I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you….

iContent Robot…

Three of four referees have already stopped the fight for net neutrality and called it a loser. The Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department issued public policy statements against explicit enforcement of net neutrality.

The third referee, the Federal Communications Commission via its Chair, Kevin Martin, is still trying to decide if Comcast lied by concealing brass knuckles inside its boxing gloves to bloody the opponent, implying that if Comcast had admitted what it’s doing by taking off the gloves publicy in … (cough) … competitive transparent fashion … it would not be a violation of net neutrality.

The fourth referee is the Courts, which through a series of rulings, has closed off the possibility of effective competition punching through the broadband landline duopoly which controls 93% of service to customers.

It’s Round 10 in a 15-round match and “Net Neut” is staggering but not yet down from the blows of “Competition Con”, who took the gloves off and unleashed a series of Pirate and Hulu sucker punches while slipping the referee a few hundred grand between rounds.

The One-Click/One-Vote crowd went wild as “Net Neut” bounded back from the ropes time and again from the underhanded blows and illegal holding of “Competition Con”, chanting “Hands Off Neut … Hands Off Neut …”.

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HULU AVOIDS THE TIPPING POINT OF COMPETITION
Technically, even though Hulu is a heavily concentrated source of media content, it is important to separate this version of “Competition Con” from that associated with net neutrality.

Specifically, within a framework of effective net neutrality, the concentrated content market power of Hulu can be diluted as long as access and provision of all other competitive content is made available on a level playing field, which is not possible without net neutrality.

That’s why Hulu et al is against net neutrality, because it will offset its market power and force it to play on a competitive playing field. This is the key tipping point between effective competition and market power on a physical broadband network not subject to effective competition from other networks.

When the Federal Trade Commission rendered null and void any reasonable enforcement of net neutrality in 2007, it opened the door to concentrated content provision like Hulu on broadband networks ordinarily subject to anti-trust restraint in other contexts.

In opposing net neutrality, Hulu et al is attempting to get from the broadband world of content what it was prohibited from getting via anti-trust restraints, however lax, in other venues of producing and distributing media content.

Conversely, Hulu is seeking to acquire the same market power of Cable and Satellite TV, to grossly overprice content through forced bundling and packaging.

But Hulu cannot gain this market power if net neutrality is in place. The minute Hulu attempts to raise price above competitive cost or force consumers to purchase unwanted content, they’d simply move to other providers of content on the same network - not another facility based network under the effective competition provided by net neutrality.

For now, Hulu content is “free”, provided on an advertising model under a fragile framework of implied network neutrality that exists only due to the threat of its enforcement.

Further, in sharp contrast to those against net neutrality, it would not have (and did not) prevented, blocked, or discouraged the incentive to produce and distribute something like Hulu content on the internet in any way.

Another sharp contrast is that between the early concerns of large content providers like Google and “Whitcare tiering”, essentially an extortion tax proposed by Ed Whiticare, ex-CEO of AT&T for content providers “using the network for free”. This was a primary reason large content providers originally supported net neutrality, so what happened?

Either Hulu et al has cut a back room deal with facility-based broadband providers to avoid Whiticare-like fees, or conversely have agreed, or expect to recover and redistribute them to network providers through market power pricing afforded through the abolishment of net neutrality.

Another way to explain this is that the concentration is so powerful that it can extract fees above competitive cost implicitly through forced integration of advertising content or explicitly through discriminatory pricing of network services or content itself.

Once the threat of net neutrality is removed, the brass knuckles of Comcast and “Competition Con” will reappear in the form of discriminatory bandwidth access and gegabyte volume tiering along with selective “management” of network congestion, all confounded by grossly oversold bandwidth capacity under deceptive marketing practices.

For millions of broadband customers, the price of having what they have now will easily double or triple as the price of “everything packages” emerges from the rising complex of a broadband landline duopoly coupled with Hulu-like concentrated content.

The United States is falling behind in many areas for complicated reasons and the lack of a neutrally competitive broadband infrastructure is one of them.

To allow an emerging, electronic platform of democratic participation and competitive electronic commerce to be overwhelmed by private market power in the name of fraudulent competition undermines the last frontier of free speech as well as competition among content providers and consumers.

The answer to bad speech is more speech, not less speech, and the answer to bad content is more content, not less content. If the referees can’t enforce competition, then a political solution is necessary.