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

[EmeraldCoastMike]

I bought a Satellite internet setup last month. After the $300 dish cost and $85.00 monthly fee (internet only) and on a calm clear day (no wind,no clouds and no rain) I get to surf the net with a 15 to 20 second lag time for each page. Lucky me! I'm living the American Dream. Just ask the idiots in Washington. There I feel better. Yeah, right!

[realitytrumpsbull]

Th'innernit will soon be wireless...it will be everywhere...you'll carry your computer on your belt...oh, wait, you do already...YOU THERE, number 234234230-B6! NO SURFING THE WEB DURING WORK TIME! YOUR PAY IS BEING DOCKED! A SECOND OCCURRENCE WILL RESULT IN DISCIPLINARY ACTION!

[chinohillster]

Arrrgggh...don't get me started!

My community is about 40 miles east of Lost Angeles, so we're not talking howling, remote wilderness here. I recently dismantled the little DSL network I had set up in my apartment because it was down more than it was up, and the Verizon Broadband cards (I have three laptops at home) were much faster and more reliable than the DSL service.

I could not get a cable modem because the apartment complex where I currently live has a deal with Verizon to provide Direct TV, phone and DSL all in the same package - so we have no cable service. Also, my town was recently switched from Adelphia to TimeWarner Cable, and I have heard nothing but complaints from fellow citizens of my town about the service!

I recently purchased a couple of MacBooks for my teenagers, and they've been using the wireless Internet connection.

The entire infrastructure in the United States is a pain, from dealing with ISP's (*cough* Earthlink *cough*) to the phone company to the cable company!

Arrrrghh!

[paixa3]

The internet policy in the USA is just a hint of other areas in the country that will become failures and be disgraceful.

The erosion of the society is increasing at an increasing rate each day.

Until the CITIZENS get back congress, the country will be doomed.

[Ani]

Dial-up, indeed! How humiliating to realize that if we continue on our current path, America will soon be owned by just one giant corporation.

Thank you for your informative article, Mr. Brodsky. Keeping our Internet freedom out of the hands of Big Money feels a lot like trying to save a whale in shallow water. Once beached, there's nothing to do but watch it painfully die.

[avergejoe]

You forgot to mention:

Bruce Kushnick's book, "The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal" -- it's a powerful critique documenting the trail of broken promises and misinformation perpetrated by many broadband service providers in order to get favorable treatment, special dispensation, and competition-free access to residents across the United States. One of the most damning indictments, that United States residents have already paid for upgrades to our existing broadband infrastructure -- being charged for services never delivered -- and not a small amount either, but actually to the tune of $200,000,000,000. When you break it down, that's roughly a $2,000 refund for every household that's due for contractual obligations never fulfilled.

But more importantly, are customers owed $2000 for a fiber optic service they paid for but never received?

And did America lose $5 trillion in economic growth, $500 billion annually, because of these missing networks?

Broadband Scandals is a well-documented expose, 406 pages and 528 footnotes. Using the phone companies' own words (and well as other sources), the book outlines a massive nationwide scandal that affects every aspect of state of the Internet. Not only the web but broadband, municipalities laying fiber or building wifi networks, not to mention related issues such as such as VOIP, cable services, the cost of local phone service, net neutrality, the new digital divide, and even America's economic growth.

The fiber optic infrastructure you paid for was never delivered.

Starting in the early 1990's, with a push from the Clinton-Gore Administration’s "Information Superhighway", every Bell company — SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest — made commitments to rewire America, state by state. Fiber optic wires would replace the 100-year old copper wiring...

In order to pay for these upgrades, in state after state, the public service commissions and state legislatures acquiesced to the Bells’ promises by removing the constraints on the Bells’ profits as well as gave other financial perks. They were able to print money — billions of dollars per state — all collected in the form of higher phone rates and tax perks.

[puddytat]

Absolutely! The phone companies were allowed to overcharge for services and add fees to "finance" the fiber optic network they agreed to build with all that extra money. Again, the state and federal governments go along with the corporations so they can stuff more money into their coffers. Where's the oversight? Where's the accountability?

I want my 2000 bucks back and I want lying phone company executives in jail!

[InsaneDisabled]

Market forces can't work because they're incomplete -- at least the way most businesses look at them. They ignore what are usually the weaker forces on the assumption that they don't matter. And in the *short* term, they usually don't.

It's the government's job to step in and take the long view, taking into account these weaker forces like technological advances, resource depletion, and death rates. Business can't afford to do that, often to its extreme detriment.

Trouble is the short term is a lot shorter than it used to be -- especially for things like connectivity technology. Yet another case where a "hands off" attitude just lets the toddler fall over the cliff.

[Zenobius]

I'm tempted to propose the idea that markets, unless carefully controlled to avoid the accumulation of barriers to entry, become dominated by oligopolies or monopolies.

At one point, oil and food had a lot of small producers, now they don't. Maybe internet access is the same way? All that happened is that our market matured, partly due to the fact that some competitors were telcos and cable companies that could cross subsidize and had political influence; more quickly than the technology did.

Unfortunately, whatever the cause, the solution will probably involve interfering with private power. For some reason, the idea of interfering in the behavior of large private {as opposed to public} corporate power is unacceptable over here. Still net neutrality is as good a place as any to start.

[adzeman]

Free markets always move as quickly as possible to monopoly. My service sucks, its only provided by two corporations that I rather not do business with, otherwise I'm as happy as a clam.

[progressivegreg]

Market forces are working so well (NOT!) in so many areas..gasoline, milk, food in general (unless you're fotunate enough to have a good farmers market) and on and on. I for one am truly sick of hear "the market corrects" the market exploits and rips off any chance it gets!

[werenotgonnatakeit]

Dude, our country is a disgrace. Let's be honest. For once.

[altohone]

Good post. Sad, but good.

You skipped too quickly over the ruling by Justice today though that supports killing net neutrality though.

What few choices we have are about to be limited further by Big Money that can pay to play.

[ralphie]

he sure did --
here's the article i read:

US backing for two-tier internet

The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6983375.stm

what does the Justice Dept have to do with this issue?

[AsaNisMasa]

this blog presents the frustrating truth of american internet. but on the bright side, i thought you were going to tell us that Alberta, Canada has more ISP choices than us. Because that would be the most pathetic of all.

[No Yards]

Yes, that would be pathetic
http://www.canadianisp.com/cgi-bin/ispsearch.cgi?f=Search&p=AB

[lapoutlander]

Jasper Alberta
Population 2006 census = 4,256
Active ISPs on canadianisp.com = 7
Total ISPs possibly = 15

[homesteader]

Dial-up is my only option--there are others in the area, but not exactly where I live--so for a while if I wanted to download, say, an audio book, it was quite a bit faster to drive an hour each way to the nearest small city with an internet cafe, download my book, run a couple of other errands down there, drive back than to try to download it at home. We've finally gotten an internet cafe less than ten miles from here.
But there are still weeks when I'd cheerfully kill for even a slow(ish) DSL. And we're supposed to have fiber optic lines throughout the county.

[deleweye]

Not mine you wouldn't - my average surfing speed (loading pages) with Alltel DSL averages 20KB/s. Granted I get faster downloads once I'm connected, but my only alternative is popping for satellite -

[NurseRiches]

It's true, you know. I'm sitting here in London using 8mbps Broadband, which goes so fast you can almost smell burning insulation (well... kinda). To hear that there are still huge swathes of the USA still only accessing DIAL-UP is an absolute farce. You must be FURIOUS! Some American dream, eh?

But compared to the Japanese, our choices here in the UK are pathetic to behold. Now THEY have truly got their fibre-optic shit together!