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The newspaper of record for the Internet community has come out in force to support Net Neutrality. In an editorial today, the San Jose Mercury News stated that if Congress doesn’t adopt Net Neutrality rules, the results “would be disastrous for Internet users, for Internet companies and for innovation itself.” Here’s more:

The choice facing lawmakers is stark: keep the Internet as a decentralized network that no single company controls and where all users and all Web sites are treated equally; or hand control over it to an oligopoly of cable and telephone companies.

The Mercury News reiterates our point that Net Neutrality legislation isn’t new “major government regulation of the Internet.” This is the AT&T lie being echoed by industry front groups in Washington. According to the Mercury News:

Network neutrality isn’t new. Its basic tenets — that all users can access all legal content on the Internet and that all content providers are treated the same on the network — have been in effect since the birth of the Internet through regulations governing the old telephone network. But a series of court decisions and a vote of the Federal Communications Commission last year have voided those rules. And that has opened the door for phone and cable companies, which control Internet access, to change the rules of the game.

The Mercury News outlines the threat posed by the largest phone and cable companies that seek to strip Net Neutrality from the books so they can put their “Hands ON the Internet” and squeeze it for profit:

. . . if cable and telephone companies become traffic cops and toll collectors, they will be in a position to decide which shows go on the fast lane and which get stuck in a lane too slow to be watched. That would turn Internet video into an online version of the cable system, where an intermediary controls the delivery of all content. The explosion in creativity would be snuffed out and the innovative start-ups and business models would never see the light of day. Future technologies and industries could suffer the same innovation-crushing fate.

The only thing that stands in their way is Congress and a vocal citizenry. The Mercury News sums it up:

few lawmakers seem to understand that by not enacting network neutrality legislation, they’d be subverting the basic principles that have made the Internet into such a powerful force for economic growth. Perhaps, it’s because they’ve been worn down by armies of lobbyists from the telephone and cable industries.

It’s time for online users everywhere — those who search on Google, download songs from Apple, buy books from Amazon, run businesses on eBay, make phone calls on Skype or simply read e-mail and surf the Web — to let them know the Internet is too valuable to be sold off to special interests.

Read the entire editorial and take action.

Don’t be fooled. Web sites like “Hands Off The Internet” are industry front groups — the products of high-priced consultants bought and paid for by the cable and phone industry. Companies like AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth and their trade associations are spending millions every week to mislead and misinform the American public.

Their latest attempt to hoodwink Internet users is a cutesy cartoon at www.dontregulate.org — a clever piece of industry propaganda that is riddled with half-truths and outright lies.

The animation is an example of Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” in action. Telco giants cloak their real intentions behind a populist message that sounds plausible, while undermining the work of genuine public and consumer advocates.

Visit our “Big Lie” page for a quick guide to cutting through the industry spin.

For a hilarious take on the Bells’ “Astroturf” campaign, visit Jesus’ General.

AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth want us to trust that they’ll be good stewards of Internet freedom. Meanwhile, they’re selling out ordinary Americans to the National Security Agency.

A report in Thursday’s USA Today tells how these three carriers secretly provided to the NSA the phone call records of tens of millions of people — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime.

These companies apparently have no qualms about betraying customer trust — or breaking federal law.

According to the report, Section 222 of the Communications Act, prohibits companies from giving out information regarding their customers’ calling habits: whom a person calls, how often and what routes those calls take to reach their final destination, and who calls in to the number. When asked about their potentially illegal handover of this personal information, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth declined to comment, citing “national security matters.”

Now they are asking Congress to strip away Net Neutrality protections so they can become benevolent overlords of the World Wide Web.

Now they are asking Congress to strip away Net Neutrality protections so they can become benevolent overlords of the World Wide Web.

Would you trust these corporations with your Internet?

Tom Tauke, Verizon executive vice president of public affairs thinks you should. Earlier this week, he swore up and down that the telephone giant would never deny consumers access to what they want on the Internet. Tauke said that doing so would be “akin to Starbucks hatching a plan to secretly serve customers Folgers crystals.”

We’re not talking about coffee, Tom. Internet freedom is not a commodity for Verizon’s to sell off to the highest bidder. The only thing that Verizon is “secretly serving customers” is a lie about improved choices and innovation. And they’re asking Congress to pass a law that allows them to become gatekeepers to the information superhighway.

Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth maintain networks that reach into the homes and businesses of tens of millions of Americans. These companies built this access to our private lives — and the billions in revenues that come with it — on a “bedrock principle” of consumer protection.

Now, that they’ve sold out this trust to help the government monitor ordinary Americans, how credible are their claims that no Net Neutrality safeguards are necessary?

The industry-sponsored argument against Net Neutrality is that the Internet has never been regulated, and that the imposition of Net Neutrality rules will harm the Internet. Just the opposite is true, writes Fletcher Kittredge in the Bangor Daily News, today.

Kittredge wrote in response to a May 5 editorial by Jason Fortin of the Maine Heritage Policy Center. In his piece, Fortin regurgitated the industry talking point that “no government regulation has been needed and none has been imposed” in the history of the Internet.

Kittredge calls out Fortin for spreading this telco lie:

The telephone transmission lines over which consumers access the Internet have always been regulated until last August, when the Federal Communications Commission decided to remove the regulations that have safeguarded consumer and business access to the Internet for the past twenty-six years.

With the removal of those common carrier safeguards, the telephone company, like the cable company, is free to raise rates at will, discriminate in favor of their own Internet service provider, favor their own content and services, and even refuse to offer you broadband service at all. Do you really want to see your broadband service become just like your cable service - higher rates each year and no ability to assemble your own package of services?

Another point on which Fortin and I agree is that, in the end, it is always the consumer who pays. What is interesting is that Fortin argues that unless your cable and phone companies are free to charge you more for their services, which he already admits are slower than those available in Asia, they won’t provide you service at all.

In reality, the telephone companies have been regulated as common carriers for the past 70 years including the last decade or so that they have been providing Internet access to homes and businesses. Fortin wants to pretend that Net Neutrality never existed during the ealy days of the Internet. In fact, it is the principal reason the Internet became a revolutionary force for economic innovation, civic participation and free speech.

Fortin also implies that the large Internet content companies get access for free. To which Kittredge responds:

Again, nothing could be further from the truth. Those Internet content companies pay for access just like every other business does - in fact they pay millions of dollars per month for that access. What they don’t want is to have to pay more to get on the new telephone or cable company fast lane - a fast lane that only has value if it is restricted to a smaller number of users - or have to ask permission from the telephone or cable company gatekeeper before they can offer their content and services.

Why are Maine readers paying special attention to this debate? Their Senator Olympia Snowe (Rep.) has been an outspoken champion of Net Neutrality — continuing Maine’s proud tradition of going against the grain of the DC establishment, in this case, to take a right stand for Internet freedom.

Rather than repeating the industry line, Fortin should applaud Sen. Snowe’s “enlightened efforts to ensure that basic non-discrimination rules continue to apply to Internet transmission network operators, so that all American businesses and consumers can continue to innovate and offer services over the Internet.”

The Gun Owners of America argued the conservative case for internet freedom. It’s very much worth reading:

“The concept of Network Neutrality has unfortunately been misunderstood by many conservatives, libertarians, and other champions of the free market. That’s too bad, because the free market essence of the Internet is exactly what would be lost without Network Neutrality.

“The large telecoms, some politicians and a number of conservative pundits have characterized the push for Network Neutrality as a left-wing attempt to stifle innovation and put government bureaucrats in control of the Internet. Well, it’s not. Through my work with Gun Owners of America, I am demonstratively a lot further to the right than they are.

“It is true that the largest member of the coalition looking to regain Network Neutrality is MoveOn.org – and they are usually my political enemies. But Gun Owners and groups like Brent Bozell’s Parents Television Council have done  what many on the right don’t seem to have: our homework.

“One of the most telling points is that what the coalition is trying to get codified is what we have had all along as the Internet was developed. In all of those years, Network Neutrality was policy… until August of 2005, when the FCC changed the rules. How can this policy stifle innovation and competition when the Internet has been a roaring success in those areas for decades?

“The real problem is that we are under a distorted market from the get-go. Government is setting the rules. The result has been a government-supported oligopoly. We are lucky that those controlling physical access to the Internet have been forced to give every purchaser of bandwidth equal access – it doesn’t matter whether Gun Owners or the Brady Center is purchasing a T-1: all T-1 purchasers pay the same for the same level of service. And moreover, the phone company has to tough it if they don’t like what is being done with that bandwidth (such as this column).

“This goes all the way back to Ma Bell – after all, the physical infrastructure of the Internet is the nation’s phone lines. And just as I-95 is the only Interstate we have between Richmond and the Beltway, no one is going to build a competing physical Internet.

“But people are going to build new Burger Kings along the highways. Suppose, however, that AT&T owned I-95. And that they inked an exclusive deal with Wendy’s. Or bowed to pressure from food Nazis and said no burgers at all from Florida to Maine.

“What we think of as the free market nature of the Internet is only possible because the oligopoly has been forced to keep its hands off of what actually gets done with the infrastructure they control.

“In a truly free market, Network Neutrality would not be necessary, as good old American competition would drive the very best service up the ladder of success. But as long as government is setting the rules for a handful of companies, the rules have to include statutory Network Neutrality to ensure those companies can’t unilaterally shut down what the innovators are doing. If they had any choice, telephone companies would not have allowed Instant Messaging or Voice over Internet – those things directly compete with their largest moneymaking service!

“But it can be worse than that. Large telecoms have internal anti-gun policies. If they were allowed to, what’s to stop them from slowing or blocking content they disagree with? Another wrong argument made by the misguided is that the leftists are trying to institute price controls, forcing companies to charge the same for high bandwidth video as for quick-flying e-mail. Or as one writer put it, charge the same for a golf ball and a marble being sent through garden hoses. Nope. That bigger, more expensive hose required to deliver the golf ball? Network Neutrality merely means that all who buy that particular hose get the same hose at the same price and can’t be denied the chance to lawfully use it. It’s a funny way to have to think of it, true, but as long as Congress is making the rules for a handful of major companies in providing the infrastructure, it has to make certain those companies give equal access to all comers. That’s the way it has been for the very lifetime of the free and open Internet we’re all interested in maintaining.

This isn’t a left or a right issue, it’s an issue of freedom.

One of the reasons I started paying attention to this fight is because the telecoms started saying that they were going to violate the principles of internet freedom. For instance, John Thorne, SVP of Verizon, said the following in February in a major speech reported in the Washington Post.

A Verizon Communications Inc. executive yesterday accused Google Inc. of freeloading for gaining access to people’s homes using a network of lines and cables the phone company spent billions of dollars to build.

The comments by John Thorne, a Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel, came as lawmakers prepared to debate legislation that could let phone and cable companies charge Internet firms additional fees for using their high-speed lines.

“The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers,” Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. “It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.”

On the call today, Link Hoewing, Verizon’s VP for Internet Technology Policy and Business Support Planning, implied that there will be no content discrimination, that Verizon can’t even tell if a packet is from Google. So I asked him about the statement from his colleague at Verizon. Here was his response.

You’ll have to ask John about that.

He then gave me a bureaucratic run-around about how corporate officer Tom and not corporate officer John is in charge of Verizon’s policy and so I shouldn’t listen to corporate officer John. Look, that’s insane. John Thorne said publicly at a major speech that his company believes that Google’s profits should belong to the telecom industry.

If Verizon can’t get their facts straight internally, how can we trust them to manage the internet without any oversight whatsover? I can already imagine the customer service nightmare I’m going to have when my blog isn’t viewable by Verizon customers.

Link Hoewing, Verizon’s VP for Internet Technology Policy and Business Support Planning, held a conference call with bloggers today.  There’s a recording of the call here: http://www.savetheinternet.com/VerizonCall.wav.  I commend Verizon’s openness in hosting the call.

Well here’s a shocker, frm Marilyn Geewax at the Austin Statesman. Lobbyists are writing the bill in secret, in conference committee. Megolomaniac AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre doesn’t like it when the public gets involved in lawmaking.

No one should waste much time watching the floor debates on C-SPAN. The lawmakers admit their goal is not to pass definitive legislation in public in the coming weeks.

Instead, they want to pass separate bills, regardless of how different they may be. The final version would be negotiated, largely in private, by about a dozen senators and representatives on a conference committee.

The Senate just needs to pass “anything to get us into conference,” where the real decisions will be made, House telecommunications subcommittee chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said Tuesday at a telecom forum hosted by National Journal’s Technology Daily.

I can’t say I’m surprised. These guys have always had contempt for the public.

This blog post is cross-posted at The Qando Blog. 

There were two Op/Eds on Net Neutrality today, one in the New York Times, and another in the Washington Post.

The NYT version, is a fairly uninspired pro-neutrality editorial. The WaPo, version, however, requires some comment.

Yet perhaps without realizing it, those who are now advocating “net neutrality”—the notion that those who shell out the big bucks to build new much higher speed networks can’t ask the websites that will use the networks intensively to help pay for them—could keep this new world from becoming a reality. Further, they could deprive the websites themselves of the benefits of being able to use the networks to deliver their data-heavy content.

That is not, in fact, what we are advocating. Moreover, I’d bet that when the guys at Google or Yahoo get their bandwidth bills every month, they think they are already paying for the network. In fact, I bet they think that’s the whole purpose of those bandwidth charges.

I run a web hosting company myself. With every plan, you get a fixed amount of bandwidth included. If you exceed that bandwidth, even by one byte, you get charged for an additional 5GB of bandwidth. You can have all the bandwidth you want…you just have to pay for it.

That’s the standard for practically every hosting company in the world. Bandwidth isn’t free, and never has been. Everybody gets charged for it. And by everybody, I don’t just mean content providers. Individual users pay for the bandwidth they use, too. Everybody pays for bandwidth, coming and going.

No one on the Net Neutrality side is, as far as I’m aware, arguing that network providers can’t charge for bandwidth. Nor are any of the network providers giving away any of that bandwidth for free.

What the network providers are after is not the ability to charge for the bandwidth that content providers use. What they are seeking is to obtain rent from content providers, by charging more than the bandwidth is worth, and restricting the bandwidth of content providers who are unwilling to pay that rent. This is supposed to be done under the guise of rationing our precious, precious bandwidth.

But, there’s already a method of rationing bandwidth. It’s called “price”. That’s already an adequate rationing mechanism without resorting to rent-seeking.

Economists are fond of saying that there are no “free lunches,” which is to say that new products and services don’t magically appear. Those who benefit from them pay for them. A corollary of this simple principle is that markets will not work efficiently— that is, they will not generate the maximum output at the least cost— unless prices fully reflect all of the costs of products sold or services delivered.

And your point would be…?

Is it that bandwidth prices are too low? OK, then raise the price of Bandwidth from $X per GB of transfer to $X+ per GB.

Are you arguing that Yahoo! is getting some free benefit from all the bandwidth they use? If so, then I’d bet the Yahoo! bean counters would disagree when they write out those checks every month to pay for their bandwidth.

Oh, and by the way, without content providers, who would be using any of that bandwidth in the first place? If the content didn’t exist, the network would be pretty darned useless.

There are well known externalities associated with the Internet. One positive externality is that the more users there are, the more beneficial it is to be plugged in, and the more profitable it is to write software it is for Net applications. But increasingly, as content like movies, real-time games, and other data-heavy services like remote disease monitoring are made available, some data imposes negative externalities— traffic congestion, if you will— that adversely affect the ability of others to use the Net reliably.

Until recently, traffic congestion on the Net was not a problem. There was so much excess capacity in the fiber optic cables and other parts of the complex telecommunications network that additional data heavy traffic delivered from one site did not threaten the reliability of traffic delivered from other sites and routed through the Net. But that blissful world is gone now. The existing networks are rapidly running out of excess capacity. We need new cyber-highways if the brave new world of movies, fast Google searches, and telemedicine— to take a few examples— is to become at all viable.

The question, then is: who should pay for these much higher speed networks? Asking all users to pay the same amount, regardless of how much they data they download, hardly seems fair.

And, who precisely, is charging for network access without reference to the bandwidth used? I know I’m not. Nor do I know of anyone who is.

So, again, the point would be…?

Why should telecoms companies that want to build the next-generation cyber-highways be treated any differently? Shouldn’t they at least be allowed to charge data heavy sites more than others so that the many of us who don’t download lots of data don’t get socked?

Again, they already do charge data heavy sites more than little web sites. They do so through charging for every GB of transfer, which means that sites that use more bandwidth pay more in bandwidth charges.

If it helps, look at it this way:

Let’s say you’re a SBC telephone customer. You pick up the phone to call a local business. After you dial the number, you get a message that says, “You have chosen to call a number that uses GTE as its local phone service. We are unable to connect this call between the peak hours of nine AM to five PM. If you wish to connect to this business during non-peak hours, you must pay an additional service charge.”

So, let’s say you’re lucky, and the business remains open until 5:30 PM. Now, when you call, you get this message: “To connect to this number with a low-quality connection at the rate of twenty-five cents a minute, please press ‘one’ now. To connect to this number with a regular, high quality connection at fifty cents per minute, please press ‘two’ now.”

Do you think you’d like a phone service that operates like that? If not, then why would you want a tiered Internet that works like that?

Treating phone companies as common carriers has some advantages that I doubt you really want to give up. Treating the Internet that way carries the same advantages.

There may be some good arguments against Net Neutrality, but they won’t be found in this op/ed piece.