A brawl has broken out over basic regulation of high-speed Internet transport services. The parties are firmly in their camps, the filings are enormous, and the arcana of telecommunications policy is on florid display.
So I thought I’d spend a moment or two on DNS – a calm, thoughtful, placid moment.
In the Brand X decision of 2005, the Supreme Court deferred to the FCC’s determination that cable modem access should be treated as a deregulated “information service.” Part of Justice Thomas’s reasoning was that the bundling of DNS with access caused a leveling up – because DNS was involved, the whole package needed to be deregulated.
What the heck did this mean? DNS is the decentralized set of databases that allow for translation between IP addresses and domain names. It allows resources to be found by humans. You and I couldn’t communicate online without DNS. But the Commission at the time – and the Supreme Court – decided that DNS was an “information service,” akin to data-processing, and that ISPs who offered DNS look-up services together with Internet access were providing a finished product that should be deregulated.
In its recent reclassification filing, AT&T says that was absolutely the right way to go. Even if users don’t take advantage of email services, hosting, or anything else provided by the transmission company, the fact that DNS look-up is provided changes the character of the service offered from a point-to-point transmission service to a data-processing-like information service.
Public Knowledge takes a different view. From their perspective, DNS is the equivalent of routing or switching services – and thus expressly excluded from the definition of information services. It’s not data processing, they say. It’s an essential component of the basic service that is used to facilitate the movement of information. PK points out that all of the carriers advertise speeds and prices, and that these are the key elements that consumers think they’re getting when they buy high-speed Internet access.
It may turn out that a central factual dispute between these two filers is the status of DNS look-up. That’s interesting. I always thought that the Supreme Court’s fumbling around about DNS made little sense.
Okay – enjoy.