The arguments on the other side — in favor of a prioritized internet
If you're going to argue for an open internet, you'd better be able to respond to the following:
1. It's strange to have as a default background assumption FCC regulation.
2. Your empirical assertions about collective activities online being of greater value than property rights of network builders etc. are untested and may be incorrect.
3. People always free-ride. There may be so much freeriding online (eg across P2P networks) that such collaboration isn't actually efficient.
4. Your view of the internet is profoundly static. What about the inventions that haven't arisen yet? What will provide the incentive structure for them to emerge? Where's the money going to come from? Network builders need to monetize their networks in order to continue to innovate.
5. We should rely on markets and wait for market failure before having government intervene.
6. Moving from two broadband providers to three won't provide substantial consumer benefits.
7. Generally speaking, if there's value to users in collaboration, then a market-driven provider should be able to meet users' needs. Notion that you need regulation in order to provide valuable services is a non sequitur.
Powell on Choice
On the walls next to the stage in the Glenn Miller Ballroom at the University of Colorado are two enormous black and white pictures. The one on the left is of Glenn Miller himself, horn-rimmed glasses, looking over his shoulder, trombone in his left hand, ready to play at any moment. The one on the right is the first page from the manuscript of a Glenn Miller tune — I think it must be Moonlight Serenade, the signature with which the Miller band famously signed on and signed off their radio broadcasts for many many years. When you knew the Glenn Miller Band was coming, you knew this tune was coming.
Today Michael Powell spoke from the stage in this room, and he seemed very anxious about the amount of choice in the world. (He said many interesting things, but I'm seizing on this theme for the moment.)
He said (paraphrasing here): “My argument is that the problem with media is not concentration, it's hypercompetition. We're fragmenting media, so we're getting 'me tv.' Do we really want this much diversity? This is a social problem. We are losing community. In the Walter Cronkite area, because the media market was so concentrated we had a communal media experience — we had no choice but to talk about the previous night's broadcast. Our minds were opened because we had to listen to stories we might not have chosen to hear.”
He went on: “Fox news is always on for my father in law. Now every one of us can reinforce our preconceived biases. I can tailor my internet news, go to places that only traffic in my biases. Ironically, this is splintering our country. We are making our own world, and we don't have a shared experience. Media regulation is premised on the idea of scarcity, but what do you do in an era of abundance? Does anyone really think there's scarcity any more?”
He broadened the theme, talking about how overwhelming the choices available are. “I have no idea what's in my iPod. You don't want 25K songs. You want the songs and pictures you care about. Maybe there is too much diversity, too little community, media is too influenced by the political environment.”
He finished by saying, “Until we get our metrics coherent, until we decide what we care about as a country, these media issues are explosive and unsolvable in a public policy sense.”
Now, you could read this in two different ways. Maybe his assumption is that regulation should help people deal with this diversity and insist on making different sources of information available. Maybe he's signaling that vertical integration of media platforms (eg, broadband) is absolutely fine because it may help people bump into different sources and deal with overload. Or maybe he'd like to see greater federal support for public television as an alternative source of news. Can't tell.
But former Chairman Powell is perplexed by the amount of choice in the world. He's worried (a later answer made this clear) that children are afraid of failure rather than hoping to succeed. He's worried that we can tailor our experience too much. He is worried about our collective future, and he's not necessarily saying that regulation of any kind is the answer.
He certainly misses Walter Cronkite, whose voice provided a Glenn Miller signature-tune like constancy to his childhood.
Big day at Silicon Flatirons
Today was a long day of panels, with no wireless. And so I paid full attention.
(I was lucky to be able to start my own presentation with a situational joke. Last night, when I tried to send my slides to the conference organizer using the hotel wireless connection, the message went through but prompted an immediate message: “Network intrusion detected. The service has noticed unusual traffic coming from this computer. Your connection to the internet will be slowed to 56K for the next ten minutes.” I am not making this up. It was 1998 here in the Boulderado Hotel for the next little while.)
I was most struck by what Dale Hatfield had to say today. He said he didn't see how we gave up on common carriage so easily. It's a concept that goes back to the 1600s, and we dropped it in a matter of months. He said that he didn't think that content and carriage should be mixed together, and that structural separation might not be such a bad idea.
There was also a great moment when Judge Stephen Williams of the DC Circuit said that his perspective as a judge wasn't so useful. (Of course, many cases reviewing what the FCC does go through Judge Williams's hands.)
Former Chairman Powell said that calling Google and Yahoo! new entrants and worrying about protecting them may not make sense. He seeemed to be hinting that there were antitrust concerns looming for these companies.
Powell also talked about the institutional reality of the FCC. Paraphrasing: “The FCC is asked to make affirmative economic policy. So it's like a little independent legislature. A little Congress. This means that it has the dynamics of a legislature. So, like Congress, the political pressures are great. And the Senate confirmation process is aimed at getting politically reliable appointments to the Commission in place, who will advance particular points. The Act bakes in this politicization by dividing the seats by party.”
He went on: “Also, the nature of material the FCC regulates is more intimate for regular people than what the FTC does or the SEC does. So this invites enormous public reaction. They're on the front page all the time.”
Comparing the FCC to the FTC, Powell noted that the FCC is “unique in its really narrow focus. The FCC is 24/7 communications policy, all the time. So naturally there's a professional lobby, and a series of incestuous relationships. The first question about all of this should be: what should the FCC as an institution be in the future? Its current construction isn't capable of certain things. If we fail to ask that question, we're missing a really interesting and big piece of the story.” (Again — all of this is paraphrasing.)
I was surprised at the references to the FTC. It's true that it had seemed to me that the FTC was a good deal more professional and neutral than the FCC in the results it emerged with, but I didn't know that was a widely-held belief. It must be demoralizing for the staff to work hard and then have political results-ended work dictate what emerges. There seemed to be real questions as to whether the Commission would be able to do the backward-looking regulation that the PFF is calling for. They're not great at enforcement.
As with all the telecom conferences (still not many) I've attended, I was once again taken aback by the cavalier attitude the telecom guys and the cable guys have towards the internet. For them, it's a network like any other, and all the old rules should apply.
Except when, as with common carriage, it's inconvenient to apply the old rules.
Chairman Powell spoke again after dinner tonight, urging the students to consider public service and reminding them that it wouldn't be easy.