Newsweek just published an article confirming my worst fears:
“BLOCKED OUT. Doug Herring, 48, got a glimpse of that specter last November. Traveling on business in Tennessee, the General Electric (GE) sales manager phoned his wife at their Elberta (Ala.) home. Herring had just signed up with Web-phone provider Vonage Holdings and was pleased with the service. But this time, he couldn’t get through. He switched Web-phone providers, but still couldn’t make calls.
Frustrated, Herring contacted Madison River Communications, the rural phone company that provides his digital subscriber line (DSL) connection. The company said it was blocking calls from Internet phone companies. Outraged, Herring and Vonage complained to federal regulators.
“For me to get the Internet where I live, [Madison River] is the only provider,” Herring fumes. In March the Federal Communications Commission fined the company $15,000, and the carrier agreed it would no longer block Internet-calling services.�?
The good news is the FCC fined a small carrier; The bad news is that the carrier didn’t break any laws and further, the large carriers are heading in the same direction, as Mr. Whitacre notes in this quote:
“Yet in a Nov. 7 interview with BusinessWeek Online, AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre Jr. declared: “What [Google, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain’t going to let them do that.” Whitacre and AT&T argue that they need flexibility to exact a toll from Web services that hog bandwidth.�?
Read the entire article here: At Stake: The Net as We Know It
Mr Whitacre forgets that users pay for the use of his “pipes�? and he’s already making misleading promises about how much bandwidth is being delivered. This is a public utility once again failing to abide by their franchise and the governing regulatory body aiding and abetting their usurious behavior. Why should the access over the pipe be paid for twice? Is it because Google is smarter about making money than they are? Or perhaps that Vonage is yet another nail in the cash cow (the phone system has been fully depreciated for many decades).
What about the other half of this robbery?
The FCC ruled last summer that broadband providers we not obligated to provide equal access to competitive services. They went further and made sure the coverage was so broad that a network provider could not only prevent an other network provider from demanding access to the network transport layer but also to any “competitive services�?.
The excerpt below, from the executive summary, it is clear that the FCC intends to allow network “pipe�? providers abuse their privileged monoloply:
From the FCC ruling Appropriate Framework for BroadbandAccess to the Internet over Wireline Facilities (ruling 05-150)
“In accordance with our responsibilities under the Act, and in light of the competitive and technical characteristics of the broadband Internet access market today, we take the following actions to establish a comprehensive regulatory framework for facilities-based providers of wireline broadband Internet access service:
• Consistent with the Supreme Court’s opinion in NCTA v. Brand X, we determine that facilities-based wireline broadband Internet access service is an information service….�?
The FCC is either unbelievably uninformed about the industry they regulate or has decided that they can wantonly disregard the public trust they have sworn to uphold.
“Finally, the actions we take in this Order allow facilities-based wireline broadband Internet access service providers to respond to changing marketplace demands effectively and efficiently, spurring them to invest in and deploy innovative broadband capabilities that can benefit all Americans, consistent with the Communications Act of 1934, as amended (the Communications Act or Act).�?
Innovation by an RBOC is a oxymoron. The only thing that held them back is the thought that if they drag their feet they can gain an unfair regulatory advantage rather than spend money. The equipment pays for itself inside of 6 months or they don’t deploy it. In this case increasing bandwidth costs them and the cable providers (MSO) money, doesn’t provide additional revenue.
Let think about this for a moment, why innovate when you can’t really expand your footprint or extract much more money from a household? Oh but you say what about advanced services like “IP video�?, look at the cable industries profitability and then ask the question again.
Increasing raw bandwidth just opens them up to agile competitors using their own pipes against them unless they can block them, which is what this ruling did. It grants the right for the network provider (wireline or cable) to block, censor, or degrade any “service�? they deem competitive. They been doing the latter regularly anyway now it’s clearly legal.
I’m surprised that there wasn’t more outrage at the time the ruling was made but I guess no one really thought they meant it, even given the long history of wireline and MSO operators gaming public regulation for obscene gain.
Now is one of the rare times when you should be emailing/calling/writing your congressional representatives, the white house, department of commerce, and the FCC. You can and will have censorship on the on the Internet without recourse.
This is malicious corporate censorship aided by malicious or incompetent federal bureaucrats. Time to have them called to to answer.
Network providers have been given the tools to kill innovation in the Internet and set the United States further behind in web technology. This will end up killing small innovate companies long before it hurts Googlezon.
Network providers need to provide open access to whatever their customers want to consume. If they provider wants to charge per bit, fine just make sure the pricing policy is stated clearly. Customers should have a clear indication of what the real capacity restrictions are in the network (i.e. What is the over subscription factor ). throttling back customers to their fair share is an acceptable practice, unfairly throttling particular applications is not (this is a routine practice in many networks).
The physical plants, with the possible exception of fiber to the home have been subsidized, via a publicly granted monopoly, including most cable TV plants. In almost all cases the gain from this franchise was realized long ago, they should be now employed to reduce the consumers cost of service. Perhaps we should have credits allocated to the consumer if, as the carriers assert they, can not technically be opened to competitors?
Services across the network need to remain “technology and competitively neutral�?, network providers have an unfair advantage in that they alone can see what goes across the network.
It is time to make it illegal for network providers to manage bandwidth only any basis other than capacity per customer.
Please write your congressional representatives asking them to review FCC rule 05-150.
Google has just released a set of components called 
