My esteemed colleague and good friend Tom Howarth has posted about the recent FCC decision here in the US. Tom articulated an opening statement that is worth repeating:
“On February 26 in a groundbreaking announcement, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) agreed in a 3 – 2 vote to recognize the rights of two southern US cities (Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Wilson, North Carolina) to build their own publicly owned high-speed Internet networks in areas where incumbents had refused to invest in modern infrastructure to support high-speed broadband connectivity.”
Tom continued in his article to say that 75% of US citizens have little or no access to at least the speeds “that we in the UK would consider slow.” I would respectfully disagree with those figures, considering that 81% of the US population resides in cities or suburbs, where high-speed Internet access is readily available.
I will be the first to concede the specific point of his post, that communities are now able to build their own networks and infrastructure to the Internet. This could have been done without the government takeover of the Internet. The FCC announced these super-secret regulations to allow the government takeover of the Internet, because the FCC had tried and failed to do this in both 2010 and 2011. In both cases, the courts vacated the Commission’s net neutrality rules. After all, the government already took over health care and a sixth of the economy while at the same time engaging in the biggest fail in IT history with the rollout of healthcare.gov. It should be required reading for the engineers of tomorrow on how not to do a rollout. Now, this same government has just taken over the Internet. Hey, no worries: they are the government and they are here to help. What could possibly go wrong?
These 300+ pages of new super-secret regulations have yet to be published. Once again, we have to pass it to see what’s in it, and none of us have had the opportunity to read these new rules. With no concrete facts to work from, I will give speculation a shot. First, I am not sure the FCC decision is going to make it through the courts. It has had had two prior net neutrality attempts vacated to date. No matter what you decide to call it, a rose is still a rose.
I believe the cost of Internet access will go up just like our phone bills. Like phone bills, the Internet bills will be filled with tax after tax. I think the government looks at this as a money-making machine, and that it wants control over all of it. As far as bringing on more competition, let me ask my fellow US citizens: how much choice do you have when it comes to other “utilities,” like power or water? On top of that, is net neutrality going to get rid of the current paid tier approach to speed, or will all of us who pay extra for faster speeds be required to accept a much slower connection so that everyone has equal speed? Does this latest government takeover give the NSA, CIA, and every other alphabet agency an increasingly direct route into our homes and lives?
With the utmost respect to Tom, I must respectfully disagree that this FCC announcement is a good thing for the US. Quite frankly, I believe that it’s going to be the end of the Internet as we know it, and that we’ll end up turning the “Third-World Internet nation of the US” into a bigger “Third-World Internet nation.” I want to repeat that I do concede that Tom may have found the only good, or one of a few goods, to come from this announcement. Overall, in my opinion, this is government overreach in a quest for total control of the population, and it will be more bad than good. Time will tell, if the courts don’t vacate it first.
In order to understand the FCC’s recent actions we need to look at what spurred it to take action.
If you remember the spark that lit this fire occurred back in 2007 when Comcast acted to throttle BitTorrent traffic on its network. While BitTorrent may be the preferred means of distributing pirated movies, it is a perfectly legitimate file sharing mechanism that is used by many businesses today. Comcast actions were directly harmful to those businesses and as such it needed to be slapped. It’s also worth pointing out precisely how Comcast was going about this practice. Specifically it was spoofing TCP RST packets making it appear that the recipient’s computer was unable to process the incoming data, aside from being dishonest and just plain lazy in its implementation, this had negative impact on other carriers and their customers as well.
Inevitably Comcast appealed the FCC’s legal wrist slapping, and inevitably Comcast won; not because what they were doing was in any way legitimate, but purely because at that time there was no law in place that prevented Comcast from acting this way. In the absence of any law, only 2 choices are available; allow actions that are obviously wrong to continue unabated or write law. The FCC as a direct consequence of its existence is pretty much obliged to follow that second path. A process which lead to the development of the current net neutrality regulations or as you would have it “government takeover of the Internet”.
What was seeing today is the downstream consequence of one Internet provider attempting to subvert the Internet as a whole. And the question becomes one of whether or not protection from monopolistic Internet providers is worth a little light regulation to enforce a level playing field. I’d say that it is.
You asked a few questions in your post, let me answer them for you.
How much choice you have when it comes to other “utilities” like power or water?
While the US is woefully behind the times in its enablement of monopolistic practices you might be pleased to know that choices in power generation are becoming increasingly available and you don’t have to go off-grid to choose your own power utility. Organizations such as Sonoma Clean Power offer residential subscribers the choice of who generates their energy. A customer can choose to buy low carbon power at a discount from preferred generators, or if they prefer to pay a premium they can buy power from 100% renewable sources, or should they wish to support their local monopoly they can continue to buy from PG&E.
Is net neutrality going to get rid of the current paid tier approach to speed or will all of us that pay extra for faster speeds now be required to accept a much slower connection so that everyone has equal speed?
No.
With this latest government takeover, does this give the NSA, CIA and every other alphabet agency an ever more direct route into our homes and lives?
No.
Simon,
I guess time will tell. You appear to have great faith that this will be a good thing in the long run I just believe that will not be the case. We are going to have to revisit once all the rules and regulations are published and see where things end up. I total believe this is a total power grab by the government to control the internet in the same way they control the news and media to make sure the minions only get the approved message from the government and once they start to have enforcement look at where all content will be monitored and scrutinized. Again we can all speculate till we are blue in the face but until the facts come out no one will know. I hope you are right but I will not be holding my breath
I also do not think networking in the United States is all that good. I live in a high tech city and the suburbs and part of the city cannot get speeds greater than dial-up or DSL without paying through quite a bit for the service. It may have quite a bit to do with the buried cables that are hard to manage. But in either case, gigabit speeds in many cities and towns are a far distant future. The network is not ubiquitous in the US, nor it is split evenly within a city. Fibre is not run everywhere yet and will not reach every home even in a city for quite a number of years. It is either slow cable, DSL, or even dial-up lines still.