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3 Charts That Show The FCC is Full of Malarkey on Net Neutrality and Title II
From Nick Gillespie of Reason. Excerpts:
"The typical nightmare scenario that gets trotted out goes
something like this: Comcast, the giant ISP that controls NBC
Universal, will push its own content on users by simply blocking
sites that offer competing content. Or maybe it will degrade the
video streams of Netflix and Amazon so no one will want to watch
them. Or perhaps Comcast will just charge Netflix a lot of money to
make sure its streams flow smoothly over that "last mile" that the
ISP controls. Or perhaps Comcast will implement tighter and tighter
data caps on the amount of usage a given subscriber can use per
month, but exempt its own content from any such limitations.
It's worth noting—indeed, it's worth stressing—that essentially
none of these scenarios has come to pass over the past 20 years,
despite the lack of Net Neutrality legislation. There have been
occasional cases of this or that issue, but they were generally
either the result of human error, technological breakdowns, or
short-lived policies that customer complaints put an end to. The
closest to anything like the nightmare scenarios above involved
accusations by Netflix that Comcast and other ISPs were
deliberately throttling its streams. Comcast said it was doing no
such thing, a perspective supported by researchers
at MIT and elsewhere who found that despite huge increases
in demand and traffic, Netflix attempted to push its streams via
congested parts of the Internet. Netflix eventually agreed to pay
Comcast
higher fees for what is known as a "peering" arrangement that
is not technically a Net Neutrality issue. What the situation
actually underscores is that for all the gee-whiz magic of the
Internet, it depends ultimately on physical hardware and resources
that somebody somewhere has to build, expand, and pay for. Those
charges to constantly upgrade and expand capacity will ultimately
be borne by content providers such as Netflix, ISPs such as
Comcast, and consumers such as you and me."
" proponents
typically claim that ISPs have monopolies over their local markets,
that they offer shoddy and degraded connections, and that the
United States is way behind other, more civilized countries whose
governments more heavily regulate the Internet.
With that in mind, here are some charts about the current state
of the Internet in the United States and elsewhere, some of which
come from the FCC's own analysis.
FCC
The above comes from the FCC's summary of "Internet
Access Services: Status as of December 31, 2012" (the most
recent document in the series that I found online). Over the
four-year period covered, the number, variety, and speed of
Internet connections increased significantly. That's not something
you would expect if monopoly conditions actually existed."
The above comes from the FCC's summary of "Internet
Access Services: Status as of December 31, 2012" (the most
recent document in the series that I found online). Over the
four-year period covered, the number, variety, and speed of
Internet connections increased significantly. That's not something
you would expect if monopoly conditions actually existed. Given the
increasing centrality of the Internet, you might see more people
signing up for service, but a true monopoly would have no interest
in or need to improve speed or variety of service.
But it turns out, at least according to the FCC—the very agency
that now says it needs to regulate the Internet like a public
utility in order to ensure a free and open Internet—that the idea
of monopoly ISPs is false.
FCC
According to this FCC chart, 80 percent of households in America
have at least two fixed and/or mobile providers that offer "at
least 10 Mbps downstream speeds," which until recently was far
above what the agency concerned high-speed broadband. In 2010, the
FCC defined as service that offered a 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps
upstream.
Just a few weeks ago, it arbitrarily upped its definition to be
25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream. (Net oldtimers will remember
the old days of 56k modems and the like.) At the end of 2012, says
the FCC, fully 96 percent of households had two or more providers
offering 6Mbps downstream and 1.5Mbps upstream service."
"One of the other points that is often raised in Net Neutrality
debates is that the United States lags behind foreign countries via
virtually any comparison: market penetration, connection speed,
cost, you name it. Last November, Bret Swanson, a researcher at The
American Enterprise Institute, produced
a compelling rebuttal to such arguments, which often relied on
misleading data (such as advertised maximum speeds rather than
actual delivered speeds) and dubious measures of network
capabilities. In "Internet traffic as a basic measure of broadband
health," Swanson argues that
Internet traffic volume is an important indicator of broadband
health, as it encapsulates and distills the most important
broadband factors, such as access, coverage, speed, price, and
content availability. US Internet traffic is two to three times
higher than that of most advanced nations, and the United States
generates more Internet traffic per capita and per Internet user
than any major nation except for South Korea.
Here's one of his figures:
AEI
The thrust of Swanson's basic argument is also supported by the
annual "State
of the Internet" reports produced by cloud-computing service
Akamai, which typically shows the United States doing well in most
comparisons."
"To the extent that cable
companies once had absolute local monopolies, it was precisely due
to local governments granting them that. There are all sorts of
things that local, state, and federal governments—not to mention
nominally independent agencies such as the FCC—might do to reduce
or remove barriers to entry for competitors. As FCC Commissioner
Ajit Pai told
Reason in an interview released yesterday,
There are a lot of markets where consumers want and could use
more competition. That’s why since I’ve become the commissioner,
I’ve focused on getting rid of some of the regulatory
underbrush that stands in the way of some upstart competitors
providing that alternative—streamlining local permit rules, getting
more wireless infrastructure out there to give a mobile
alternative, making sure we have enough spectrum in the commercial
marketplace—but these kind of Title II common carrier regulations
ironically will be completely counterproductive. It’s going to
sweep a lot of these smaller providers away who simply don’t have
the ability to comply with all these regulations, and moreover it’s
going to deter investment in broadband networks, so ironically
enough, this hypothetical problem that people worry about is going
to become worse because of the lack of competition.
Pai calls the new rules "a solution that won't work to a problem
that doesn't exist." I think he's right about that and it should
give even the most uncritical supporter of the FCC action pause
that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a robust supporter
of Net Neutrality,
has seen fit to write a "Dear FCC" warning:
The FCC will evaluate “harm” based on consideration of seven
factors: impact on competition; impact on innovation; impact on
free expression; impact on broadband deployment and investments;
whether the actions in question are specific to some applications
and not others; whether they comply with industry best standards
and practices; and whether they take place without the awareness of
the end-user, the Internet subscriber.
There are several problems with this approach. First, it
suggests that the FCC believes it has broad authority to pursue any
number of practices—hardly the narrow, light-touch approach we need
to protect the open Internet. Second, we worry that this rule will
be extremely expensive in practice, because anyone wanting to bring
a complaint will be hard-pressed to predict whether they will
succeed. For example, how will the Commission determine “industry
best standards and practices”? As a practical matter, it is likely
that only companies that can afford years of litigation to answer
these questions will be able to rely on the rule at all. Third, a
multi-factor test gives the FCC an awful lot of discretion,
potentially giving an unfair advantage to parties with insider
influence."
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