Telco Argument Implodes During DC Debate
June 19th, 2006 by tkarr |
Amazon.com’s Paul Misener handily defeated Mike McCurry — co-Chair of the telecom front group “Hands off the Internet” — in a debate over Net Neutrality at George Washington University on Friday.
Watch the segment in question, posted at PoliticsTV. The video shows a slow-motion implosion of the telco argument against Net Neutrality. In the “Question and Answer” section, Misener points out that large bandwidth users such as Amazon already pay for their use of bandwidth.
But it is not content companies’ use of the pipes, but user choice that’s really at stake.
“It’s not true that Internet content companies don’t pay for access to the Internet.” Misener says. “We pay handsomely for access to the Internet Amazon pays millions of dollars a year to connect to the internet… There are a lot of ways that companies at the edge providing content are already paying the network operators.”
McCurry asks: “Paul, isn’t that exactly the kind of tiered pricing that everyone who proposes net neutrality rails against?”
“No” replies Misener:
“Tiered pricing for access is something we support. Amazon pays a lot more than ‘Joe’s-Internet-retail.com’ simply because we use more capacity… That makes perfect sense to us. You pay for that capacity. But the important component here is that once the consumer has paid for his or her capacity at their home they ought to be able to use that capacity however they want. There’s a fundamental misconception here that somehow delivery of video over the Internet is just like it is over cable TV, over satellite, over broadcast or, frankly, like delivery of content through newspapers or magazines. Those models have always been about ‘push.’ Somebody decides — who either owns the pipe or owns the newspaper — what content goes in their and pushes it out to consumers and they can choose to read it or not.”
Leaving Internet choice in the hands of users – and not handing it over to the middlemen at AT&T, Verizon and Comcast — is precisely what we’re fighting for at SavetheInternet.com.
Misener:
“That’s not the way the Internet works. The Internet does not have all this content in there unless the user asks for it. When you hit return on your browzer it actually sends out a ‘get command’ to the server; it’s a very illustrative name for a command in computer code. It actually says ‘get’– that means now send me the file. That file never gets into the pipes owned by the network operators that Mike represents unless their customer who’s paid for that access asks for it. So we’re not clogging their pipes at all. We’re only providing the content that we hope our joint customers want to see.”
This important point gets to the core of what McCurry’s bosses at AT&T and BellSouth want to do. They want to fundamentally reverse the Internet’s user-powered “pull” model — that is, the model where all choice and intelligence resides with the end-users — and turn it into a “push,” where these same network companies make decisions about what content users get to see based on which companies pay the corporate gatekeepers.
Misener continues:
“When we get to the point of discrimination, there’s also this misnomer when we talk about things like wanting to prioritize videos so things don’t get clogged… We don’t want that either. We don’t think that that’s wrong for the network operators to be able to prioritize certain types of content. So if they want to prioritize telemedicine over data files that makes perfect sense. Let them do it. We’re not opposed to that. The [Net Neutrality] rules that we propose would not do that. Our concern is discriminating among the source or ownership of that content. So if the network operators are put in a position of favoring the Mayo Clinic over Johns Hopkins, that’s a problem. That’s the discrimination. That’s when the network operators become the HMO.”
This is the sort of discrimination that the phone companies want to put in place. For proof of that go no further than a Washington Post story from last December when William L. Smith, chief technology officer for BellSouth Corp., “told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.”
This discrimination would turn the Internet on it’s head, ceding control to large corporations that seek to impose an old media model (top down) in place of the bottom-up Internet that has become a force for innovation, economic growth and democratic participation today.
In response to Misener, McCurry could do little better than sputter that Net Neutrality would allow sexual deviants to prey on teenagers at MySpace. Witness this age-old debating tactic. It’s become common to political discourse of late: when backed into a corner, sow fear and obfuscate. (Listen to McCurry’s reply at 5:35 of the “Question and Answer” segment and judge for yourself).
Here’s McCurry again:
“On our side of the debate we often say that you cannot point to an instance of true discrimination or a real problem that exists — this solution in search of a problem argument. You are kind of hypothetically raising what you think the structure of the problem might look like down the road. Because we certainly are not there yet. I think there is one instance, in which I think the Commission then did get in and address it and it was resolved. But beyond that, can you think of any other instance where anticipating a problem like this you then went in to try to develop and define a regulatory structure that might prevent the problem. Is that a good way to approach policy making?”
Misener:
“I would share a lot of that concern. My free-market Republican predilections would be to be concerned if this were new, and if rules didn’t already apply… These are temporary conditions applied to AT&T and Verizon.”
These temporary merger conditions expire soon Misener adds:
“So the fact that they haven’t done it yet is because it has been illegal. So they keep saying, ‘can you see a problem. There’s not a problem.’
It’s been illegal. It’s been illegal and it still is illegal for AT&T and Verizon… Monopolists will always seek the profit maximizing point. So if they’re looking for that profit maximizing point they will do what they can to get to that point. What we’re suggesting that they have fully announced their intentions to do this. These are not some rogues. These are the CEOs of companies saying that they plan to engage in this sort of discrimination. I’m not saying that it’s the best business plan but they have announced that they want to do it.”
To which McCurry replies:
“Well, this is a question of definition: One person’s tiered pricing, building a faster lane is another person’s definition of discrimination. [The ISPs] have said and pledged that they can’t degrade services that they provide currently… That is stipulated to by everybody and agreed, if you don’t trust the phone companies for whatever reason keep the Commission there wary and watchful to make sure that they do that. But again you’re not giving me a good sense that there’s a definition of the problem that you can use.”
Misener breaks through this static:
“Sure there is. Discrimination based on the source or ownership of the content. That’s real easy. If you want to discriminate and favor telemedicine offer data files, that’s fine. But don’t pick the Mayo Clinic over Johns Hopkins. That’s pretty easy. And a complaint system where Johns Hopkins can go to the Commission and say Mayo Clinic was given a better deal than we. That makes perfect sense.”
Indeed. Again, watch it and judge for yourself: http://www.politicstv.com/blog/?p=261
June 19th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
[…] If anyone wants to to how horribly one-sided the debate over net neutrality is, check out this smackdown of anti-neutrality schill and Telco lobbyist Mike McCurry by Amazon.com’s Paul Misener over at Save the Internet. It really is hard to win a debate with the facts just aren’t on your side. Mark Twain notwithstanding, Carlyle was right: “no lie can live forever.” The carnage can all be viewed on video here. […]
June 19th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
I think I speak for everyone here when I say: “Pwned”
June 19th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
[…] Save the Internet has a great excerpt from a debate with Mike McCurry and Amazon.com’s Paul Misener on the net neutrality issue. PoliticsTV has video of the debate — it’s great. As Misener says: […]
June 20th, 2006 at 6:11 am
I can do naught but smirk.
You know, I hadn’t really realized before that what the telcos were trying to do was change the ‘pull’ model that’s fundamental even to the protocols involved (HTTP, FTP, etc), and shove some ‘push’ architecture on top.
In normal web interaction, almost everything is “pull” — you type in a URL, your DNS finds the address, you send the request for a page, etc etc. You click on a hyperlink, which sends a request, etc etc.
Do you know what, in normal browsing, is NOT pull? Pop-up advertisements (well, technically they’re ‘misdirected’ pulls — not desired content, but sent in response to a request). And we all know how popular THOSE are (eyes the firefox logo in the corner of his browser, and the “adblock” text in the opposite corner)…
June 20th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Great debate on net neutrality…
The Save the Internet folks report on a wonderful net neutrality debate. And what they have to say is totally compatible with my Tariff Rebate Passthrough proposal.
Key points:
Prioritizing one KIND of application, like telemedicine or video downloa…
June 20th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
So the argument comes down to this: “my paid shill is better than your paid shill.”
Excellent.
June 20th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
Wrong, Richard. We pay neither of these people. The argument is this: Net Neutrality is necessary to protect the free and open Internet. Telcoms are trying to radically rewrite the rules that govern the Internet so that they can impose a discriminatory regime that gives them the power to pick winners and losers online based on who pays them the most.
June 20th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Tim, be honest: both Misener and McCurry are paid shills.
Tim, be honest: the Telcos are perfectly happy with the laws governing the Internet today, You guys are the ones that are trying to impose your vision of the past on the Internet of the future by writing the crazy Markey Amendment banning the “you get what you pay for” principle that’s fundamental to the working of the Internet.
Tim, be honest: the Markey Amendment makes Google and Yahoo winners, and the little startups losers.
Tim, be honest.
June 20th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
net neutrality debate…
Save the Internet » Telco Argument Implodes During DC Debate “Amazon.com’s Paul Misener handily defeated Mike McCurry — co-Chair of the telecom front group “Hands off the Internet” — in a debate over Net Neutra…
June 20th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
If the best you can do is question my honesty, it’s clear that you’ve got nothing left in your quiver. Perhaps if you took a moment to watch the debate in question, you would realize just how weak McCurry’s (and by extension your) arguement is on this issue. Go on, watch the debate. I dare you. You can easily dismiss them both as paid shills, but can you dismiss the glaring superiority of Misener’s position?
June 20th, 2006 at 7:38 pm
[…] In a recent debate (recap and partial transcript here) between a Net Neutrality proponent – Amazon’s Paul Misener – and an opponent – former Clinton staffer and telecomm “sellout” Mike McCurry – the philosophical ideas and real-world market effects were bandied about, and, in my opinion, made it clear which side to favor. You’ll recognize most of his arguments – I’ve already included them in this post, but Misener is pretty durn elegant. […]
June 20th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
Richard,
You’re REALLY missing the big picture here and it is quite clear that arguing with you is a lot like banging your head on a brick wall all day long: pointless.
Think of the debate like this: McCurry did not bring up a single unique argument against network neutrality. The same bogus bullsh*t we’ve been hearing for months. “Oh, you’re looking for a solution before the problem even exists!“ — We all know this is BS. As Misener said, and as McCurry clearly avoided, the “big honcho guys” of a handful of large phone companies in the United States and Europe are waiting (greased up and ready) to start charging popular websites for bandwidth. “Who said they can use my pipes for free.” — the immortal words of one very greedy man. Sounds kind of nasty, eh?
Call him a paid shill, but Misener was clearly passionate about the discussion, he had a spark that McCurry didn’t — maybe it was because he believed in Network Neutrality. Maybe it was because Network Neutrality makes perfect logical and business sense.
THE “D” MAN!
June 20th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
Quick note:
“popular websites for bandwidth.”
I meant to say “for nothing. They are already paying for their bandwidth.”
My booboo.
June 22nd, 2006 at 8:34 am
Why not fast-track TV and radio broadcasting too? I bet PBS & NPR would go bankrupt in a week!
Or maybe they can figure out a way to fast-track telephone calls–no more pesky calls from Grandma unless she really pays, damnit!
Wow, there’s just SO MUCH MONEY to be made!
June 25th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Because making money is bad, right?
June 26th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
[…] Google and other sites that use enormous bandwidth already pay extra for it. The more bandwidth a website uses, the more it has to pay. There is nothing controversial about this. As Amazon.com’s Paul Misener said recently, “Tiered pricing for access is something we support. Amazon pays a lot more than ‘Joe’s-Internet-retail.com’ simply because we use more capacity… That makes perfect sense to us. You pay for that capacity.” […]
July 12th, 2006 at 6:02 pm
[…] ‘Amazon.com’s Paul Misener handily defeated Mike McCurry -co-Chair of the telecom front group "Hands off the Internet"-in a debate over Net Neutrality at George Washington University on Friday…read on" […]
July 30th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
[…] According to a blogpost at Save the Internet, Amazon.com’s Paul Misener handily defeated Mike McCurry — co-Chair of the telecom front group “Hands off the Internet” — in a debate over Net Neutrality at George Washington University on Friday.blogpost at SaveTheInternet.com Amazon.com’s Paul Misener handily defeated Mike McCurry, co-Chair of the telecom mouthpiece “Hands off the Internet”, in a debate over Net Neutrality at George Washington University on Friday. […]
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February 2nd, 2007 at 2:36 am
[…] He also linked to Save the internet.com, a group of net neutrality people who are not opposed to pricing mechanisms. […]