FCC & Net Neutrality: Part 1

The Net Neutrality issue has been hot the last few months, and it probably won’t be cooling with the Fall weather.? There is already one bill sitting in committee, and another from Byron Dorgan and Olympia Snowe on the way.? In addition to this, the big news toward the end of September was the FCC’s policy statement on Net Neutrality.? This was accompanied by the launching of the FCC’s new site OpenInternet.gov to go along with it’s sister site, Broadband.gov.

After reading over FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s speech and considering my comments, I felt that a lot of the nuances of what he talked about may get lost in a simple response.? So I decided that I would just break the whole thing down.? I’ll be splitting his speech up over several parts and providing responses to what he had to say.

If you’d care to listen to the speech in full first, then here you go:

You can also find the text of the speech unmolested by my comments here.

So here comes our break down, paragraph by paragraph.? My comments in bold.

Prepared Remarks of
Chairman Julius Genachowski
The Brookings Institution, Washington DC
September 21, 2009

I?d like to thank Brookings for hosting me and this discussion about the future of broadband and the Internet.

We?ve just finished a summer of big-ticket commemorations, celebrating the 40th anniversaries of the Apollo landing and of Woodstock; 1969 was also a good year to be a kid in New York, with Joe Namath calling the Super Bowl, and the Knicks? season that ended with the legendary Willis Reed in Game 7. I grew up a long fly ball from Shea Stadium and soaked up every minute of the Miracle Mets? season. Maybe that?s why I tend to believe in miracles.

But perhaps the most momentous birthday from that famous summer of 1969 went by just a couple of weeks ago with little mention. Just over forty years ago, a handful of engineers in a UCLA lab connected two computers with a 15-foot gray cable and transferred little pieces of data back and forth. It was the first successful test of the ARPANET, the U.S.-government-funded project that became the Internet — the most transformational communications breakthrough since the printing press.

Today, we can?t imagine what our lives would be like without the Internet — any more than we can imagine life without running water or the light bulb. Millions of us depend upon it every day: at home, at work, in school — and everywhere in between. The Internet has unleashed the creative genius of countless entrepreneurs and has enabled the creation of jobs — and the launch of small businesses and the expansion of large ones — all across America.

Yes, the Internet has unleashed creativity and created jobs, and has done so without the help of the government or having any of its facets regulated.

That?s why Congress and the President have charged the FCC with developing a National Broadband Plan to ensure that every American has access to open and robust broadband.

There are several assumptions here.? First off, Congress has not charged the FCC with a National Broadband Plan, nor have they charged the FCC with regulating the Internet or determining that the Internet must exist under regulated, binding by law Net Neutrality rules.? The only thing Congress has done in regards to this issue was pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which had two things in relation to these issues. 1) There existed monies in the stimulus package for the expansion of broadband into unserved and underserved areas.? The funding is limited, and less than half of what Verizon alone has spent on developing their entire fiber network.? It is the FCC who labeled and determined this to be a “National Broadband Plan.”? Congress simply provided money for the development of limited networks.? That is significantly different than being “charged” with accomplishing some mission that Genachowski apparently considers is his destiny as Chairman.? 2) Congress did not charge the FCC to ensure an open Internet.? Within the stimulus the language insinuates that grantees of stimulus funds must build networks under the guidelines of FCC policy statements.? It is therefore the FCC that determines what those policy statement conditions are, not Congress.

Additionally, this statement carries with it the assumption that access to the Internet is both desired by everyone and a right.

The fact is that we face great challenges as a nation right now, including health care, education, energy, and public safety. While the Internet alone will not provide a complete solution to any of them, it can and must play a critical role in solving each one.

These statements are a bit of a reach.? I understand that part of the job of the Chairman is to act as a pitchman for the Obama Administration’s platform and policy agenda, but these claims are weak at best.? I guess I can see where the Internet is a useful tool in research for health care and education, as far as ones ability to search out the best insurance policy or the ability to take an online class.? But as far as health care goes, one could just as easily open the YellowPages and make phone calls and write some stuff down.? But I certainly don’t understand how increasing Internet access will improve public safety and solve our energy issues in this context.? Is there by chance some Einstein-esque man with a secret energy solution that just cannot get his message out at the moment, and if only he had Twitter all our energy problems would be solved?? Something about beach front property in Colorado goes here.

Openness is the Key

Why has the Internet proved to be such a powerful engine for creativity, innovation, and economic growth? A big part of the answer traces back to one key decision by the Internet?s original architects: to make the Internet an open system.

Historian John Naughton describes the Internet as an attempt to answer the following question: How do you design a network that is ?future proof? — that can support the applications that today?s inventors have not yet dreamed of? The solution was to devise a network of networks that would not be biased in favor of any particular application. The Internet?s creators didn?t want the network architecture — or any single entity — to pick winners and losers. Because it might pick the wrong ones. Instead, the Internet?s open architecture pushes decision-making and intelligence to the edge of the network — to end users, to the cloud, to businesses of every size and in every sector of the economy, to creators and speakers across the country and around the globe. In the words of Tim Berners-Lee, the Internet is a ?blank canvas? — allowing anyone to contribute and to innovate without permission.

This is a fantastic paragraph.? Genachowski hits the nail on the head here.? Unfortunately he is too blind to see that government intervention is ubiquitous for not being hands off.? Regulated Net Neutrality is the exact polar opposite approach to what Genachowski has written here.? Government now has the power to pick winners and losers.? They have the power to know what data is being transferred by having the power to conduct deep packet inspection to determine the contents of data traveling across networks.? They will have the power to tell network operators how to manage their networks and how to manage the flow of data, slowing or speeding up the delivery of certain types of applications.? That is the essence of picking winners and losers right there.? Period.? Genachowski wants the Internet to be a “blank canvas” with a little FCC logo down at the bottom right hand corner.

It is easy to look at today?s Internet giants — and the tremendous benefits they have supplied to our economy and our culture — and forget that many were small businesses just a few years ago, founded on little more than a good idea and a no-frills connection to the Internet. Marc Andreessen was a graduate student when he created Mosaic, which led to Netscape, the first commercially successful Web browser. Mark Zuckerberg was a college student in 2004 when he started Facebook, which just announced that it added its 300 millionth member. Pierre Omidyar originally launched eBay on his own personal website. Today more than 600,000 Americans earn part of their living by operating small businesses on eBay?s auction platform, bringing jobs and opportunity to Danvers, Massachusetts, Durham, North Carolina and Lincoln, Nebraska, and many other communities in both rural and urban America. This is the power of the Internet: distributed innovation and ubiquitous entrepreneurship, the potential for jobs and opportunity everywhere there is broadband.

Yes, you too can create the next Amazon in your garage!? With all the grandeur of these statements, the fact remains that all of these massive Internet companies were established under current conditions.? Evidence of the success of the Internet without regulated Net Neutrality is evidence in support of the absence of regulation, not a promotion for regulation.? This paragraph is an argument for keeping the established norm, not for change.? The problem with Genachowski and Neutralians is that they are banking on some ridiculous cosmic notion that the Internet is currently neutral and that they must enact laws to keep it that way.? It is this notion of, “There isn’t a problem, but maybe, possibly, there might be in the future, so we have to do something about that at the risk of destroying the innovation inherent in the Internet and proper network management.”

And let us not forget that the open Internet enables much more than commerce. It is also an unprecedented platform for speech, democratic engagement, and a culture that prizes creative new ways of approaching old problems.

Then why mess with that system based on what essentially boils down to your bet that something bad may happen that the market itself could not correct, when actual case study shows that any violation to Net Neutrality principles has been met with swift action by market forces and immediately corrected within weeks or even days?

In 2000, Jimmy Wales started a project to create a free online encyclopedia. He originally commissioned experts to write the entries, but the project only succeeded after moving to volunteers to write them collaboratively. The result is Wikipedia, one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world and one of the most comprehensive aggregations of human knowledge in our history. The potential of collaboration and social media continues to grow. It is changing and accelerating innovation. And we?ve seen new media tools like Twitter and YouTube used by democratic movements around the globe.

Again, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Even now, the Internet is beginning to transform health care, education, and energy usage for the better. Health-related applications, distributed over a widely connected Internet, can help bring down health care costs and improve medical service. Four out of five Americans who are online have accessed medical information over the Internet, and most say this information affected their decision-making. Nearly four million college students took at least one online course in 2007, and the Internet can potentially connect kids anywhere to the best information and teachers everywhere. And the Internet is helping enable smart grid technologies, which promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by hundreds of millions of metric tons.

This is obvious marketing speak for the promotion of Obamacare and administration policy objectives that has nothing to do with anything we are supposed to be hearing about in this speech, which is supposed to be an FCC position statement on Net Neutrality.

At the same time, we have also seen great strides in the center of the network. Most Americans? early exposure to the Internet was through analog modems, which allowed a trickle of data through the phone lines to support early electronic bulletin boards and basic email. Over the last two decades, thanks to substantial investment and technological ingenuity, companies devised ways to retrofit networks initially designed for phones and one-way video to support two-way broadband data streams connecting homes and businesses across the country. And a revolution in wireless technologies — using licensed and unlicensed spectrum — and the creation of path-breaking devices like the Blackberry and iPhone have enabled millions of us to carry the Internet in our pockets and purses.

Yes, Genachowski, and this is what makes the Internet the most wonderful creation man has ever made.? It is a world without you, the government.? It is the last remaining frontier of the Wild West.? And I don’t mean that in a way to reflect the “red light districts” of the net.? I mean that from the perspective that the Internet is a world of self regulation.? Even the regulation on certain websites is determined by the members or owners that inhabit those sites.? It is because of this unbridled nature of the medium that such creativity has flowed.? It is kin to the Age of Enlightenment.? Discovery blossomed when one mans quest for power over another man was finally somewhat extinguished.

It is said that early America buoyed The Enlightenment via the American Revolutionary War.? America thrust off the chains of its oppressor, those that wished to control it, and it blossomed forth.? This is why the Internet has proved successful.? The barriers to entry that exist in many brick and mortar and “meatspace” opportunities are much higher than those of small business and upstarts on the Internet.? Especially in the Internet’s earliest days.? To regulate that now, and possibly restrict innovation and economic development based on a whim is just dumbfounding to me.

The lesson of each of these stories, and innumerable others like them, is that we cannot know what tomorrow holds on the Internet, except that it will be unexpected; that the genius of American innovators is unlimited; and that the fewer obstacles these innovators face in bringing their work to the world, the greater our opportunity as citizens and as a nation.

Does this seem like backwards logic to anyone else?? Genachowski praises the lessons we can learn of success under an unregulated Internet, and then goes on to promote the idea that fewer obstacles improve innovator output and end user opportunity, but he wants to regulate the Internet.? You know that noise Scoopy-Doo used to make when he was confused?? I just made that noise.? How do you limit obstacles by introducing regulation that increases obstacles?? Baffling…

To be continued…Part 2

-nick