Regulatory thuggery
The FCC's E911 order was supposed to be complied with by November 28. The idea was that all “interconnected VoIP” customers would have acknowledged by then the limitations on any E911 service provided by their vendors, and would have received stickers repeating this warning. VoIP customers who didn't have E911 service were to be cut off. (None of this ever happened to wireless or wireline companies that were having trouble with 911 services — no acknowledgements, no limitations on marketing, and certainly no requirement to terminate service.)
The Commission has relented, slightly. They'll forbear from enforcing the acknowledgement requirement, as long as they keep getting detailed reports from the VoIP providers. And:
Although we do not require providers that have not achieved full 911 compliance by November 28, 2005, to discontinue the provision of interconnected VoIP service to any existing customers, we do expect that such providers will discontinue marketing VoIP service, and accepting new customers for their service, in all areas where they are not transmitting 911 calls to the appropriate PSAP in full compliance with the Commission’s rules.
That's remarkable. Stop selling these wildly successful services, you industry, until you've plugged into our legacy emergency system. Okay, so you don't have authority to plug into the system. Go work with a third party! Okay, so no third parties have nationwide nomadic 911 capabilities (and when one emerges, it will have a captive market) – just do your best, and we'll be watching. In fact, we think you should do just what Verizon and AT&T did when they did their mergers. They had some great plans for compliance, and it's only coincidental that those plans were filed just before we allowed the mergers to go through.
We think (this is still the voice of the FCC, although parody is difficult in the blog format) that Verizon had an “innovative compliance plan” for nomadic 911. Here are the details:
By November 28, Verizon expects to have a capability to detect when a customer’s VoiceWing telephone adapter is disconnected from the network. If we detect that the customer’s adapter has been disconnected, we will suspend the customer’s service, with the exception of 911 calls and calls to customer service. At the same time, we will send the customer an e-mail and post a message to the customer’s Personal Account Manager asking the customer to confirm his or her existing Registered Location, or register a new location.
While in suspend status, if the customer attempts to make any calls, other than 911 calls or calls to customer service, before he or she confirms or registers a new location, Verizon will intercept the call and play an announcement that will inform the customer of the service suspension and transfer the customer to a customer service representative for assistance. If the customer confirms to the service representative that the customer’s Registered Location has not changed, full service will be restored by Verizon. If the customer indicates that he or she has moved from the existing Registered Location, service will remain suspended unless and until the customer registers a new address in an area where Verizon can provide 911 service. If the customer fails to choose either option (for example by hanging up), service will remain suspended . . . As a result, the customer will be required to register a new address when the service is used nomadically.
Ta-daah! Very innovative. And the FCC is strongly encouraging VoIP providers to mimic the AT&T/Verizon promises — here's the threat: “The Bureau applauds the steps undertaken by AT&T, MCI and Verizon and strongly encourages other providers to adopt similar measures. The Bureau will carefully review a provider’s implementation of steps such as these in deciding whether and how to take enforcement action.”
Someone publicly suggested at the Pulver conference the other day that the E911 rules had been written by third-party providers of E911 compliance technology. Digging, digging. At any rate, this shows what regulatory mischief can be done at key moments in a company's history – such as when a merger needs to close.
Liquid mesh
Translating common carriage to the 21st century internet is difficult, because companies and regulators are getting used to cutting across the protocol stack. So much more of this will happen, of course, in the absence of any rules saying discrimination is unlawful, and it will take years to write any such rules.
“Transport” wants to do more discrimination so as to make money for itself, and so is demanding the right to be free to run its “own” network. Many people think we should create and enforce the norm of neutrality, thus ensuring that no applications or content or devices are ever discriminated against.
But applications want to discriminate too. Should email providers be forced to provide address portability? Should search engines be forced to reveal the algorithms that they use, so that they can be checked for fairness? No, you say, shocked. But shouldn't they be treated as common carriers if the transport layer is? Where does the principle of nondiscrimination stop? Can't you imagine law enforcement requiring end-to-end encryption so that no discrimination could possibly occur (no packet inspection possible) but then saying that as a trade it will need the keys to all of this within two hours after any encryption scheme is released?
And what if the transport layer sees itself as a speaker — doesn't it have First Amendment claims (however specious) about wanting to support its own video and gaming services that could tie us up in court for years?
What happened to all of the deep concerns about technical mandates that came out in the broadcast flag context? Do they just disappear at the lower layers? Are the lower layers incapable of innovation? Should they be fixed in one form? Wouldn't it be better just to force access providers to be truthful about what they did, so that consumers could figure out what was going on and decide for themselves?
I am as committed to the ideal of the open internet as the next guy, and my dream is to have OneWebDay support that goal. But the mischief that can be done to our future (in so many unexpected ways) by insisting on statutory and regulatory definition of neutrality seems to outweigh the possible benefits of this path. There is so much nonsense, so much horse-trading, between where we stand now and the glorious goal of neutrality. The sad fact is that Americans don't mind vertical integration one bit, and the duopolists know that. Not only that, but price discrimination in a competitive market is actually a good thing. Now all we need is a competitive market.
I'd rather see a future that doesn't depend on a “third pipe” but that includes broadband internet access that is neither cable nor DSL. I can imagine a network owned by its users, or by a cooperative, or subsidized by a large company that has no interest in controlling use of the network. Our devices will be doing most of the computation, so there will be no way to tell the difference between devices and routing. We'll have network-aware applications, too.
This admittedly techno-determinist view fits with how the internet was supposed to work. Routing is not supposed to be centrally determined, and the idea of mesh networks pushes this even more to the edge — individual devices will make decisions about routing. As long as we don't make this kind of broadband provision illegal (even by accident, by some casual legislative drafting), it will likely emerge in time.
As David Reed might say, we're in a phase transition of sorts, and there are many people who want to force us into hierarchical and rigid solids. Stay liquid, and the outcome will be extremely positive — as humans, we're good at being liquid.