Southwest Virginia Blogs

This article talks about Verizon's new claim that net neutrality "limits" the company, and the nothing but a scare tactic of claiming they won't be able to roll out any new services unless they get to erect toll gates.

One thing net neutrality does limit is the ability of one or two big companies from setting up walled gardens that keep consumers locked into a few choices (from, say, Verizon or Comcast). Net neutrality gives consumers and innovative startups a chance to play on a level playing field.

The telcos are way behind the cable companies in broadband customers, and they are desperately trying to get legislators to give them a break. They have cleverly adopted language that makes them sound like they are all for innovation and rolling out new services quickly, but you have to look beyond that to see what the end game is likely to be.

Right now, the picture could get very grim very quickly if legislators fall for all this "We just want to offer great new stuff at great prices." In the short term, we do get some modest competition. But in the long term, communities, their economic future, and local jobs are at stake if all we have is a duopoly with cartel-like pricing and a very limited set of choices for services. A duopoly is not marketplace competition. Vasteras, Sweden has marketplace competition, with 64 service providers selling all kinds of services to local residents and businesses. That's what every community in America ought to have--dozens of providers, not just two.

A distinguished group of technology leaders has begun a Save the Internet campaign, which is intended to provide information to legislators on the network neutrality issue.

Many of the incumbent broadband providers want to start charging differential fees for access to their broadband networks. The effect will be to squeeze much of the innovation and opportunity out of the Internet, leaving only deep pocket companies that can afford to pay the tolls--and that is all they really are.

It's as if our entire Interstate Highway System, formerly free, suddenly had tollbooths at every exit. It would not be good for the economy. And a two tier Internet won't be good for the economy or for communities.

Communities need a stake in the ownership of the Internet; nothing less than their economic future is at stake. If the toll access to the Internet is too high in your community (think rural), companies won't relocate to rural areas. And that means no jobs.

There is ample precedent for communities to take on partial ownership of telecom infrastructure; done correctly, private telecom providers can make even more money, but on a level playing field that is managed for the common good.

Having trouble understanding the issues around network neutrality? Here is a short video that explains it very clearly.

A new Swedish study, via the Drudge Report, says that cellphones appear to raise the risk of brain tumors. People who appear to be at risk are those who have used cellphones for more than 2000 hours in their life, so the risk accumulates the longer that you use a cellphone. The researchers recommended hands-free use of cellphones to get them away from the head.

Cellphones use gigahertz radio frequencies that are also used in microwave ovens. Bluetooth wireless headsets also use gigahertz frequencies, so only wired headsets provide any protection.

Teh Federal Election Commission has clarified rules for political and campaign activity by exempting virtually all kinds of political speech on the Internet from the onerous rules that cover how campaign funds can be spent.

The rules, which surfaced last year, seemed to require onerous reporting by citizen bloggers if they even wrote about political candidates, and if they accepted campaign ads on their Web sites, it was worse. But occasionally government does the right thing.

Bloggers and their writing are much like the pamphleteers that were popular during the early days of the U.S. They are both citizen writers that generally derive little or no income from the activity. Imposing the same rules on bloggers that are required of professionally managed political campaigns made no sense administratively and even less sense in a free speech context.

The Federal government has reached a compromise with Google on the government's request to Google to turn over a chunk of search queries. The Feds claim they need to see what people are searching for so that they can design better child pornography laws.

A federal judge has ordered Google to turn over the URLs (Web addresses) of some of the sites Google indexes, but not the search queries that people type in on the search engine.

Privacy advocates feel this is a reasonable compromise. I can agree with them in the narrow sense that it protects individual privacy rights better, but I still think the whole thing stinks. Since when does the federal government have the right to simply tell a privately owned business, "We want your data?" The only possible justification for a demand like that might be an issue of national security, but this particular demand is wrapped up in the politician's standard mantra, "It's for the kids."

Child pornography is horrendous, and those who traffic in it should be vigorously prosecuted. But surely someone in government is smart enough to figure out how to do that without trampling the rights of private businesses. This ruling sets a precedent--rest assured we will see the government trying to get the records and confidential information of other businesses in the future, on even more flimsy justification. Readers of this blog know that I am no fan of Google, but in this case, I think the company has gotten the short end of the stick.

Doc Searls, one of the tech community's best commentators on technology and its impact on us, has done an outstanding job of explaining network neutrality--what it is, why it has made the Internet successful, and why it needs to be preserved.

He also analyzes the broadband carriers and their dream to turn the Internet into a sophisticated form of cable TV. This is an article that deserves close attention. Here is just one of many key points:

"In fact, the asymmetrical build-outs of service to homes has done enormous harm to market growth by preventing countless small and home Net-based businesses from starting and growing.

Specifically, by provisioning big bandwidth downstream and narrow bandwidth upstream, while blocking ports 25 and 80--in crass violation of the Net's UNIX-derived network model, in addition to the end-to-end principle--the carriers prevent customers from running their own mail and Web servers and whatever server-based businesses might be possible. Again, all the carriers can imagine is Cable TV. That's been their fantasy from the beginning."

The end of network neutrality means the choking off of new engines of economic growth, especially in rural communities and underserved urban neighborhoods. Small businesses and entrepreneurs have been creating jobs at a furious rate over the past decade, fueled in large part by the Internet. If we lose the Internet as we know, to be replaced by glorified TV, communities and neighborhoods lose their future.

Read this article.

Garth Graham is the visionary leader behind Telecommunities Canada; Graham has been thinking about communities and technology longer and with more clarity than most of us, and when Garth talks, I try to shut up and listen. In the hallway between PCNA sessions, I made a casual statement about how "technology is a tool." It's an innocuous phrase that has been uttered by millions of technocrats at one time or another.

But Graham looked me straight in the eyes and said, "Andrew, I have to disagree with you. IP is a social contract, not a tool."

The instant he said it, I knew it was true, and I realized I had missed an important piece of the puzzle. IP (Internet Protocol) is a relatively simple set of rules used by all the individual networks that comprise the "Internet." The IP rules work only because individual network operators have informally agreed to abide by them for the last twenty years or so--an informal social contract.

The alarming proposals for a multi-tiered Internet discard that social contract and replace it with business contracts between network access providers and content providers. Content users are left out completely.

As Garth said, "We can't let this happen." I agree.

Stephen Levy is a knowledgeable technology columnist for Newsweek, and his article on network neutrality is short and articulates the issues clearly. As Levy puts it, the Internet may end up with two classes of service: "steerage and first class," with nothing in between.

Such a split would stop the development of new services, and create de facto monopolies for the companies that are already big--think Google, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN. All four of those companies were tiny once, and the reason they were able to grow was because network neutrality allowed them to.

Once the Internet is split by access providers (the telephone and cable companies, for the most part) into free and fee-based classes of services, Levy, Vint Cerf (one of the original Internet developers), and many other believe innovation and competition will come to a halt.

What worries me is that there are too many calls for legislation. Do we really want Congress deciding how the Internet should be run? I don't think so.

The solution is to break the infrastructure stranglehold that the telephone and cable companies have over communities. Community infrastructure investments will not only get them to play by community rules, but as One Cleveland has shown, they can make money using community infrastructure.

I've borrowed the title of Jeff Chester's article in The Nation. Chester raises alarm bells about the plans of the incumbent broadband providers to create walled gardens that give them near monopoly control over what their subscribers can do and access via their broadband connections.

With the encouragement of network equipment giant Cisco, these companies are beginning to plan for massive snooping into every packet of data that flows in and out of our computers. Using Google as an example, these broadband providers want to build massive dossiers about what you watch, who you call, and what Web sites you visit, so that they can sell advertising space to companies eager to sell you something. The broadband providers are ready to jump to IP-based TV, but not the free-ranging, free for all of the Internet. Instead, you will be able to access only that programming your broadband provider will let cross their network, and it will be packaged much the way Google packages everything--with space for ads.

And if a business wants to use its broadband connection to videoconference with a distant client? Well, that may not work at all, or it will work only by paying special fees. Without the counterbalance of public infrastructure, open to any broadband service provider, this will come to pass in many communities.

Vermont legislators are debating legislation that would provide low interest loans to wireless providers that offer broadband in underserved areas of the state. And even better, the state lawmakers may waive onerous state-required impact reviews and red tape for new wireless towers if local communities have an approved review process in place.

This is exactly what government should be doing--making it easier and less expensive for the private sector to build out broadband infrastructure. The wireless tower changes recognize that broadband wireless towers are usually much lower and less obtrusive than cell towers, and don't require the same level of study and oversight.

Good for Vermont. Let's hope this bill breezes through the legislature and gets passed quickly.

If you are not familiar with the phrase "network neutrality," it is time to start learning more about it, as the issue is moving front and center in the debate about the future of the Internet.

The current Internet is "network neutral," meaning that there is a gentleman's agreement among all network managers that they will allow anyone else's data to cross their network. If you send an email to someone in California, it might traverse several privately owned networks along the way. Network neutrality is what makes the Internet work.

But as I've been writing for some time, the Internet was never designed for video, and the crushing data load of video (hundreds or thousands of times more data than emails and Web pages) is forcing network managers to start considering alternatives to network neutrality.

It is the low end broadband providers (telcos and cable companies) that are suffering. As their customers now routinely download or stream audio and video from sources outside their own network, they have to carry all that traffic, raising their costs and affecting network performance (everything gets slower).

This BBC commentary is a good introduction to some of the issues (I don't agree with everything the author recommends), and here is a critical and important quote from the article:

The phone and cable companies want to be free to charge for new services and make more money, and they argue that it's not up to the government what they do with their networks.

I have to side with the broadband providers in this case. I don't agree with the author that the solution is to re-regulate telecom and turn these companies into de facto arms of the government. We've already tried that, and as the technology changed, it was less and less efficient.

The author talks about the undesirability of having two roads in every town--a well maintained private road (owned by the telcos and cable companies) and a "dirt road" for public use. But in trying to convince us of the correctness of his position, he fails to mention an alternative--that communities build and maintain roads that can be used by everyone, including the cable and telephone companies.

This model already works really well--with vehicular roads, on which an amazing variety of public and private vehicles share that road and its costs and everyone benefits from a single, publicly maintained community road system.

The author's alternative is to have the Federal government deciding for local communities what kind of broadband they need. That's not likely to work well, any more than it is to let the cable or telephone company decide what kind of broadband we need (where we are right now).

Think I'm wrong about relying of the Feds? Ten years after the 1996 Telecom Deregulation Act, the Federal government is still stubbornly insisting that "broadband" is 200 kilobits per second. That's about four times faster than dial up, about two to four times slower than what most of us have via cable and DSL, and about 500 times slower than what the rest of the world thinks is an acceptable broadband speed (100 megabits per second).

So communities have three choices:

• You can let the Federal government decide what is best for your community. And we already have plenty of information about how that is likely to work out.

• You can let a private company with headquarters many states away decide what is best for you community. And we have plenty of information about how that is working out.

• The community can set its own direction for the future, make its own investments, and make decisions locally about what is best for the community.

Which fork in the road is the right one for the economic future of your community?