Redstate

I believe the question really comes down to: how do you encourage telcos and/or other carriers to build out broadband infrastructure in locations where they don't have a business case to do it otherwise? Low-cost loans are certainly one aspect of this. Another poster elsewhere on RS mentioned that telcos currently must depreciate their equipment over a very long period of time, which affects the balance sheets for years...perhaps that can be changed for rural buildouts. Or tax credits can be applied.

I definitely think there's a problem with rural coverage, based on personal experience. The question is: how to fund it. I think the best approach is to motivate (using "the carrot") private enterprise to do the job. In fact, that's probably the only practical way of doing it, since the government isn't exactly in the telecom business.

As long as the telco and cableco OWN the wires , you will NEVER have competition. I only have ONE phone wire , and ONE cable wire. Yes, they are now sort of offering phone over cable and DSL and maybe movies over phone.

But they are not really the "same" thing.

I want One or Two wires and they be opened up for ANYONE to offer a service.

Think opening the wires as a "highway" model. Not paid for by taxes but more of an Access fee to maintain and upgrade them by a Utility type org set up.

Even if the cities allowed more than one cableco, there would likely be no takers...the cost of dragging wires through the city would be to high without a guaranteed monopoly like the first cableco had when it entered. The new one would not be guaranteed a certain amount of subscribers.

This problem was largely solved long ago with the railroads, trucking companies, airlines, etc. that own infrastructure but use either public assets or governmental power to operate that infrastructure. A railroad owns the tracks and, maybe, the locomotives, but in order to be in business, it must provide access to that infrastructure to anybody's freight and, somewhat, do so with non-discriminatory rates. Analogously, a cable company uses a lot of government power to get its wires run; it should have to allow anyone's "freight" over those lines, the only issue being how much it charges the shipper.

In Vino Veritas

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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

RFYoung
You realize, I assume, that the REA is still in existance and funding movie theaters in State College, PA. otherwise wasting tax dollars.

be sunseted. There should be a specific program goal and an end date so we're not, as RFYoung notes funding projects that have nothing to do with the original program 50 years later.
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CongressCritter™: Never have so few felt like they were owed so much by so many for so little.

The huge bandwidth gap will still be there. Sure, it is cheaper to install, but POTS lines are even cheaper since they are already in the ground. If the goal is simply some kind of internet connection availability with very limited bandwidth, dial up already meets that need.

512k will become the equivalent of 56k today at some point in the not so distant future. We started not so long ago with modems that ran at 0.3k. Technology marches forward. The infrastructure would have to be capable of growing with it, for this to serve any purpose.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

This is all about long term regulation and Congressionally mandated "solutions."

the "solution" for obtaining "universal" broadband is the free market. It's what got broadband to the level it is at today and it is the solution that will get it spread even further.

When liberals progressives talk about "national" strategies and "universal" anything what they mean is government directed and taxpayer subsidized.

John
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Why would God invent something like whiskey? To keep the Irish from ruling the world of course

Government over reach in the sector?

But its very easy to create it as one.

In most areas the choices are cable(by cable co) or DSL (by phone co). Spectrum for wireless broadband is usually gobbled up by traditional cell phone companies.( They do so to limit supply and control the market).The last thing the cell phone carriers want to see are wifi phones that will give unlimited calling for the cost of a wireless internet account.

We really are lagging behind other nations in advanced telco services and its because the market is not feeling the pressure to innovate.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

But its very easy to create it as one.

From an economic perspective, a given market either is a natural monopoly, or it is not. Either a single firm can supply the entire demand in a given market at below marginal cost, or it cannot. Natural monopolies can't be "created," they simply exist. Of course, I await Adam coming along to correct this simplistic analysis, but that's always been my understanding.

We really are lagging behind other nations in advanced telco services and its because the market is not feeling the pressure to innovate.

Well, the best way to make sure that never happens is to introduce artificial price controls like net neutrality into the mix.

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This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.

-Edmund Burke

Have government granted monopolies. If you go with a competitor your service will be worse.

And yes once again they aren't a natural monopoly in the textbook economic sense. They are close enough though that all it takes is a little suppression of competitors to keep them as monopolies.

If the cable cos and the telcos want to send video down the wires thats fine. They shouldn't be allowed to chose who doesn't get through though.

The consumer has paid for the bandwidth with the expectation they will have access to the internet. Not with the expectation that they will get to see what ATT lets them.

I point out that most of these organizations lean liberal. Redstate and the Herritage Foundation could both be on the receiving ends of shakedowns to get their messages out.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

They had to enter into a consent decree for that kind of behavior that was probably not very pleasant for them.

And yes once again they aren't a natural monopoly in the textbook economic sense. They are close enough though that all it takes is a little suppression of competitors to keep them as monopolies.

So then we agree that they are not natural monopolies, and that only government intervention can make them monopolies. I don't know what we're arguing about, then, except that I seem to be more convinced of the fact that more government intervention will only make the problem worse.

If the cable cos and the telcos want to send video down the wires thats fine. They shouldn't be allowed to chose who doesn't get through though.

Why not? Should a web hosting company be allowed to take down jihadist websites, as we discussed on the front page earlier this week? What about a television station? What justification is there for the government telling a cable of phone company what sort of messages they have to promulgate or allow to be promulgated? Isn't that the fairness doctrine writ internet?

The consumer has paid for the bandwidth with the expectation they will have access to the internet. Not with the expectation that they will get to see what ATT lets them.

If their expectations are thwarted in this regard, I am confident that an alternative will be available, and if one is not, that one will arise.

I point out that most of these organizations lean liberal.

I point out that most of these organizations have stockholders they must answer to, and therefore, they have a fiduciary duty to make money.

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This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.

-Edmund Burke

I've yet to see any remotely convincing analysis which shows that the provision of broadband internet is a natural monopoly (in fact, quite the opposite), and it is not subject to "network effects" like in the early days of telephone service, unless the cable companies somehow figure out a way to prevent their customers from accessing any internet site not hosted by them - and at this point, such a decision would be disastrous for business in any case.

Well actually it is a duopoly which is probably even worse.

And ISPs most certainly know how to prevent customers from accessing any internet sites not hosted by them. That would be trivially easy. They also know how to "rate limit" sites not hosted by them or their preferred partners so that you would be able to access the site but it would be unbearably slow. You wouldn't even know it was happening and since they aren't required to show how their routers are configured you would never know.

Net neutrality isn't about controlling pricing. It is about preventing ISPs from restricting or reducing access to sites based on their own business deals that you are not even aware of.

I see no compelling reason why ISPs should be allowed to control what sites I can and cannot access.

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why ... I dream of things that never were and ask why not. - Robert Kennedy

Currently are supplying all the demand in a market does not indicate that the market is only capable of supporting two firms. And I have no idea how a duopoly de facto is supposed to be worse than a natural monopoly.

And ISPs most certainly know how to prevent customers from accessing any internet sites not hosted by them. That would be trivially easy. They also know how to "rate limit" sites not hosted by them or their preferred partners so that you would be able to access the site but it would be unbearably slow. You wouldn't even know it was happening and since they aren't required to show how their routers are configured you would never know.

I presume, with the proliferation of information that exists out there, that if you were really motivated to know, some website would arise which would tell you. But this all goes to the last point:

I see no compelling reason why ISPs should be allowed to control what sites I can and cannot access.

I see no reason why not. If I own a radio station, I see no reason why the government should be able to tell me what kind of music I have to play for my customers.

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This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.

-Edmund Burke

Currently are supplying all the demand in a market does not indicate that the market is only capable of supporting two firms. And I have no idea how a duopoly de facto is supposed to be worse than a natural monopoly.

Only 2 companies have copper/fiber running to the home. A cable company and an Telecom. It may be POSSIBLE for other carriers to enter the market but it isn't likely. The costs of extending wiring to the home are extreme especially if you don't have existing right of access agreements with the municipalities.

I presume, with the proliferation of information that exists out there, that if you were really motivated to know, some website would arise which would tell you. But this all goes to the last point:

Not very easy to do at all. The website wouldn't be able to track the path you take or your PC or anything else. It would be no more than a guess.

I see no reason why not. If I own a radio station, I see no reason why the government should be able to tell me what kind of music I have to play for my customers.

Uh they already do. The FCC regulates content over the airwaves.

Of course that is a poor comparison. Radio stations are content providers they are not access providers.

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why ... I dream of things that never were and ask why not. - Robert Kennedy

Only 2 companies have copper/fiber running to the home. A cable company and an Telecom.

You forgot one, the electric utility company. I've heard, in the past, they could use their lines.

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Vista really sucks!

You can thank government for that.

Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

Hooray!

Can we at least agree that the system, as it is now, is broken in terms of allowing local service providers to have effective monopolies, to the detriment of the market and consumers?

We may not agree on what the solution to that problem is, but hopefully we can at least agree on the problem. That's a starting point.

Many ISPs already block ports to prevent you from, say, using a mail server that's not hosted by them. They claim it's an anti-spam measure, but it's really a revenue generation measure. It would be pretty trivial to expand this to other things, like VoIP. They don't even have to outright block VoIP, they can just degrade the performance to rival VoIP services so it becomes unusable.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

I recently had an incident with Comcast where I stopped being able to get my email. I don't use Comcast's email account, I use the mail server at the hosting company I've had my domain with for almost ten years. When I called them, they first tried to claim that they had permanently blocked port 25 on my account because of spamming. When I pressed them on the impossibility of this and threatened to take it to the state Attorney General and the CPD, they changed their story and said they were slowly implementing port 25 blocks on all user accounts, and that we had to either use their mail server (and, of course, their email account, since they won't relay) or contact our hosting company and demand they open an alternate port.

Taking my business elsewhere was not an option. I cannot get DSL where I'm at, and no other broadband solution is viable for me. Comcast knew I had no alternative but to suck it up.

Eventually I was able to resolve this with my hosting company, who was willing to work with me and open up port 26 for my use. Most people will not be so lucky, or will not know their options. And within a year or less it will be impossible to use anyone else's mail servers on any Comcast network.

They claim it's to prevent spamming, that port 25 is too well-known and exploited by spammers and that everyone should change to a different port, but this is a ridiculous argument. If everyone uses a different port, configuring mail clients will become a nightmare, and if everyone switches to a new standard port, the spammers will just attack that one instead.

Its aptly named. You call, they abuse.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Given how many people out their choose to run the spammer's haven that is Microsoft Windows, and on top of that running arbitrary code downloaded from who knows were, essentiially handing their comptuers over to spammers to use in their spam networks, if ISPs didn't do that blocking, their whole networks would end up on anti-spamer blacklists.

Given the choice between blocking port 25 and being RBLd to oblivion by the anti-spam zealots, they like many big corporations choose the PR move and just block port 25.

Hooray!

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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

Sending spam would be outgoing, obviously. That's what some spammers do: distribute a virus or trojan horse, take command of a network of the computers of ignorant users on the internet, and then spam with those computers.

Hooray!

Users with compromised computers are still a major problem that ISPs have to deal with. Blocking port 25 outbound doesn't cure that problem, or even help to alleviate it. They can get a pretty good idea who is compromised just by looking at the traffic, though, then cut them off and tell them to fix their system.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

If people can't run mail servers, they can't spam. If they can't contact port 25 outside the network, they can't send spams.

Hooray!

People need to be able to access mail servers somehow. Comcast won't allow them to relay their personal domain through Comcast mail servers, nor should they. If they can't run their own, then the only alternative is to use an external mail server. What you propose, if universally adopted, is the practically the death of personal domain email.

So what's your alternative? Pick another port arbitrarily for SMTP? As soon as it becomes a standard, spammers will attack it--whoops! We're back where we started. Since you know so much about the problem, I'd like to hear your proposed solution.

So they block port 25. Comcast is already doing it; within a year it will be impossible to use port 25 on their networks for anything other than their own mail servers, which don't relay (and shouldn't). What's next?

People still need to be able to get their mail, and a sizable portion of them use an external hosting company. One of two things is going to happen: either every hosting company picks an arbitrary port that isn't blocked and has their customers use that, or a new standard SMTP port will be chosen that isn't 25.

In the former case, you have an absolute nightmare for anyone picking a service or setting up a mail client, a lack of standardization that is antithetical to nearly every principle that makes the internet work.

In the latter case, trojan and worm designers and spammers will adapt to the new standard, and within days the entire exercise will be moot--port 917 will be the new port 25, the same problem with a new number.

The only real, serious solution is the widespread adoption of a secure alternative to SMTP that eliminates the relay loopholes and other vulnerabilities of SMTP on port 25. As long as SMTP is used in its current form, it doesn't matter what port-of-the-week is used, it'll still be the same problem.

Comcast is inflicting a tremendous inconvenience on their customers for what amounts to a very temporary band-aid of the real problem.

The only real fix is to open up competition, and we're only going to get that with massive deregulation, not New Deal style programs.

Hooray!

Deregulation, even assuming it enables the kind of meaningful competition you predict, has absolutely nothing to do with the issues surrounding SMTP and spamming. At best, it would allow customers to switch to another provider if their current one blocked the SMTP port-du-jour--and that's no guarantee that they won't all block it, thus putting us right back at square one. It certainly won't enable or encourage companies to adopt any kind of sensible standard that eliminates the problem.

The only real solution to the SMTP problem is, as I said, widespread adoption of a secure alternative standard. Any other solution, including the moronic band-aid of blocking port 25, is just inconveniencing customers with very little impact on the spammers and hackers, who will find a workaround in short order. It's a solution based on the creating appearance of doing something useful rather than the reality.

You keep repeating this mantra of "deregulation, deregulation" as it it's some kind of universal fix-all for the market. It's not. Some government regulations are good, and some are bad. Some market problems are corrected by the right regulations, and some are made incalculably worse by deregulation; the converse is also true. The only constant you can count on is that successful corporations, absent any checks on their power, will do everything in their ability to stifle competition and increase their bottom line. They're not wrong for doing so; it's what makes them successful. But it does mean that if they are not kept in check, it will almost always be bad for the consumer. Carte blanche deregulation makes that tendency worse, not better; massive deregulation of cable and telco infrastructure will make them more powerful, not less; this will harm competition and diversity of customer choice, not aid it.

If we had a market with more ISPs, we would see some differentiation of service, and find out if people actually are interested in getting port 25 opened or not. People would have options.

Hooray!

First of all, you're not answering the arguments I'm actually making. I wrote:

Deregulation, even assuming it enables the kind of meaningful competition you predict, has absolutely nothing to do with the issues surrounding SMTP and spamming. [...] It certainly won't enable or encourage companies to adopt any kind of sensible standard that eliminates the problem.

Deregulation has nothing to do with this, and neither does this response of yours. Nor does your premise make any kind of sense: of /course/ people are actually interested in having port 25 open. Believing otherwise would require a tremendous amount of ignorance about how third-party email hosting works, and just how many people use it.

Nor, for that matter, did what you wrote even attempt to address the heart of the problem: the "deregulation" that you so desire won't actually result in more options for the consumer. It won't result in more ISPs, more choices. A lack of regulation of the telco and cable markets will empower the companies who own the infrastructure to engage in anticompetitive practices to shut out rivals--which they have a /demonstrated history/ of doing. Correcting that was a significant driver behind the Telecommunications Act of 1996--a bit of government regulation that made the industry more competitive, not less. Consumers don't have a lack of choices because the industry is regulated--they have a lack of choices because the local current laws don't go far enough.

Sorry I'm not going to get into a threadjack over the inefficiencies of SMTP, an old protocol that assumed a controlled, friendly Internet.

Hooray!

Feel free to ignore the rest and enjoy the rest of the thread.

It irks me that so many right-wingers have fallen into this trap of regulation when it suits them...

Hooray!

It's not that I'm for regulation when it suits me, it's that I'm for whatever the appropriate level of regulation is to solve problems. If that's none, that none; if that's a lot, that's a lot. I don't really have an ideological attachment to it either way. Sorry if I gave you that impression.

"Net neutrality" has nothing to do with preventing ISPs from restricting access. There's no way any ISP is going to prevent you from viewing a web site (although AOL is the only one to my knowledge that actually has been known to censor certain sites). In reality, it would be suicide for an ISP to force you to access their own content over another host.

Telcos/ISPs simply want to offer more bandwidth to those who are willing to pay a premium for it. This has nothing to do with blocking anybody. Yet the myth lives on...

www.scottbomb.com
Click here to donate to the Fred Thompson campaign.

And "Net Neutrality" is just an attempt to block the telcos/cable cos from charging appropriately for extra use of the service they provide - it's an artificial price control, and an especially insidious one because it states, effectively, if I may analogize it to price controls on gasoline, that a person should be able to keep their gas tank full for $100 a month no matter how large their gas tank is or how much they drive.

If that's how the cable cos and telcos want to provide service, that's fine, but I'm opposed to the government making them do it that way.

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This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.

-Edmund Burke

Looking at webpages... uses LESS bandwidth than downloading gobs of videos from Google or Apple! Who knew?

Hooray!

You are given a limited amount of bandwidth to work with. How you use that bandwidth is none of their concern. If you have 512kbps, you can use that 512kbps to talk over VoIP, to download videos, to browse the web, or to read email. It makes no difference to the service provider... unless their goal is to steer your usage to their "premium" customers.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

The way most broadband works, you have that much access IF the lines aren't too clogged up. Charging people more for clogging up a communitiy's lines is quite reasonable.

That would be called false advertising.

You sign up for a service. They say they are offering a certain amount of bandwidth to you.

Why is it the customers responsibility to determine how much bandwidth the ISP allocates collectively?

The funny thing here is that an ISP wouldn't dare dream of pulling this garbage with an enterprise customers. They have actually service level agreements that GUARANTEE the bandwidth offered is the bandwidth received.

Yet apparently the consumer doesn't deserve such guarantees. Not only that they should be intentionally throttled if they try to achieve the levels they are offered.

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why ... I dream of things that never were and ask why not. - Robert Kennedy

that enterprise-level customers get treated differently. They also pay for the privledge.

My wireless broadband service promises squat, except that I can cancel the service if I don't like it. I'm given a nominal service speed, but that means exactly what it says - "in name". What I actually get on any given day is a different matter. But I get it without paying a couple of hundred bucks per month.

Really, the presumption that line capacity is effectively infinite, or even built around providing full service to every customer simultaneously, is false. Sure, it's possible, but that's not necessarily something people are willing to pay for. Targeting payments toward regular high-capacity users is not unreasonable.

If a provider says that they can offer you 1 Mb/s in download speed why should they be allowed to charge me more if I actually use 1 Mb/s in download speed?

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why ... I dream of things that never were and ask why not. - Robert Kennedy

It's not like they're going to set up a dedicated DSL circuit for little ol' you.

Truth is, the last few broadband offers I checked over, no speeds were guaranteed at all. Upper bounds were advertised, lower bounds were never discussed. Please, let me know where I can sign up for a guaranteed three megabaud connection on a consumer rate.

At least as I've understood it, most net neutrality proposals would do a nice job of nuking QoS routing, among other things. That may sound like a wonderful idea if you're the schmoe on the block eating up bandwidth with BitTorrent (or whatever), but it looks decidedly less ideal if you've ever had to be the guy who can't get to CNN because there's somebody else saturating the connection. (In the last year or two I spent in college, the on-campus Internet connection was abominable because something like 75% of the available bandwidth was being absorbed by three users on a campus of 1500 people.)

To a telephone company decided to make connections to numbers on rival telephone companies unreliable, unless the rival telephone company paid they a kickback for the "premium" level service. In some cases that "premium" level of service might be priced such that nobody can afford it... except themselves, of course. So if you want to use VoIP, you end up with one choice... the same monopoly you get your broadband service from. They just leveraged their monopoly in broadband to monopolize another, unrelated market. That doesn't have to end with VoIP, either.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

So if you're downloading lots of things from some company on another ISP, racking up costs, who should pay for that? Should everyone else's rates go up to subsidize you?

Hooray!

If they feel they can't afford to support that amount of bandwidth, they need to 1) buy more bandwidth from their service provider or 2) sell less bandwidth to their customers. If they want to promise some crazy bandwidth like 20megabits, knowing they don't have the ability to support anywhere near that, that is their problem. Nobody is forcing them to promise that kind of bandwidth to their end users.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

Hooray!

ISP peering agreements are generally no cost crossconnects. There certainly aren't any total bytes used costs.

If an ISP sells you a service claiming that you can get 1 Mb/s service why does that mean that you should expect LESS than 1 Mb/s service simply because carriers expect you to?

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why ... I dream of things that never were and ask why not. - Robert Kennedy

You're dreaming if you think big ISPs are stupid enough not to charge of thise crossconnects aren't symmetrical.

When big ISP meets little ISP, little ISP pays big ISP for the privilege. And if household ISP's customers are all downloading gobs of data from commercial ISP's MegaVideoService customers, then household ISP is going to have to pay for that.

I don't want to subsidize your iTunes usage, thanks.

Hooray!

Do not sell your service at a certain rate if you are not willing to provide that rate.

And, ftr, we aren't talking about small ISPs here. We are talking about ILECs and Cable companies. These companies comprise about 80% of our internet bandwidth.

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why ... I dream of things that never were and ask why not. - Robert Kennedy

The deregulation of the telco industry has already eliminated this particular network effect as a natural incident of telephone service. Thus, a telephone company certainly could engage in that sort of behavior, but since they have to make their network elements avaiable (bundled or unbundled) to competitors, this would merely constitute financial suicide. This conclusion applies a fortiori when there are not one but two access infrastructures over which broadband access may be provided, and we're not even counting sattelite.

And also, I would refer you to Verizon v. Trinko, in that any telco engaging in such behavior would promptly find themselves on the wrong side of multiple millions of dollars of "fees" paid to the FCC.

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This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.

-Edmund Burke

I'm sorry but you guys are way off on this.

It is NOT about bandwidth usage. You pay X dollars a month for Y Megabits/second. If an ISP wants to change their billing model to a total bytes per month, that's their choice as well.

We are talking about selectively choosing which sites you can and cannot go to based on ISP business arrangements that you are not involved in and probably not privy to.

They have tried this before. And they are almost CERTAINLY doing it now. But of course there is no way to know.

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why ... I dream of things that never were and ask why not. - Robert Kennedy

To continue this discussion ad infinitum today, so I'll just say that I endorse the basic tenets of this article wholeheartedly.

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This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.

-Edmund Burke

But he makes a lot of flawed assumptions.

I for one have no problem with ISPs offering access tiering. They already do this, particularly on the enterprise level.

But his understanding of how the Internet works seems a little off. You can't realistically build 3 last mile networks for 3 types of service. You CAN provide 1 last mile network that can provide 3 types of service. They already do that.

His argument that content providers would not be motivated to come up with new access methodologies if net neutrality were passed is true. But I fail to see why that is a good thing? So we should not pass net neutrality because that would provide the very large content providers from leaving their core businesses because their suppliers are cutting them off but not their competitors? Gee sounds great.

I find it ironic that he does note the case of a rural ILEC blocking content to push people to their own products and notes...

At most, then, concerns about website blocking would support limited regulatory intervention that would only prohibit vertically integrated network owners from blocking content and applications that competed directly with their own offerings. It would not support the type of blanket restrictions on discrimination associated with network neutrality.

So, IOW, if there is already clear evidence of the providers being anti-competitive we should stop that. But we shouldn't worry about potential measures they could easily implement because there is not evidence of them doing it.

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why ... I dream of things that never were and ask why not. - Robert Kennedy

...if competition were a practical reality in the broadband market.

What everyone (and not just the telcos) has suddenly become very frightened of is Google. The CEO of one of GOOG's competitors once told me that about half of all searches are to find products to buy. Given that GOOG has a huge share of the search market, they're in a strong position to influence not only bandwidth requirements but also marketing itself.

The cables/telcos are against "net neutrality" partly because they want to get back a certain amount of pricing power and influence in their markets, by making sure they can get paid extra for carrying the kind of tailored content that GOOG has been quietly shopping around to corporate marketers. They risk getting beaten down nearly to commodity status otherwise.

But the fact remains that for a lot of reasons, the incumbent telco/cable providers face very little competition in the local-access market. Their privileged legal status erects major barriers to entry for competitors. And the telcos themselves are strongly disincented to innovate, because of accounting rules which require them to write off their capex for copper infrastructure over several decades. Much of the copper that's in the ground today won't be amortized for another eight to ten years.

Although I'm fully sympathetic to your argument in principle, I think the practical realities here argue against it. Local access is now de facto a government-provided service, if you take the view (as I do) that the privileges enjoyed by the telcos/cables make them something like government entities, and not fully-private ones. We don't want to give them more power because there are no competitive forces to balance against them. (More specifically, it won't really be possible for the market to provide "net-neutral" alternatives even if the market wants them.)

What blackhedd said.

Relates to this discussion a little bit, regarding network neutrality. In this case, one business - Google - is attempting to make sure that other businesses don't throttle access.

Starts out with:

"This week I was supposed to explain why U.S. broadband prices are so much higher and U.S. broadband speeds are so much lower than in most other developed countries, but then Google made an unexpected reckless move in the wireless bandwidth market and here I am trying to explain it."

Interesting read.

There's no way any ISP is going to prevent you from viewing a web site (although AOL is the only one to my knowledge that actually has been known to censor certain sites).

Why? If Disney pays Cablevision a bunch of money to "prioritize" their websites and Cablevision "prioritizes" them by rate limiting other sites, how would you even know?

ISPs aren't going to force you to access their own content. Content providers and ISPs have already separated.

Telcos/ISPs simply want to offer more bandwidth to those who are willing to pay a premium for it. This has nothing to do with blocking anybody. Yet the myth lives on...

You are simply wrong. NO ONE is suggesting that ISPs shouldn't be allowed to charge more for more bandwidth. The market is quite efficient at determining those costs.

We are talking about ISPs prioritizing certain websites based on deals they made with them while suppressing, but not blocking, other websites because of that deal.

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why ... I dream of things that never were and ask why not. - Robert Kennedy

OK either I'm not getting what you're saying or someone (appearently a lot of folks) is terribly paranoid.

Please tell me when was the last time you went to www.__________.com and could not access the content you wanted? Just WHO is getting blocked?

I've NEVER heard of any ISP blocking a particular website (except for 1 or 2 very unpopular/controversial sites AOL deliberately blocks their customers from). And yet according to some folks, if we don't have "net neutrality" then I won't be able to visit certain websites. Hogwash! How long do you think an ISP would last if they wielded that kind of power?

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And it already happens. It's very commonplace when it comes to external mail servers. It's been done with VoIP as well. The ISPs last just fine. You got no other choice in the matter. If they tell you you can't use your VoIP provider any more and that you have to use their VoIP service, you'll have no choice but to follow their instructions or do without VoIP. If there's a competitor in town, they will probably mirror the restrictions. After all, they got their own VoIP service to hawk as well. It's a no-lose situation for the ISP and a no-win situation for the customer because of their monopoly status.

It would be like the electric company only allowing you to plug appliances purchased from them into their grid. What choice would you have, but to buy all your appliances from the electric company? They have a monopoly. Barring regulation, that monopoly is pretty easy to extend into other areas.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

Future not so friendly: Telus blocks union website

Clean Internet: We block Myspace.com, Here’s why

FCC Fines N.Car. Provider $15K For Blocking Vonage

Verizon's E-Mail Embargo Enrages

And I still haven't found the incident I remember reading about.

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NARF

I am not a Libertarian, but I am a conservative and a product of a household with two hard-working, honest entrepreneur parents.

A key element of problem-solving is to get to the right question before coming up with "answers".

I would begin with: what does the Government (politicians) NEED to do? What can be done locally, where politicians are generally more accountable? How can we limit the period of interference from afar?

I abhor putting systems into place and creating beauracracies with control based in Washington DC, where change is sluggish at best and the money syphon only gets turned off when everyone who supported/benefitted dies off. There are things that need to be done in Washington, but then less is more.

On a positive note, genuine attempts to make *good* legislation based on the wisdom of the people are definitely a step forward. Especially in the current political environment.

Broadband, as it exists now, is provided to the average residential customer in one of two ways: Cable or DSL. The former is considerably superior to the latter in terms of throughput and reliability, and is provided by your local cable company. In most places, you have only one to choose from.

DSL is provided over the same copper wires that your telephone service uses, typically by relegating the data signal to the high frequencies and the voice signal to the low frequencies. Its availability is highly dependent on distance from the nearest TX, and can be entirely blocked by load coils or other filtering mechanisms. If there is any fiber optic bridging in your neighborhood--as there is in many--DSL is flatly impossible, as the signal will not travel over fiber.

The upshot of all this is that it is impossible to get DSL in many areas, and the technology is impractical for the very customers a "rural broadband" effort would be trying to reach. That leaves Cable, which for all intents and purposes /is/ a monopoly in most areas.

There are many problems the market can solve. I do not think this is one of them.

For carriers in monopoly or near monopoly positions some form of common carrier non discriminatory pricing model would be a must. Most of the telco/cable companies exist because of government grants of monopoly.

Precisely. BellSouth has done a lot to keep affordable broadband away here; sure, other companies can provide you with DSL over BellSouth's lines, but what happens if there's a problem with the line? They're held hostage to a service company that gets a direct benefit from providing crappy service, since BellSouth would much rather you get your high-speed access through them. I've heard more than one tale of people whose DSL performance is just abysmal, so they cancel their service and sign up with BellSouth, and magically the line quality suddenly becomes much better. (Some have even signed up for BellSouth DSL then can