This week, Harold Ford, Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, showed how completely the DLC is captured by industry money, why the US congress is mired in gridlock, and why the government continues to fail to protect the American public: from oil spills to banking crises to mining disasters, and now to the Internet. Big money lobbyists and their puppet politicians' blind abandonment of reasonable government oversight.
Harold Ford is one of those puppets. In his piece, "FCC Re-Designation of Broadband Will Bring Unwanted Market Uncertainty" Ford calls on the FCC to halt their efforts to reestablish the agency's authority over Internet service providers (ISP's) like Comcast and AT&T. As I have described in previous posts, the courts recently ruled that changes made by the Bush-era FCC has left the agency in charge of the nation's communications without authority to oversee the 21st century's dominant communications platform. This would be funny if it weren't reality.
Phone and cable companies are flooding Capitol Hill with cash and an army of lobbyists, including proxies like Ford, who failed to mention in his Huffington Post piece that he is the honorary co-Chair of "Broadband for America", an industry front group that pays him to spin on their behalf.
If the FCC heeds Ford's advice, you can say goodbye to candidate Obama's promises of universal, affordable Internet access and Net Neutrality. You can say goodbye to the level playing field that the Internet has always been: where all content moves at the same speed, no matter who is sending it.
With a broken political system awash in special interest money, Harold Ford is not alone. On Monday, 74 House Democrats signed an industry-written letter that echoes Mr. Ford's line, calling on the FCC to stand down. The letter is so full of misleading information that it's hard to know where to begin. And nearly every Republican in congress is toeing the phone and cable line.
So tell it like it is, Harold Ford. You're choosing the big money from the cable and telco juggernaut over the right of the American people to fast, affordable, universal Internet access. You're ignoring how the US has slipped from 4th to 22nd in broadband speed and adoption. You're ignoring Harvard Berkman Center's findings that regulation promoting competition would serve US consumers well.
Mr. Ford, you said that "Legal and Agency experts are not carefully examining the economic impact will have on investment decision"? But FCC Chairman Genachowski repeatedly stated his intent to ensure investment continued... just read his speech. Over the past few weeks we saw broadband providers themselves telling investors that they had no plans to slow investment in response to the FCC.
Harold, I am looking for the consumers you claim have prospered under the current "light regulatory touch." You mean all of the Americans who are paying more and getting less than in 21 other nations? Prospering more than in France, where you can get broadband, phone and 300 TV channels for $37 a month? By my estimate, Americans are paying about three times more here thanks to your "light regulatory touch" that abandons competition and other key oversight.
Be warned, Mr. Ford, millions of Americans have called for Net Neutrality and universal Internet, and are not content to let shills like you lie to the American people any longer.
Author's note: Several comments below are rehashing industry lies that Net Neutrality is a "government takeover of the Internet." In fact, the opposite is true. Net Neutrality is the long-standing law that says Internet service providers and the government may not block or censor what you do online. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying to you.
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First and foremost, without NN any government assisted improvement of the broadband infrastructure is a direct government subsidy of a small number of corporations.
The argument is this: End service providers control consumer access. In terms of a Porter 5 force analysis, consumers have little buyer power, end service providers face little inherent competition. Thus, they (end providers) are in a perfect position to regulate (differentiate) among data streams to increase profit.
With little buyer power and little inherent competition, end consumers can exert little influence to encourage the end providers to not differentiate data streams. Thus, the market requires NN to effect uniform and unimpeded access to the net.
A similar situation is the "Company store" of the coal mines of the 1800's where the employees were always in debt to the company -- with no were else to shop, the employees had to shop at the high priced company store and only had access to the goods of that company store.
Not facing competition, the company store could do what ever they wanted with prices. With no buyer power, the company store didn't have to change its practices
Look, in a nutshell
Net neutrality started LONG before the Obama administration. The whole premise behind net neutrality is that there should be no preferential treatment of data streams.
That's all it is.
In addition, Mr. Silver’s interpretation of the United States Court of Appeal’s ruling in favor of Comcast is incorrect. The Federal Communications Commission is still fully in charge of the nation’s interstate communications network. What the FCC is not in charge of, and rightfully so, is how a broadband provider may manage its network.
I agree that for a significant number of people, especially unserved and underserved minority communities, broadband specifically, and the Internet in general, is not affordable. Driving up the costs of network management, however, will not solve the affordability problem.
NO!!!
Net neutrality started LONG before the Obama administration. The whole premise behind net neutrality is that there should be no preferential treatment of data streams.
That's it in a nutshell
why various people (most of which are super users with only 1???? fan -- can we say paid for poster) make different claims is beyond me.
Yep, that's Harold.
The real issue here is what the specifics of a consumer-protection proposal really are likely to be. I think there are better ways forward than mandating that ISP's must treat all data streams the same. I'd rather see a lot more attention paid to bad behavior by ISP's and ensuring that either we do away with the natural oligopoly concept in this area or that we carefully ensure that ISP's use of things like traffic shaping are done in the public interest. That's not "network neutrality" but it solves the same problem (and probably solves it better).
That's not quite true. I think the FCC, FTC, and DOJ would be likely to step in if a company was trying to specifically block competitors' services. That would be almost certainly civilly actionable by injured parties as well.
But a lot of non-network-neutral stuff goes on at ISP's, including small ISP's. These include traffic shaping (usually setting up a separate queue for P2P protocols and bumping down the routing priority), security scanning services (blocking worms and viruses), etc.
In fact, not too long ago, a spat between two backbone companies DID cause a brief period when a lot of people couldn't get to a lot of web sites.
Every time I see this guy on "Morning Joe", I think to myself, "What a puppet this guy is." Thank you for expressing this view of Ford, and for explaining Net Neutrality in layman's terms.
Many of us have been on the Internet since the first browser was introduced, and dial-up was the only option for connecting. There were hundreds of search engines, and a dozen of them were at the top of their game. Anyone could list their web site for free on these search engines, and you would never see an advertisement. This is one of the reasons one of my web sites is among the top three returned on the remaining top search engines.
It's like everything in this country. Bait and switch. When "pay television" first made its debut in this country, there was outrage from many of the citizens here. "Why should we pay for something we get for free?!" But the providers promised that because we were paying, there would be no need for commercials. HA! What a joke. And now, there's not analog television left for the poor who can't afford a converter box.
Capitalism - another name for Greed With Cancer.
“The real solution is to pass laws stating that anticompetitive routing of traffic should be a violation of law.”
Anticompetitive routing of traffic should be a violation of law – Agreed.
@iblogleft
“Examining data packets for content, then determining how that content is relayed is quite another. “
Agreed.
IF and that's a big IF, I could be convinced that data packet examination is okay...I would want any DPI that is beyond the realm of a court order to be spelled out in law...very clear law!
I don't.
What is it with you progressives that think that government policy makers are made of so much better stuff than us mere mortals of the Great Unwashed, that we should blindly follow whatever decision comes down from on high?
Unlike a company that can be curbed from its abuses, a government regulator's abuses have no such mechanism to protect us from their over-reaching their authority.
You would rather give your freedom to choose away?
I've yet to run into somebody who didn't have access to the net if they wanted it.
I AM ALL FOR IT.
The FCC's people are from the 'better people' store?
Remember, while we elected our President, we don't elect those he appoints to run these organizations, and the next President doesn't have to remove them.