If the 3 million public comments, the backing of the FCC Chairman, and the support of big tech companies all over the United States wasn’t enough, this week we heard more positive rumblings about Network Neutrality, this time from President Obama.
“My appointee, [FCC Chairman] Tom Wheeler, knows my position. I can’t now, that he’s there, I can’t just call him up and tell him exactly what to do. But what I’ve been clear about, what the White House has been clear about is that we expect whatever final rules to emerge to make sure that we’re not creating two or three or four tiers of Internet.
Of course, whatever the FCC decides, someone will be taking the commission to court. Edward Wyatt of the New York Times sat through 24 hours of discussions this week and concluded, along with other scholars: “Litigation is probably inevitable.”
Muni Networks
This week, our own Chris Mitchell traveled to Washington’s Mount Vernon for an event highlighting how their municipal fiber network has improved the business climate [pdf]. While in the area, he spoke at two forums in Seattle about municipal fiber networks. The Stranger’s Ansel Herz is skeptical of the city’s glacial pace for change in terms of connectivity. He and Taylor Soper with GeekWire were among those covering the community events:
Seattle may never see better, more affordable connection speeds unless some serious changes happen.
That was the message from Chris MItchell, the Director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative, who spoke on Wednesday evening at City Hall to a group of 50 that came to hear how Seattle could offer more Internet options — including a publicly-funded municipal broadband service, similar to what’s already available in Washington cities like Tacoma and Mount Vernon.
Another Tennessee Republican is questioning the Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s ten+ million dollar elephant-in-the-room. William Neilson Jr. targets Blackburn’s recent Op-Ed this week.
She wants the government to stay out of her state while she (part of the terrible government) tries putting into place her own rules which do nothing other than eliminate parts of the state from competitive broadband.
Here is an idea: If you want the government to stay out of your business, stop allowing businesses to bribe politicians which in turn gets state/local governments to put in place rules that only help a select few, rather than the public. You can’t hate government involvement yet want that same government involvement to help your side thanks to a few thousand dollars in donations.
Meantime, the FCC has a lot of reading to do, and that’s just of the 230+ comments filed in the proceedings that would allow Chattanooga’s EPB to expand its Gig Network outside its current service area.
And for this week’s Good Question (take note, WCCO’s Heather Brown!) “How Come My ISP Won’t Increase Internet Speed and Lower My Bill, Like they Do in Sweden?” asks Motley Fool’s Anders Bylund.
This last-mile infrastructure and the connecting fiber loops are accessible to a variety of telecoms, cable service providers, and Internet specialists. All of them have equal access to the consumer-facing and core networks, on “equal and non-discriminatory terms… The American model is powered by private, for-profit organizations. On the next level down, consumers are facing a Balkanized patchwork of cable, fiber, and DSL services with minimal competition and zero infrastructure sharing. Flooding or overriding this system with government support would be politically impossible, so we’re stuck with this framework. That means focusing on profits over service quality, and there is no incentive at all to lower the cost to consumers.
I mean, it’s no “Why do trees change different colors in the fall.” but it certainly strikes us as a question the media should pursue.
Astroturf
This week, the Boy Genius Report found a video from “NetCompetition,” a non-profit that claims to promote competition for Internet services, but is actually a front for the telco and cable companies.
Cleland asks us to simultaneously believe that these municipal networks are total failures and that City Hall is so all-powerful that it will run cable and telephone companies (that are orders of magnitude larger) out of business. BGR offers a smarter take:
If some municipal broadband projects are successes and some of them are failures, doesn’t it make more sense to study them all to see what works and what doesn’t before writing the entire concept off all together? And even if some municipalities do waste a lot of money on broadband projects that go nowhere, isn’t that their right? Aren’t state and local governments the real “laboratories of democracy,” as some like to say?
Cleland has also argued that the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger is pro-competitive.
Another so-called citizen group is trying rather unsuccessfully to rally their troops against net neutrality this week. Jason Koebler of Motherboard and Joan McCarter with the Daily Kos say “American Commitment” a group run by conservative strategist Phil Kerpen, found 808,363 people in the US to support paid prioritization of the Internet. And all he had to do was lie to them!
Email blasts were sent to hundreds of thousands of people with subject lines that had nothing to do with net neutrality, such as “Only Days to Stop Obama’s Takeover.”
In the emails themselves, Kerpen called net neutrality “marxist,” suggested that maintaining net neutrality would “erase your internet freedoms, upend your right to privacy, censor the content you view on Internet, seize control of e-commerce, keep records of the sites you visit and when, track what you read and for how long and so much more!”
And, let’s not forget Americans for Prosperity. Kuper Jones chimed in with a few scare tactics of his own on The Hill this week.
“..municipal networks across the country have had an abysmal track record at best. They’ve left citizens with tremendous amounts of debt and greater tax burdens. Taxpayers in Lafayette, Louisiana as well as eleven cities in Utah can attest to this as they’ve been saddled with $160 million and $500 million in debt, respectively, thanks to broadband boondoggles.”
We would hardly call 1,300 well-paying positions, better connectivity, and competitive pricing a boondoggle, but again, maybe there are multiple definitions of the word out there somewhere we’re not aware of.