Tag: Internet

How Did the FCC Come to Acquire This Power?

By
Jim Harper

Jeff Eisenach and Adam Thierer have a great essay in The American honoring the 50th anniversary of Ronald Coase’s article “The Federal Communications Commission.” It’s timely given the FCC’s proposal to establish public utility-style regulation of the Internet under the banner “net neutrality,” and it’s a good general warning to Neo-Progressives who “see market failure as the source of most problems, and government as the centerpiece of most solutions.”

Topics: 
Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

‘Net Neutrality’ Regs: Corporate Interests Do Battle

By
Jim Harper

Some people have labored under the impression that “net neutrality” regulation was about the government stepping in to ensure that large corporations would not control the Internet. Now that the issue is truly joined, it is clear (as exhibited in this Wall Street Journal story) that the debate is about one set of corporate interests battling another set of corporate interests about the Internet, each seeking to protect or strengthen its business model. The FCC is surfing the debate pursuing a greater role for itself, meaning more budget and power.

Tim Lee’s paper, The Durable Internet, dispels the idea that owners of Internet infrastructure can actually control the Internet. The preferred approach to “net neutrality” is to let Internet users decide what they want from their ISPs and let ISPs and content companies do unmediated battle with one another to create and capture the greatest value from the Internet ecosystem.

If the FCC were to reduce its power by freeing up more wireless spectrum—either selling it as property or dedicating it to commons treatment—competition to provide Internet service would strengthen consumers’ hands.

Topics: 
Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Whitehouse.gov Switches to Drupal

By
Jim Harper

There was some buzz earlier this year when the White House used the free, open-source Drupal content management platform for Recovery.gov. Now the administration’s marquee Web site Whitehouse.gov will be using it.

The AP story linked just above does a good job of recounting the benefits of open source in this application: chiefly, low cost and high security.

Arnold Kling wrote recently on the Library of Economics and Liberty blog relating the work Elinor Ostrom did to win the Nobel prize in economics to how the Internet enables private provision of public goods—no regulation, little to no centralized authority at all.

Open source is nothing if not an example of that, and it’s good to see this use of open source joining many others across the big, beautiful Internet.

Topics: 
Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

From the Oxymoron File: The Neutral Subsidy

By
Jim Harper

Peter Van Doren points me to some revealing passages in a new article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. In “Subsidizing Creativity through Network Design: Zero-Pricing and Net Neutrality,” Robin S. Lee and Tim Wu caution against tiered pricing for Internet access services, writing:

[U]nless sufficient bandwidth and quality of service can be guaranteed for the “free” Internet, there is a risk that … tiering will serve to sidestep de facto prohibition on termination fees… . [A] priced-priority system could simply become a de facto fee charged for all content providers if the “free” Internet was of sufficiently poor quality and consumers shifted their usage behavior accordingly… . [T]his might dampen the introduction of new content and services and eliminate the subsidy for content innovation currently provided by net neutrality.

Locking in net neutrality by regulation would lock in a subsidy to content providers. Lee and Wu prefer it, and many of us may like the results, but it’s hard to call a subsidy regime “neutral.”

Topics: 
General, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Is This Intervention Necessary?

By
Jim Harper

So asks the Washington Post in a cogent editorial about FCC Chairman Jules Genachowski’s speech proposing to regulate the terms on which broadband service is provided. (More from TLJ, Julian Sanchez, and me.) The WaPo piece nicely dismantles the few incidents and arguments that underlie Genachowski’s call for regulation.

As the debate about “ ‘net neutrality” regulation continues, I imagine it will move from principled arguments, such as whether the government should control communications infrastructure, to practical ones: Will limitations on ISPs’ ability to manage their networks cause Internet brown-outs and failures? (This is what Comcast was trying to avoid when it ham-handedly degraded the use of the BitTorrent protocol on its network.) Will regulation bar ISPs from shifting costs to heavy users, cause individual consumers to pay more, and hasten a move from all-you-can-eat to metered Internet service? We’ll have much to discuss.

Topics: 
Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Preemptive Regulation of the Internet

By
Jim Harper

Julian Sanchez has already done a fine job of assessing FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s speech announcing his plan for federal regulation of the Internet. There was nothing really new in it. No substantial problems justifying regulation have emerged, and—Genachowski’s claims to modest aims aside—any ‘net neutrality regulation is likely to be a substantive morass. Says Julian:

[I]t absolutely reeks of the sort of ad hoc ‘I know it when I see it’ standard that leaves telecoms wondering whether some innovative practice will bring down the Wrath of Comms only after resources have been sunk into rolling it out.”

If the FCC goes ahead with regulating the Internet, the public will get a good look at what closed systems are really like. The FCC’s retrograde “Electronic Comment Filing System” doesn’t even allow full-text searches of submissions. This is but one failing the Internet’s engineers all over the country—and not just in big telcos—will run into dealing with the FCC.  It’s laughable that this outdated telecommunications bureaucracy is trying to take over the Internet.

A complex array of network protocols and business processes make up “the Internet.” The Internet’s end-to-end architecture is good engineering because it is naturally open, flexible, and conducive to communications freedom. The Internet empowers consumers to fend for themselves, such as in their dealings with Internet Service Providers. When Comcast degraded the Bitorrent protocol, it took just weeks for consumer pushback to end the practice. The FCC opened an inquiry long after the matter was settled.

But some politicians and the FCC’s lawyers think their slow-moving, technologically unsophisticated bureaucracy knows better than consumers and technologists how to run the Internet. The FCC’s “net neutrality” plans are nothing more than public utility regulation for broadband. With federal regulation, your online experience will be a little more like dealing with the water company or the electric company and a little less like … well, the Internet!

As Julian said, Tim Lee’s is the definitive paper. The Internet is far more durable than regulators and advocates imagine. And regulators are far less capable of neutrally arbitrating what’s in the public interests than they imagine either.

Topics: 
Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

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