Moving Slowly in the Fast Lane
The Federal Communications Commission, our national communications regulatory body, is asking the wrong questions and heading in the wrong direction. We need new leadership in this country that has the political muscle to implement radical change. A key national priority, on a par with funding Head Start programs and adequate national healthcare, must be to ensure that access to an unfettered internet is universal, speedy, and cheap.
Thirty years ago, two-way communications in this country were controlled by Ma Bell. After eight years of litigation, AT&T agreed to divest itself of its local telephone companies, and those local telephone companies (the “Baby Bells”) agreed not to leverage their local monopolies into the market for long distance service.
Where are we today? The Baby Bells have re-consolidated. Telephone service in this country is essentially controlled by AT&T (in the West) and Verizon (in the East), with Qwest filling in gaps. And two-way communications in this country – which, these days, means highspeed internet access – are controlled by a duopoly of Big Phone and Big Cable. Many Americans don’t have a choice of highspeed providers, and, as Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, Free Press, Media Access Project, and U.S. Public Interest Group recently told the FCC, “Americans pay 10 to 20 times as much [as people do in other countries] for far less service.” The duopoly is something like Shamu and Godzilla on hire for televised wrestling – giant beasts gently swatting at one another for the cameras. They aren’t competing, these giants. There is a clear failure in the market for highspeed internet access in this country.
Even people who don’t often think about interactive communications have heard that the U.S. is lagging far behind many other developed nations when it comes to highspeed internet access. As with other key infrastructure issues – like Head Start and healthcare – we just don’t seem to care about giving our people a firm foundation for life.
Network operators, the Shamus and Godzillas of interactive communication in this country, want to control and monetize highspeed access to the internet. They believe that they can and should control this complex system by, among other things, deliberately degrading upload speeds (so that we users can’t produce and host our own materials) and keeping highspeed access for their own content.
Many other countries have taken a hard look at their communications policy and have understood that communications and economic growth are tightly intertwined. Economic growth is driven by new ideas creating ever-newer goods and services and new ways of making a living. We have never had an interactive communications platform like the internet before – it’s capable of producing enormously diverse ideas (in the form of new niches, new roles, and new understandings of information) and allowing them to be disseminated on a large scale. Universal highspeed access to the internet could trigger crucial economic growth that would benefit U.S. society as a whole.
And this access has to be fast. We are beginning to see the video future of the internet, and that future requires that information flow far more quickly over the now-monopoly-controlled local bottlenecks in this country than it does now.
We should care about the economic health of our country. Access to the internet at high speeds should be something that we make available to everyone in the U.S. as a public infrastructure. We don’t even know what we’ll be capable of using this access for – yet – because our expectations have been so dimmed by the craven practices of our local Shamus and Godzillas.
In an ongoing regulatory factfinding mission (undertaken because the Commission didn’t have the political will or sensitivity to actually act), the FCC is asking whether anyone using a U.S. network operator has been blocked from accessing particular sites. That’s the wrong question, as Consumers Union and its colleague advocates have told the Commission. The FCC should instead be asking why we haven’t mandated competition for highspeed access by requiring that all providers sell unfettered transport services at wholesale rates into a competitive market for retail transport. Even better, Congress should take the reins and demand that the duopolies divest themselves of their transport services so that they aren’t tempted to try to monetize internet access in favor of their own movies and phone services.
But for the FCC and Congress to change direction and start asking the right questions will take leadership. We don’t have that kind of leadership now. All acts are incremental; all steps are taken with the advice and approval of the incumbents. We don’t have a national economic policy that is tied to internet access because no one is willing to step up and lead. Sen. Kerry made a good speech at a recent hearing about auctioning off key airwaves, but even if that auction is run as he suggests it won’t solve the larger infrastructural problem.
We need much more from our national leaders. Who will be the candidate who will understand this central issue? Mike Bloomberg has run networks, even if they are proprietary, and might be the guy. We’re waiting, but in the meantime we’re moving excruciatingly slowly in the supposed American fast lane.
==Do read the CFA/CU/MAP/FreePress/USPIRG comments - they're excellent.
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4 Responses to “Moving Slowly in the Fast Lane”
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Let's put a face on what we mean by competition:
Netequality.org is the nonprofit arm of Meraki.net. They offer wireless routers that are but little boxes with a plug. When you plug the little box into a wall socket, your home is lit up as a wireless cloud, automagically. If your neighbor has one, and her neighbor, and his neighbor, the four houses can now share one DSL account. Whichever neighbor has the DSL account, simply connects the little box to their DSL modem. A community, then, can expect to connect to each home, and one-fourth of those homes would be hooked to a DSL account. This is called a community wireless mesh network.
A community wireless mesh network is just a big peer-to-peer network. When one neighbor wants to share files with others, the speed is as fast almost as having both computers in the same home. Across the community, files can be transferred as if the two homes furthest apart were next to each other. Such speeds are found in universities, and in universities, the students carry on videoconferencing, lectures, concerts, town hall meetings, live events, and best of all, everyone talks to everyone else, sees everyone else, has fun. Imagine what happens if a community can suddenly enjoy virtual house calls with their doctors, emergency services can use the wireless infrastructure, all services that utilize work orders can hook in, and streamline the company's/agency's business. Of course, this also leads straight to being able to use one's cell phone for making purchases in stores, folks can see the clerk at the grocery store as she packages the weekly grocery list for pickup.
Did I mention each house simply has to purchase a little box at the going price of $50? One time buy. After that, if there's a problem, simply remove the little box and replace it with another, and it lights up, with no technical expertise needed.
Now, it's hard to understand why our president wouldn't want everyone to buy one of the little boxes, create a national wireless mesh network, and be done with it. Oh, wait a minute . . . that would wipe out the telco, cable, satellite, cellular industries' competition to see who's going to control our trillion dollar wireless infrastructure. Forget I mentioned it.
It's not right that Americans pay 10 to 20 times more than in other country (that will make access there $ 2 - $ 4), but it's true that for the $ 50 / month they, the Americans, get a lousy service. In Bulgaria for the same amount of money one gets a really high-speed Internet, not cable modem (via Time Warner Cable's RoadRunner or Earthlink) or ADSL (via Verizon). And there's a choice between hundreds of providers.
I think I've blogged about it:
Here: http://blog.veni.com/?p=155
and here: http://blog.veni.com/?p=172
best,
Also, I got this from Bruce Lai of the City Council:
On May 22, at Brooklyn Borough Hall, the New York City Broadband Advisory Committee listened to testimony from dozens of Brooklyn residents, public school students, leaders of nonprofit organizations and small business owners. Many thanks from Gale and I to everyone who was involved with the event!
If you would like to watch the entire video of this hearing, go to the following link. (Thanks to Greg Sutton and Carlos Pareja of BCAT!) Every piece of testimony is a separate video clip on YouTube. Many of the witnesses, from all walks of life, spoke eloquently for the need for affordable broadband in NYC. Enjoy!
http://nycbroadband.blogspot.com/2007/06/video-of-brooklyn-hearing.html
Joly McFie also shot the entire hearing (and even created a nice Wikipedia entry for the NYC Broadband Advisory Committee). (Thank you!)
Here's a link to the entire audio of the hearing. (Thanks to Josh Breitbart!)
Complete testimony from several of the witnesses at the Brooklyn hearing can be found on the front page of the blog.
Finally, here's a briefing paper on the subject of broadband: (Thank you Colleen Pagter!)
[Here's a comment from Carolyn Sortor:]
Thanks for your excellent post.
This may be a bit of an aside, but potentially important in understanding the precise direction in which we should be trying to push.
I wish I'd been following what happened to phone service 30 years ago — I wasn't, so I can't be certain of all the details (a link to a solid historical account from a non-neocon source would be appreciated).
But what I CAN tell you from my own experience at the time is that telephone service used to be much more of a monopoly but was much more highly regulated and was MUCH cheaper, easier, and faster and more reliable.
Certain functions are “natural monopolies,” in the sense that it does NOT make sense economically or otherwise to allow competing standards or to expect more than one company to duplicate the infrastructure etc. required. In these cases, the best system may be for the service to be owned and operated by the government, or to allow a monopoly but to regulate it effectively, for the benefit of the public at large (compare and contrast with supposedly competing corporations which are really run primarily for the benefit of their senior management, secondarily for the benefit of their directors, relatively remotely for the benefit of their shareholders and not at all for the benefit of the public at large).
I'm not kidding, the phone system used to be terrific. It was super-cheap and the fee structure was simple and fair. There was one phone book that contained all the numbers you could ever want, there was one directory assistance that always connected you to the right number, connections were always virtually instantaneous, and I NEVER experienced a dropped call. The phone service was wonderful UNTIL it was split up and de-regulated.
Within the last two years, I arrived at my dad's house, he didn't answer the door even though he should have been expecting me, I called him but the line was busy, I tried to get the phone co. to check the line, it took me at least 20 min. just to get a human on the phone, and that person couldn't actually check anything, the answer was basically f— you you're on your own. My dad was dying inside.
It didn't used to be this way. Before de-reg, I could have gotten a human within 15 seconds, and that person could have told me almost instantly whether the phone was off the hook or there was a malfunction in the line.
I wanted to clarify this because I think we've been sold on the idea that competition is always the answer, but if you look at the historical record and think through the various factors, it clearly isn't.
E.g., the internet in its present state is quite wonderful, and I'm betting there's virtually no competition among those who presently control it.