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Tech at Night: Net Neutrality, Copyright, iPhone, Verizon

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 11th, 2010 at 03:00 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Tech at Night

Happy Weekend. As I write this it’s already the 11th, so you have two shopping weeks left before Christmas. Oops, is it still legal on the Internet not to say Holiday?

Some quick hits for the weekend as we continue to wait on the FCC to explain itself and its plans for radical new Internet regulation.

George Ou points out that if Netflix gets to demand free peering with Comcast, then Netflix ought to demand free shipping over the postal service. After all, if neutral means free, then that’s the next step, right? Just shows how absurd the radicals really are in all of this. Network investment costs money and that money must be recouped with profit, or else that investment isn’t going to happen.

And again, if that investment stops happening, we all lose out.

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn apparently wants to stick it to wireless providers despite wireless providers never being a monopoly. Monopoly utility providers were of course the original justification for regulation, because in theory you can only run so many wires to a person’s house. That justification never existed with wireless. Competition runs rampant. But the grabbing hands of the socialists grab all they can anyway. All for themselves.

CrunchGear is now off my reading list (and should be off of yours, too) because of serial, in your face bias with respect to Net Neutrality and Wikileaks, but they’ve made a startling admission about the FCC’s broadband propaganda. Americans have lower speed Internet than advocates want because Americans are choosing slower, lower speed plans on purpose. Remember that as people claim we “lag behind” and so regulation is needed.

Drudge Report is being sued for copyright infringement and in this Brave New World of criminalized copyright law, Righthaven LLC, a copyright troll form, is attempting to snatch the DrudgeReport.com domain. Great. Infringe on copyright, permanently lose your identity online. That’s the real identity theft crisis in America.

Every time the iPhone-to-Verizon rumors came around in the past, I dismissed them as false. My standard line was that Apple would not move to Verizon until they had a reason to do so, and that reason was going to be LTE, Verizon’s “4G” high speed access technology. Well, Verizon has gone live with LTE, and sure enough Now the rumor is is that Verizon may get the iPhone exclusively now.

iPhone 5 on Verizon exclusively would make good sense for Apple because the higher speed LTE network, which Verizon has gotten live ahead of AT&T’s LTE network, would make the iPhone look and feel like a more responsive tool. So for the first time, I’m saying iPhone on Verizon is a realistic thing to expect next year, with exclusivity not inconceivable.

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COMMENTS

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  • elizabeth bennet

    I thought this one was even more bizarre than the others I’ve read about. But assuming it doesn’t get thrown out (and I know very little about such things, so I don’t even know what I’m talking about here), what are Drudge’s chances of losing? I should think he’d take it as far as SCOTUS, but there again, I’m speaking words without having any understanding of how this might play out.

  • fpete13527

    Although there are so many things that need to be fought after the New Year (actually before the New Year) the fight against the FCC needs to stay in the top group IMO.

    I would love to see some more speeches on the GOP Congress floor expounding on how pathetic the FCC initiatives are.

    After Obama’s surrender of the Presidency to the Clintons, I think it would be extremely easy for most ANY in the GOP to attack this harder:). Maybe they will.

  • rogershru2

    If not for your articles I don’t think I would even know about net “neutrality” for what it really is. The tech sites I read on occasion, such as cnet, only offer vague generalities about the issue and how we need to keep the Internet free. If more people knew free meant more government intrusion and disincentives to innovation and true freedom, then I think this would be an issue on par with taxes and tsp in the public.

  • rogershru2

    Nt

  • travelguy

    The Netflix/Level3/Comcast fight is NOT a peering dispute, no matter how much Comcast would like to frame it that way. Peering agreements occur between backbone providers. ISPs (which is what Comcast is) contract for bandwidth with one or more backbone providers, like Level 3.

    Comcast customers are paying Comcast for bandwidth at retail, Comcast turns around and buys that bandwidth at wholesale from a backbone.

    What’s really going on here is that Comcast is trying to protect their TV business and to continue to price by value of service. The thought of being a dumb pipe provider keeps them from sleeping at night.

    To maintain their current business model, they want to charge content providers (like Netflix) on top of what they are getting from their subscribers. You can bet if they are sucessful, the next step will be to go after companies like Amazon for a percentage of their sales.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens
  • fpete13527
  • travelguy

    Not sure how you jump to that conclusion – what I posted was a summary of the situation, not a policy position.

    Put another way – this is a business model argument. Consider telephone service: In the days of wired service only, the caller paid the vast majority of cost of the call. Along comes wireless and both parties were paying for the call. Which way do you prefer? I know I preferred the old model because it made things much harder for the phone companies to come up with complicated pricing schemes that hid the true cost of the call.

    Another way to look at this is that it’s a last mile tollbooth issue. Comcast can attempt to charges companies for access to “their” customers because for most subscribers, there isn’t a lot of choice in ISPs.

    Personally, I like things simple and transparent and I hope Comcast isn’t successful. And for the record, I characterize myself as hard Libertarian. The classic Libertarian position would be to let the companies duke things out. I may end up there, but have a lot of misgivings about it.

  • fpete13527

    The bandwidth cost needs to be a free market solution at all levels of the pipes, regardless of whether there are a few right now.

    The bottom line is to keep the Government OUT of ALL aspects of control of the internet, both from the pipes out to their true intent of CONTENT CONTROL.

    Once it tis deemed that they control the hardware pipe, they then will use that to further justify that they can control content. They will also manipulate the contol of bandwidth to empower the content that they want.

    Your argument of bandwidth cost is EXACTLY what the Dems want people to think so that THEY can give a SUBSIDIZED and CONTROLLED government solution….for hardware AND CONTENT CONTROL.