comcast sniffs each and every one of your packets to make sure that you are not downloading anything that major trade cartels such as the RIAA or MPAA have instructed the government to prevent you from downloading.
I try to refrain from making political exhortations--largely because they sound idiotic and hypocritical, nine times out of ten--and I will not make any in this blog post. What I will do, is encourage you to get angry and stay angry about this.
I certainly intend to.
2010-11-30 Update: if you are interested in a current round-up on all of the anticompetitive and shady dealings in which Comcast is currently engaged, read Susan Crawford on that subject: she moves quickly through the various issues and gets directly to the pith.
2010-12-01 Update: Artie just brought it to my attention that Ars Technica wrote this up and comes to similar conclusions about the antitrust/Net Neutrality implications of Comcast's new fees:
Bear in mind also that when Comcast charges $50+ for broadband—and recently raised its rates—a company has to expect that its subscribers expect payment to include access to Netflix and other sources of full-motion video. Why would it be okay to download hundreds of gigabytes per month, provided the upstream peer is not Level 3? This does not fully pass the smell test in light of Comcast's ulterior motive to raise the cost of a competitor, Netflix, and its preferred carrier.
- Bandwidth is the maximum amount of material that can be transmitted along a given conduit; throughput is the actual amount of material that travels in one direction, divided by the time taken to transfer it. Hence bandwidth is usually a number--"one megabyte" or "500k" or whatever--and throughput is usually a ratio, e.g. "one megabyte per second".
All ISP's enforce bandwidth caps: you pay for a certain bandwidth--a top speed under optimal conditions--and you expect reasonable throughput. An ISP could selectively enforce a throughput cap by limiting your downloads from PirateWebsite.com to 50k/sec, a fraction of your bandwidth cap and an artificially imposed "speed" limit based on factors other than the ability of existing infrastructure to deliver the requested content. - I say "limited" here, because Comcast--in addition to sniffing customers' packets for illicit content--stipulates that only seven devices in a subscriber's house may access the Internet; they control this with their own hardware. You can read more about this on their advertising pages, but you will not find a link to those pages here.
- Eventually, as the aggregate cost of these fees is passed upstream to the company who contracts Level 3's services, NetFlix customers who use Comcast will have incurred fees that will have to be distributed to all of NetFlix' customers in order to keep the NetFlix service profitable. Basically, Comcast wants NetFlix off of its users' televisions and I get to foot the bill for it.
