Our Internet Policy Is A Disgrace: Here's The Proof

Earlier today (Sept. 6), the Justice Department filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opposing Net Neutrality. The DoJ, supposedly the protector of consumers and guardian of competition, said that "market forces" were sufficient to do both of those jobs.

That view, of course, is nonsense. Perhaps the DoJ failed to recall that there are no "market forces," and that the market for broadband services is controlled by two industries and that consumers have very little choice. Just how little choice we have was made clear to me earlier this summer.

In August, my wife and I went to Jasper, Alberta, a little town in the northern part of Jasper National Park. One morning, we had breakfast with a couple we had met in an excursion around the area. They are from Derby (pronounced Darby), a city of about 233,000 located in the center of England, far from London.

The discussion got around to the question, "What do you do?" For the next 45 minutes or so, my wife Liz, a systems architect for IBM, and the English husband, an engineer, and his wife, an Information Technology instructor, had a lively discussion of Service Oriented Architecture, data modeling, data warehousing and the like. I wanted to know what kind of Internet connection he had.

It was a difficult choice, he and his wife said, because there were so many options. He had to make up a spreadsheet to figure out which service was best. Let us pause and consider this concept.

This U.K. consumer did something not one U.S. consumer can do. This broadband consumer in the U.K. has so many options - 59 Internet Service Providers that he needed a spreadsheet to figure them out. Here in the U.S., a similar customer might have two - the telephone company and cable company.

The contrast is staggering: a complex spreadsheet with 59 choices and several features for each vs. pre-kindergarten math of counting to two. The evidence is clear. From the consumer point of view, our Internet policies are a failure and a disgrace.

The details of the riches enjoyed by English customers are more staggering today than they were when the Derby spreadsheet was made in 2004. An English consumer magazine, Which?, on Aug. 2 published evaluations of 25 providers. Between them, those 25 providers have 125 separate service plans, and the magazine evaluates each of those on 35 separate factors. Most of the services are available nationwide.

There is competition on price, on download speed, on upload speed, on the amount of data that can be downloaded, on the price of installation, on the number of email addresses, on the amount of Web storage space, on the number of IP addresses, on the amount and price of tech support. If you want a snapshot of what real competition looks like, take a look.

The Which? evaluations only scratch the surface. Another Web site in the U.K. lists about 200 Internet Service Providers.

Here's a similar version for one location in Montgomery County, Md., which has access to Verizon and Comcast services. Most areas don't have this luxury of choice, which includes Verizon's fiber service.

It's time to start asking some pointed questions of policymakers, beginning with the House Telecommunications Subcommittee, a pivotal point for the development of telecommunications legislation and policy. Here are some random questions for panel members:

Rep. Charlie Gonzales (D-ATT): You represent San Antonio, the home of AT&T. Why don't you respect the rest of your constituency? You read the company's talking points and introduce their bills, but why don't your support policies that will allow residents of your district have the same choices as English consumers?

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-VZ): Why shouldn't residents in the Bronx have what the residents in most towns in the U.K. have? What's in it for your constituents if you consistently vote with the phone company?

Rep. Al Wynn (D-VZ): While you push the phone company line, some of your constituents are still on dial-up. Don't the people who live in Derwood deserve what the people in Derby have?

Those are just a couple of the Democrats who thwart progressive telecommunications policies. The entire Republican side of the aisle, with an occasional protest from a Heather Wilson (R-NM), or Chip Pickering (R-MS), consistently speaks for telephone companies.

Representing the GOP side en bloc, here's the question for ranking member Fred Upton (R-VZ): Why do you keep the residents of Kalamazoo from having the luxury of needing a spreadsheet to figure out to which Internet provider they should subscribe? Don't your constituents deserve better?

All of those questions, and more, could be directed to policymakers at the national level, ranging from the White House, to the Justice Department, to the Federal Trade Commission and of course to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Where does consumer choice fit into your thinking, as opposed to what the telephone companies, cable companies and their eco-system want? Why is it that the telephone company reward for our dropping our international rankings for Internet access, resulting in our abysmal consumer choice, is to give them more of their public policy desires, as the FCC is scheduled to do at your Sept. 11 meeting?

It's not hard to figure out how to bring U.S. consumer choice up to the standards of the U.K. and other areas of the world. The British, and many other countries, are for the most part following policies we abandoned in the last couple of years. We need to bring those policies back.

Accomplishing consumer choice for the Internet will be the hard part. The telephone and cable companies will spend millions to keep competition from flourishing. They will employ their in-house lobbyists and their contract lobbyists. They will deploy their fake support groups. They will trot out the racial and ethnic interest groups, which take the company money while betraying their constituencies. They will gin up dozens of papers from bought-and-paid-for academics and economists. They will contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to Congressional supporters. If they lose in Congress, they will fight in the courts and through the underbrush of implementing the FCC rules implementing a law.

Companies that might otherwise believe in the power of the Internet and would endorse consumer choice will stay silent. They are the ones locked into business arrangements with the telephone companies. They didn't realize that when that first check cleared in the bank account, that a little bit of the Internet company soul materialized in amber on desks in San Antonio, New York or Philadelphia. Unions will be of no help, even though their members would benefit from competition. Instead, they will whine that consumer choice will cost jobs, a specious argument at best.

There's only one force powerful enough to combat all these weapons. You. You have to ask your member of Congress and your Senator, "Why don't we have the same choice for the Internet that people in England do?" You have to ask what your representatives are going to do about this deplorable situation. And you have to keep on asking until there's an answer.

Follow Art Brodsky on Twitter: www.twitter.com/artbrodsky

Comments

[Purple Girl]

Oh whats free and informative communication? it just stirs up the natives. Plus the fewer communication outlets the more control-
When threatened with fair competition legislation, what communication Conglomerate doesn't find handing over whatever information is requested in the best interest of their business. E-mail addresses- here you go, access to eavesdrop and censor -oh no problem.

[jrb]

Why would anyone pay 2000 dollars for a new computer if their favorite websites are slowed down because they cant pay comcast.

[Earl]

Did I miss the price comparison in this blog? Must be more expensive in GB or the cost savings would most certainly have been mentioned as another great thing about choices in England. I have too much complication in my life to want to deal with the minutia of a la carte pricing for internet. I don't want to have to draw up a big spreadsheet to figure out which ISP I will sign up for. I don't want to be billed by the minute and/or meg. I do want more competition between phone, cable, satellite and wireless to get internet access to my house, but then I don't need a bunch of false "choices" between "providers" if they are nothing more than resellers looking to lure me into a tedious trap.

[Petebe]

To use most of these ISPs you have to have a telephone line to connect to the local telephone exchange,This phone line is owned by BT (British Telecom) they charge a 3 monthly Service Charge of about £28 which is itemised in the phone bill(phone calls are extra). This charge is made if you have a phone or a phone + internet connection.
The UK government made BT allow ISP companies access to their exchanges to provide their services, BT made lots of excuses as they would have liked a monopoly , but now they
have themselves become, I think, the largest broadband ISP while competing with other ISP companies.

[Trittydi]

This is just a snapshot - this is what is wrong with all of America. We've told our children to emigrate and to not look back. Their ancestors did it - they can too. If they all get settled somewhere - we may join them.

America is nothing anymore. I'll fight as long as I'm here to change that - but it's been the same for over a hundred years now - I don't see it changing - the damage is going too deep and the politicians are ALL whores.

My generation let the democrats and repuglicans alike mess it up - this is not my children's fight. They should go.
*

[NickHP]

More on Network Neutrality:

Lets have the FCC declare that a minimum guaranteed continuous bidirectional throughput would have to be 10 Mbps to be labeled "high speed internet". And that that definition would go up to 33 Mbps in 2 years and 100 Mbps in 4 years.

Anyone getting fiber today at 100 Mbps would skip to the second level definition immediately.

I can dream ...

[NickHP]

Network neutrality:

My take on NN is that the providers are compensated for providing bandwidth and should not have a say about content. The FCC needs to have ISPs declare the minimum guaranteed continuous throughput a user can have on any connection. Peak rates are a marketing come-on.

As for situations like Comcast cable where they complain that people are abusing a shared resource, get real. The provider can throttle connections through hardware. Someone continuously drawing the maximum bandwidth will get throttled to 10% or 5% or less of the maximum to allow space for others to send signals. It may be rocket science but it is not magic. It is what DirecPC does on their satellite network. A user who uses a lot of bandwidth would be dropped back to a slower rate. It was understood in the terms of the contract, and people were not summarily cut off.

Imagine a system where ISPs compete on the guaranteed bandwidth rates they will offer.

[europena]

We are confusing ISP from Internet access providers. ISP provides emails/sec­urity/VoIP­/Video. Internet access providers extends their fiber/copper loop to your house.

There are a lot of ISP. Lately they are really disappearing as Google, Yahoo took over. Internet access providers, however, are limited.

Most of UK access are provided by BT (Surprise!) ISP uses loops from BT, and bundle the "services". Think about it, if there are 25 loops to your house, what do you do with them other than hanging your laundry?

There are a lot of good questions here. But let's not get confused by the real issues.

[drblack]

Nothing could stop development of the internet more than what the Justice Dept. suggests.
Imagine if in the 1900s roads were owned by a bunch of private companies...we would be more of a dictatorship then we are now.

[realitytrumpsbull]

Dial-up gets the job done, too, and eventually when more wireless gets out there, you'll see prices drop and installation options increase.
Do you REALLY need movies-on-demand? Um, 'no'.
Wants vs. needs. 9 trillion in red ink, what's the NEXT half-baked enterprise to be visited on us?

[NickHP]

'RealityTrumpsBull' -- you miss the point. I too, lived with dialup for years after I would have PAID for a fast connection or even DSL. But the issue is that there are things you cannot do at 48,000 bps. You can't download movies, or videos, or music. The connection is not ON all the time. You have to keep logging in. You can't host a web page unless you have a fast link, and you can't do multiple connections at once without waiting for the computer on a dial-up link.

Wireless is a good theory, but a mile from the local business center you can't get it. And if you do get it it really is bandwidth limited by the number of other users sharing the link.

The whole point about fast internet is that having it will allow people to create NEW applications and uses. Even in areas we did not forsee. YOUTUBE would not exist on dial-up. It inherently needs the higher bandwidths we can get today.

Here in Derwood, Maryland, I would like to get Verizon's Fiber Optic Internet (FIOS). But it is not here. We have Comcast, and there have been some issues. It goes down. Service times are more casual than for the telephone network. Our installation cables are corroding in the ground. We had one repaired at midnight a few weeks ago. I'd like to see a couple of TV channels going up and down at the same time through a hardwired internet connection. And I'd like to see pervasive wireless for those times when I want to roam.

[Fewkes]

Network Neutrality is the only option that average citizens have to get news and opinion that is independent of the big media conglomerates that tow the government line. Let the government and the DOJ know you are definitely for Network Neutrality.

[squarebird]

Rather I have YET to pay a dime!!

[squarebird]

I am very confused .. what part of the USA are you from? I have lived in Autin Texas and now Arlington Virginia and I have to pay a dime for broadband. There are "HUNDREDS" of free wireless access points in both of the neighborhoods I where I have lived in the last two years. I am posting free right now! I travel to Europe frequently and not only is Internet access quite regulated, the government (at least in Finland) comes into your home once a year to COUNT the number of monitors in your home .. in order to tax you further on your access! I understand the British government also has access to homes to count televisions (in Texas a revenooer could be legally SHOT for trying such a stunt).

[kfdan]

Net neutrality is something that is a must in a free country! Since it's one of the nations major avenues of information, it is important that the government keep it's hands off the control button. The DoJ has no business involving market forces (corporate control and manipulation) as an excuse to dumb down and attempt to control the net!

[legendmn]

Not only is the internet in the UK just as fast, and sometimes faster that what is available in the USA, I also noticed that is dramatically cheaper that what we pay here.
According to the spreadsheet, the most expensive service in the UK is 35 pounds, which is roughly about $70/month. Crazy-cheap...

[fn0rd]

Doing business in three european countries, canada, the US, and Mexico, I keep thinking I'm going to run into deals that are fantastically better than what we get in the US, with gigabits of bandwidth for pennies.

Guess what? The costs are usually the same, often higher, and the restrictions on the plans are complicated with lots of possible surprises if you have a busy week, or connect to certain sites, or use certain protocols at certain hours. Then there are install charges, contracts, deposits..

Here, I pay my $51 a month, get enough bandwidth to run streaming high-quality video and use a VOIP service at the same time, and my bill will be $51 if I use it a lot, $51 if I don't use it at all, and if I get annoyed with them, I pay for the current month and go.