(Washington, DC) While Congress considers writing new law to regulate telecommunications and broadband, the debate intensifies over whether, how much or even if new rules are needed in the post-Internet era. The complex questions surrounding what kinds of new broadband regulations are needed got a good airing by a panel of academicians at Pulver’s Peripheral Visionaries Summit today.
Few of the academics advocated any form of heavy-handed governance of new communications services. Columbia University professor Eli Noam argued for what he called the “Darwinian” regulatory approach, which sets some basic principles for communications-related companies to abide by, followed by enforcement of the antitrust laws and self-governance.
The issue is “Darwinian v. intelligent design and I think Darwin wins here. This is known as common law, essentially. Congress establishes a wide, short set of common principles. The FCC implements regulations, then some form of state rules” might apply, Noam said. But “an omnibus rule by Congress is truly a prescription for disaster.”
Noam fears that over-regulation will lead to stagnation in broadband network innovation. “The more conditions one puts on broadband networks, the less incentive there is to build them out.”
He posited an intriguing middle-ground between net neutrality regulations and no access regulations whatsoever. “You can have a rule that says you the carrier can discriminate among your customers but you can’t discriminate among your customer’s customers,” thereby capping the degree to which a broadband provider can block content and services.
Cardoza Law School Professor Susan Crawford agreed that a lighter regulatory touch is the best approach. “I would like to see us take a more enlightened and light-handed approach to this regulation,” she said. Still, she didn’t cotton to Noam’s Darwinian road-map. “If Darwinian regulation wins, we will always be looking backwards rather than planning for the future.”
Wharton School of Business Professor Kevin Werbach struck a pessimistic note. “I think the battle is over and we lost. The FCC has adopted a network neutrality statement. It has also won commitments from SBC and Verizon that they abide by that policy statement for a long time and none of it has any teeth.”
Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu stressed the importance of sound regulatory practices in order to maintain communications networks capable of spurring national economic growth. But that growth comes from small entrepreneurial players, not the big network providers. “These companies that are creating economic growth are clearly at the edges.”
Some form of network neutrality is needed to keep these networks humming, Wu said, or innovation and economic growth could stagnate. “Everyone has to be in the process to open the market whenever they can because the market has a tendency to close itself.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:18 PM | Print | Comments (0)
(Washington, DC) Speaking today at Pulver’s Peripheral Visionaries Summit, experienced communications technologists hashed out ways to best configure broadband networks to ensure the most open and efficient delivery of Internet services. But even these knowledgeable hands couldn’t agree on certain fundamental propositions.
Net neutrality regulation wasn’t warmly embraced by most of the panelists. David Beckmeyer, CEO of TelEvolution and one of the co-founders of EarthLink said “I think net neutrality as law is a bad thing. The better thing is competition.”
But, USC Professor (and founder of now-defunct online film pioneer Intertainer) Jonathan Taplin immediately put the kibosh on the notion that a third pipe into the home will appear. “Anything who thinks this magical third network is going to emerge is crazy,” Taplin said. “I promise you nobody is going to finance a third network.”
Some of Taplin’s colleagues suggested that even in the absence of a third network, bandwidth expansion could help to solve some of the network access issues. “If we had bigger pipes, a lot of the issues would be less problematic,” University of Colorado Professor and former FCC CTO Douglas Sicker said.
Not so, said Niel Ransom, former CTO of Alcatel and currently a board member at Overture Networks and Teknovus. Ransom argued that no matter how much bandwidth you deliver to users, they’ll find a way to chew up the capacity. “As the speed of the access grows, that doesn’t fix the problem, it just makes it worse,” Ransom said. “There will be abusers who use up the bandwidth just for the heck of it.”
Charging customers for the amount of bandwidth they consume could be one solution to the problem, allowing broadband providers to share in service revenues without charging the service providers, thereby reducing the incentive of broadband providers to block competitive services. “Perhaps network providers should begin to think about charging more for power users than they do for my mother who goes on once a week to check her email,” Taplin said.
“If we do it on the basis of who can pay [to ride over the network], we’re obviously just following the old big six media paradigm” because obviously Disney and the major programming providers can— while programmers cannot—afford to pay for network access, Taplin contended.
But Ransom said that pay per usage models don’t work. “Somehow or another, the world seems to prefer that [all-you-can-eat pricing] than the simple matter of paying per use, which they seem to hate a lot.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:16 PM | Print | Comments (0)(Washington, DC) A group of former FCC officials speaking on a panel of “recovering regulators” at Pulver’s Peripheral Visionaries Summit clearly expressed a lot of frustration they had in dealing with the often-conflicting massive political and economic forces driving communications regulation.
David Irwin, now a professor at the Columbus School of Law said “by and large, the regulators are out of touch. I don’t care what they say, they’re out of touch,” making the formulation of efficient policy difficult.
Matt Brill, now a partner at Latham & Watkins, said that the Commission must now cope with a lot of legal debate over the nature of evolving communications services, and recent court decisions definitely raise “some cautionary flags about how far the FCC can go.”
Congress isn’t much of a help, with the 1996 Telecom Act, for example, a model of “ambiguity and self-contradiction,” Stagg Newman, now with McKinsey and Company, said, quoting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Brill said “it’s hard to say that Congress is very clear about anything.”
Still, FCC staff try to do the right thing and feel rewarded by their grasp of the big picture and the notion of public service. “You have a chance to have a much broader influence working industry-wide issues rather than for a particular company,” Newman said. “Being a public servant in the most real sense is a high ideal,” Irwin said.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:50 PM | Print | Comments (0)(Washington, DC) A panel of financial industry representatives speaking at Pulver’s Peripheral Visionaries’ Summit today offered definite opinions on SBC CEO Ed Whitacre’s threat to charge access fees to services, such as Google or Yahoo, that ride over the phone company’s broadband platform. One conclusion: phone companies and cable companies need to hang together in demanding toll fees from Internet providers, or neither industry will succeed in extracting payments from Internet services.
Dan Berninger, VP and Senior Analyst, Tier 1 Research, advised the attendees to note that Whitacre aligned SBC with cable operators in the infamous Business Week interview. Whitacre phrased his threat in terms of “we and the cable companies,” Berninger said.
“He can no longer screw the customer by himself. He needs cooperation to do that because the moment he does that [asks Google for payment to access the DSL network] customers are going to run to the Hill. He has to keep them captive in order to implement his access fees. He has to have the cooperation of cable.”
The real solution to the broadband toll gate problem is competition, according to Blair Levin, Managing Director, Legg Mason and former Chief of Staff at the FCC. “What makes me more optimistic…is that Rupert Murdoch and Charlie Ergen are looking at alternative broadband access models. That’s more likely to drive the competition you’re talking about,” Levin said.
Berninger thinks Google or Yahoo can stop the phone companies and cable companies from demanding payments from Internet services. “The force that is going to stop the access industry going forward is the info-tech industry. If there is a player in info-tech that goes for the whole communications imperative…that screws that [any plans that cable or phone companies might have to charge access fees to Yahoo or Google or similar services] up.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:28 AM | Print | Comments (0)
A law passed in Michigan that would bar the sale of violent video games to minors has been preliminarily enjoined by a Michigan judge. Judge George Caram Steeh from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan granted the preliminary injunction request by the video game industry, saying the state did not prove the harm that would be caused by the sale of the games to minors.
But, Judge Steeh said, the harm to the First Amendment from such a law is clear. “Plaintiffs have demonstrated that the Act is unlikely to survive strict scrutiny, and that irreparable harm follows from the loss of First Amendment freedoms,” Judge Steeh said in his opinion.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:03 AM | Print | Comments (0)Wired has a piece on how French authorities are shutting down blogs and arresting bloggers in the wake of the suburban riots, citing statutes that bar violent speech. Most of the arrested bloggers are minors.
A prosecuting attorney from Le Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, who spoke under condition of anonymity, told Wired News that three bloggers and forum visitors allegedly posted messages that violated French criminal statutes governing violent speech. Two of the bloggers, who were arrested earlier this week, could be arraigned under violent speech statutes, the prosecutor said. The blogs in question, he said, were hosted on a French site called Skyblog, which is owned by Skyrock.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:50 AM | Print | Comments (0)
According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo is out of the running to take a stake in the suddenly desirable AOL. According to the piece penned by Kevin Delaney and Julia Angwin, both sides are saying the terms offered by the other side were, at first blush, not acceptable.
The surprise in this piece is the official confirmation by Yahoo that it had ever been in discussions to buy a stake in AOL. Another tiny bit of revelation: Google could be edging out Microsoft in the bidding, even though it jumped into the game many months after the Redmond giant.
Another interesting aspect of these closely watched talks is that Time Warner fears negative antitrust implications if it joins hands with MSN.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:11 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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