I’m perplexed by the challenge of referring neutrally to legislation moving through Congress dealing with whether or not the government should regulate Internet service. Work with me as I untangle the Standard Federal Obfuscation™ involved here.

The White House has issued a “Statement of Administration Policy” that deals with S.J. Res. 6 (House companion H.J. Res. 37 passed in April.) The bill is a “resolution of disapproval” under the Congressional Review Act. The CRA allows Congress to reject federal regulations for a period of time after they have been finalized. Resolutions like this enjoy expedited procedures in the Senate, making it harder for Senate leadership to stop them moving.

The Federal Communications Commission voted in December to apply public-utility-style regulation to the provision of Internet service. Congress is moving to reject the FCC’s claim of authority using the CRA, and the president has now said he will veto Congress’ resolution that does that.

Well—the obfuscation continues—actually, the Statement of Administration Policy says “[t]he administration” opposes S.J. Res. 6, and, “If the President is presented with S.J. Res. 6, which would not safeguard the free and open Internet, his senior advisers would recommend that he veto the Resolution.”

At some point, it may be an important detail that the president hasn’t promised a veto yet. His advisers have promised to advise him to veto. OK. Whatever. They work for him. It’s a veto threat.

But, but,… Would these regulations safeguard a “free and open Internet”? The statement says, “Federal policy has consistently promoted an Internet that is open and facilitates innovation and investment, protects consumer choice, and enables free speech.” In a sense, that’s true: When the engineers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency created the Internet protocol and when federal policy opened the Internet to commercial use, this made for the open Internet we enjoy today.

But it’s not federal policy driving these values today. It’s the Internet itself—all of us. Tim Lee ably pointed this out some years ago in his paper, “The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation.” The marketplace demands an open Internet. If there are deviations from the “end-to-end principle” that serve the public better, the market will permit them. The Internet is not the government’s to regulate.

Now, some news reporting has things a little backward. Wired‘s Threat Level blog, for example, carries the headline, “Obama Pledges to Veto Anti-Net Neutrality Legislation.” Headlines need to be short, but it could just as easily and accurately read “Obama Pledges to Veto Anti-Regulation Legislation” because the question is not whether the Internet should be open and neutral, but who should ensure that openness and neutrality. Should neutrality be ensured by market forces—ISPs responding to their customers—or by lawyers and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.?

S.J. Res. 6 would reject the FCC’s claim to regulate the Internet in the name of neutrality. It says nothing about whether or not the Internet should neutral, open, and free. Again, that’s not the government’s call.

Did you follow all that? If you didn’t, you don’t need to. Here’s the summary: President Obama has gone on the record: He supports Internet regulation.

Obama on Record: Supports Internet Regulation is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It might be tempting to laugh at France’s ban on words like “Facebook” and Twitter” in the media. France’s Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel recently ruled that specific references to these sites (in stories not about them) would violate a 1992 law banning “secret” advertising. The council was created in 1989 to ensure fairness in French audiovisual communications, such as in allocation of television time to political candidates, and to protect children from some types of programming.

Sure, laugh at the French. But not for too long. The United States has similarly busy-bodied regulators, who, for example, have primly regulated such advertising themselves. American regulators carefully oversee non-secret advertising, too. Our government nannies equal the French in usurping parents’ decisions about children’s access to media. And the Federal Communications Commission endlessly plays footsie with speech regulation.

In the United States, banning words seems too blatant an affront to our First Amendment, but the United States has a fairly lively “English only” movement. Somehow, regulating an entire communications protocol doesn’t have the same censorious stink.

So it is that our Federal Communications Commission asserts a right to regulate the delivery of Internet service. The protocols on which the Internet runs are communications protocols, remember. Withdraw private control of them and you’ve got a more thoroughgoing and insidious form of speech control: it may look like speech rights remain with the people, but government controls the medium over which the speech travels.

The government has sought to control protocols in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The “crypto wars,” in which government tried to control secure communications protocols, merely presage struggles of the future. Perhaps the next battle will be over BitCoin, an online currency that is resistant to surveillance and confiscation. In BitCoin, communications and value transfer are melded together. To protect us from the scourge of illegal drugs and the recently manufactured crime of “money laundering,” governments will almost certainly seek to bar us from trading with one another and transferring our wealth securely and privately.

So laugh at France. But don’t laugh too hard. Leave the smugness to them.

Government Control of Language and Other Protocols is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

“Google is under siege in Washington like never before,” Politico reports.

In an interview with POLITICO, a Google spokesman argued that a cabal of antitrust lawyers, lobbyists and public relations firms is conspiring against the Internet search giant. The mastermind? Google says it’s Microsoft.

Maybe it’s irony, or maybe it’s payback.

In the 1990s, Microsoft was the tech industry wunderkind that got too big for its britches — and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, then an executive at Sun Microsystems and later Novell, helped knock the software titan down a peg by providing evidence in the government’s antitrust case against it. . . .

But there are also increasing calls from some Silicon Valley competitors and Washington-based public interest groups for the Justice Department to launch a sweeping antitrust probe of Google. The European Union and the state of Texas have reviews under way.

Google says its rivals are fueling the attacks.

You could have read it here first. In the November-December 2010 issue (pdf) of Cato Policy Report, Adam Thierer wrote, “The high-tech policy scene within the Beltway has become a cesspool of backstabbing politics, hypocritical policy positions, shameful PR tactics, and bloated lobbying budgets.” The telcos, the broadcasters, the wireless industry, the entertainment industry — they all want the federal government to crush their competitors. And, he said, “Everybody — and I do mean everybody — wants Google dead, right now. Google currently serves as the Great Satan in this drama — taking over the role Microsoft filled a decade ago — as just about everyone views it with a combination of envy and enmity.” But then:

Of course, in a sense, Google had it coming. The company has been the biggest cheerleader in the push to impose “Net neutrality” regulation on the Internet’s physical infrastructure providers, which would let the FCC toss property rights out the window and regulate broadband networks to their heart’s content.

Meanwhile, along with Skype and others, Google wants the FCC to impose “openness” mandates on wireless networks that would allow the agency to dictate terms of service. It’s no surprise, then, that the cable, telco, and wireless crowd are firing back and now hinting we need “search neutrality” to constrain the search giant’s growing market power. File it under “mutually assured destruction” for the Information Age.

Google had it coming in another sense, having joined the decade-long effort by myriad Silicon Valley actors to hobble Microsoft through incessant antitrust harassment.Google has hammered Microsoft in countless legal and political proceedings here and abroad.

Thierer also noted that you could have predicted all this by reading Cato publications a decade earlier, such as Cypress semiconductor CEO T. J. Rodgers’s 2000 manifesto, “Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations with Washington, D.C.” (pdf). Or indeed Milton Friedman’s 1999 speech on “The Business Community’s Suicidal Impulse“: “You will rue the day when you called in the government. From now on the computer industry, which has been very fortunate in that it has been relatively free of government intrusion, will experience a continuous increase in government regulation.”

You (could have) read it here first.

Google under Siege in the Corporate State is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I see ACLU’s Jay Stanley has penned a reply to my post from a couple weeks back on the civil liberties group’s report arguing for the urgency of net neutrality regulation. The main thrust of my post was that many of the examples advanced to show there’s an imminent threat to the open Internet, requiring regulatory action on the double, don’t really show anything of the sort. Stanley allows that some of their examples are “not violations of Internet network neutrality in the strictest sense” but that they “speak to the motives, intent, and trustworthiness of major telecommunications firms in treating the speech of their customers fairly.” But I’m not sure they really show that either. In fact, if I can be forgiven a little digression, two more egregious corporate offenses against net neutrality that turn out not to be.

First, one I’d missed from the ACLU report: Vague terms of service agreements. Apparently, AT&T’s terms of service had a list of grounds for suspension of service that ended with the rather nebulous provision bolded below:

AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.

Based on the company’s explanation, it sounds like they intended this as a sort of catch-all for behavior that wasn’t covered by their policy or the law, but was sufficiently clearly abusive to damage the reputation of a provider who allowed it. But you can certainly understand why people read it as reserving the right to disconnect people who criticize the company, and in any event, it does seem way too vague: Who wants to risk losing their service based on such ill-defined criteria? Significantly, though, I don’t see anybody claiming that AT&T or Verizon (which had similar language) ever actually did suspend a user’s account for this reason. It appears to have been one more overbroad bit of legal boilerplate drafted by a lawyer paid to shield the company from liability in as many contingencies as possible, and promptly changed when users complained. More importantly, and at the risk of stating the obvious, this isn’t really a question of network architecture. Such a broad provision could surely be enforced in a way that was contrary to the spirit of the open Internet, but it’s ultimately a provision about how AT&T treats its customers, not about how routers treat packets. Many things might be wrong with it, but violating the end-to-end principle embodied in the TCP/IP protocol isn’t one of them. Indeed, there’s nothing really Internet specific about this at all: An offline business could attempt to refuse service to people who publicly criticize the company in the newspapers. Mercifully, such behavior seems rare, but if you’re worried about the potential for a certain class of abusive contracts aimed at squelching speech isn’t that where the remedy should aim?

Second (via Seton Motley), there’s the ongoing scuffle between Cablevision and Fox. Presumably in hopes that Cablevision would be under more pressure to cut a deal for Fox cable channels if their subscribers couldn’t just get Fox content online, Fox blocked access to their Internet video content for Cablevision subscribers, prompting Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge to fret about the danger to the open Internet. He acknowledges that normally, folks worried about neutrality have focused on the threat of ISPs leveraging access over the pipes to control content, but asserts that “it shouldn’t matter who is keeping consumers away from the lawful content.”

This is just weird. Media companies “keep consumers away from lawful content” all the time! Netflix won’t let me stream their movies unless my subscription is paid up. If I try to access academic articles on JSTOR from home, whoops, I’m blocked! I have to be visiting from an IP address at Cato or some other academic institution that’s made a deal with JSTOR for access. BBC won’t let me watch Sherlock or Doctor Who on their Web site, because they’ve sold the U.S. rights to PBS and SyFy, respectively. “Net Neutrality” and “Open Internet” have a dizzying array of different definitions, but even so, the idea that either obligates content providers to make their content equally available, for free, to every user is… novel.

I harp on this because I think it indicates how muddled a lot of the debate over “neutrality” has gotten. People have a whole welter of heterogeneous concerns about the future of the Internet that increasingly seem to be lumped under the rubric of “non-neutrality” or “network discrimination,” which both obscures the plurality of potential problems and begs the question of whether, assuming a policy remedy is necessary, “neutrality” regulation is actually the ideal silver bullet response to all these diverse concerns. If there were no downside to mandated neutrality—if there were no risk of opening the door to regulatory gamesmanship, and if every imaginable deviation from neutrality were plainly harmful—then this might not be such a big deal. If there are potential downsides, though, it behooves us to get a little more granular and look specifically at what we’re concerned about, and whether there are less sweeping mechanisms that would work to address the problem.

The ACLU puts the threat of content-based restriction of expression at the forefront of their argument, but this also seems like the concern with the weakest empirical basis, even in a relatively oligopolistic broadband market. First, to the extent that content-based filtering would be executed by means of Deep Packet Inspection, it would almost certainly run afoul of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which permits carriers to “intercept” the contents of a communication only when this is a “necessary incident” to the provision of their service. As my colleague Tim Lee lays out at greater length in his excellent paper “The Durable Internet,” there is ample evidence that consumers will react with enormous hostility to efforts to literally cut off their access to the sites they want to visit.

If we’re worried about wholesale blocking of domains, then, I think transparency-based regulation should be sufficient. That is, an ISP claiming to offer “Internet access” shouldn’t be able to restrict access to a site while making it look as though it’s the result of some kind of technical problem—perhaps even the blocked site’s fault. On the other hand, if Comcast wants to openly and transparently offer the option of a whitelisted “family plan” to conservative parents who don’t feel up to fussing with client-based blocking software, that strikes me as the sort of limitation on “expression” that is neither a serious threat to the larger Internet architecture—the effect is only to substitute for filtering the parents would do client-side were they more tech savvy—nor a proper civil liberties concern. Again, I expect a transparency requirement would be sufficient to preclude misbehavior on this front precisely because most consumers don’t want their carrier deciding what sites they’re allowed to access, and this, more than the fear of pressure from advocacy groups or even the FCC, will tend to make ISPs hesitant to do so if they can’t do it covertly. At the very least, again, if there are potential downsides to neutrality regulation, I can’t fathom why you wouldn’t try this more modest step first and watch to see if some more radical remedy is necessary.

Of course, consumer pressure is more effective in competitive markets, and as Stanley notes, if you focus on wireline broadband, the picture is not that encouraging in much of the United States. But the fact that wireline may have the characteristics of a natural monopoly doesn’t mean that last-mile broadband necessarily does: What sectors are “natural” monopolies turns out to be highly contingent on the available technology. As 4G wireless networks roll out, and as users consider the appeal of cutting the cord, the stranglehold of the incumbent monopolists and duopolists is attenuated. Wireless broadband, of course, is not a perfect substitute—fiber will probably always have a significant speed advantage—but imperfect substitutes can exercise competitive pressure too. Rail is a natural monopoly, but Amtrak still has to worry that dissatisfied consumers will drive, fly, or take Bolt Bus—even though these alternatives differ from train travel along multiple dimensions.

Moreover, specific deviations from neutrality that respond to consumer demand may themselves help secure the very competition Stanley and I both agree will help discipline carriers and keep deviations from neutrality limited to those that serve genuine consumer interests. So—and consider this a strictly illustrative hypothetical, please—Netflix now accounts for something like 20 percent of downstream bandwidth at peak home use times. Probably there are no small number of people who’d find it appealing to cut the cord if they were assured they could come home to a movie or an episode of Firefly streaming smoothly in HD. Their cable provider, of course, can guarantee this by bundling your Internet with a dedicated video service running over the same pipes—and, of course, no pretense that there’s any parity of treatment between those two types of “traffic.” It’s at least conceivable that permitting similar bundling and cross-subsidy between wireless broadband and Netflix could hasten the demise of the effective wireline duopoly that exists in many markets, eroding the very conditions that undergird the argument for fearing non-neutral routing could be anti-consumer.

Now, to be sure, you can paint a doomsday scenario based on extrapolation from this model that I find every bit as unappealing as Stanley does: A Balkanized Internet on which every ISP has exclusive deals within one player in each online service category to provide high-bandwidth routing, while the rest of the Net limps along at speeds too slow to make innovative services viable unless backed by big corporate money. (Though this would really be a concern about innovation, not free expression: There’s actually very little reason to fear that deliberate viewpoint discrimination by ISPs under transparency rules is either likely or, more to the point, feasible.) If this were to start to happen on a larger scale—despite the demonstrable preference of most consumers for an open Internet over such a curated walled-garden model, it would be worth revisiting the question. But to impose architectural mandates in advance of such experimentation—to assume a priori that any and all deviations from neutrality would impose such great costs to expression and innovation as to trump any possible consumer gains in price or quality of service—seems very much contrary to the spirit of end-to-end.

More Net Neutrality Violations That Aren’t is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I’m accustomed to finding myself on the same page as the American Civil Liberties Union–and in particular with the razor sharp Jay Stanley, who heads their Technology & Liberty program. But their recent report urging the necessity of net neutrality regulation only makes me more skeptical. I’ve always pretty much shared the position of my colleague Tim Lee: The open, end-to-end nature of the Internet is an important driver of both innovation and free expression–important enough that if it were systematically threatened, there would be a decent case for regulatory intervention. But that end-to-end architecture is also pretty resilient, even if some ISPs might wish otherwise. And while it’s easy to think of deviations from neutrality that would be pernicious, it’s also not hard to imagine specific non-neutral practices that might benefit consumers without undermining that broader end-to-end structure. The real policy question ought to be how to get enough competition in broadband markets that consumer choice selects for the latter against the former. Since broadband isn’t all that competitive in many regions, the question is whether we can afford to wait and deal with problems as they arise in a narrowly tailored way, or whether there’s some urgent need for a broad architectural mandate.

The ACLU says there is, and cites ten terrifying “abuses” that supposedly show the need to legislate now. But as I read over the list, I found I couldn’t help but think of those old Saturday Night Life “Coffee Talk” sketches, where a farklempt Mike Meyers would throw out such food for thought as: “Grape Nuts contain neither grapes nor nuts, discuss.” Because ACLU’s list of abuses mostly consists of examples that either aren’t actually net neutrality violations, or for which there are obvious remedies that don’t require neutrality regulation. Let’s discuss:

• AT&T’s “jamming” of a Pearl Jam concert, in which singer Eddie Vedder’s remarks attacking then-president George Bush were bleeped out of a webcast. Obviously, it would be pretty troubling if your ISP were filtering your datastream to remove political content of which it disapproved. But that’s not what happened here at all. AT&T, via a deal with the Lollapalooza music festival, was streaming the Pearl Jam concert on its own content hub. Now, obviously, whoever was editing the stream and decided to treat criticism of Bush as equivalent to profanity made a highly dubious judgment call, but the point is that AT&T was acting as a content provider here, not a carrier: The filtering happened before the content hit the network, and no proposed neutrality rules I’m aware of would have prohibited this.
• BellSouth’s “censorship” of Myspace. According to BellSouth’s own account, a glitch in their system temporarily left their outraged users unable to access the popular social networking site. “Some suspected” that the company was actually testing some kind of tiered access system, and decided to do so by blocking a popular site without notice, antagonizing their paying customers. Some also suspect the moon landing was faked, but I wouldn’t make it the basis of legislation.
• Verizon briefly denied the abortion-rights group NARAL access to a program whereby users who texted a dedicated “short code” could sign up for SMS updates; the company almost immediately reversed its decision. This is, obviously, not a case involving Internet neutrality, and while it’s certainly a case involving the ability of a network owner to discriminate between users of its network services, the issues involved are pretty different. These “short code” services often permit users to either sign up for fee-based updates or donate money to causes via charge added directly to their monthly phone bill. As indicated by their prompt reversal, the rationale for denying NARAL here–desire to avoid partnering with causes on either side of a “controversial” issue–was probably ill considered, but this is clearly a case where the company is partnering with the provider in a way that goes beyond carriage, because they’re also effectively acting as a payment processor. That means they’ll have an interest in vetting partners in a way you wouldn’t expect a mere carrier to vet every content provider on the network. Even if you think this particular type of discrimination ought to be prohibited, this is really a distinct case raising issues separate from those involved in the Internet Neutrality debate, and ought to be considered separately.
• Proposed filtering for copyright infringement. This is indeed a terrible and, in practice, unimplementable idea–for one because there’s no easy way to distinguish illegal from legal copying (as when I stream music I’ve purchased from my desktop or server to a mobile device). There’s also a pretty good case that this would already be illegal under federal wiretap laws…which may be why the “proposals,” referenced in an article from January 2008, haven’t actually gotten anywhere.

There are a handful of other cases that either may or definitely do count as potentially troubling neutrality violations–the most famous being Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent traffic. At least two involve ISPs in Canada, which I wouldn’t have thought is the FCC’s problem. In some of these cases, I’d even agree that regulatory action is justified–but by the FTC, not the FCC. If you are advertising access to “the Internet,” then choking off access to whole classes of popular services or degrading throughput well below advertised speeds, well, that’s what we call a deceptive business practice. (In a more libertarian world, this might be handled by another mechanism; in the world we’ve got, it’s the FTC’s lookout.) Maybe there’s a case to be made for more specific transparency rules to establish when and how consumers have to be informed about non-neutral routing policies–certainly no ISP should be allowed to block access to a website and conceal the policy by making it look like a technical glitch–but I have no idea why you’d make the leap to a sweeping architectural mandate before trying something along those lines.

More generally, I’m a little puzzled about why the ACLU is weighing in on this at all. It’s true that ISP routing practices, like the practices of many private firms, could have implications for “free expression” broadly conceived. But not everything that might promote or hinder expression is part of the civil liberties portfolio, which has traditionally been limited to restraints on freedom imposed by government. To the extent federal policies inhibit broadband competition, one might say the government is in some sense complicit in whatever private policies restrict expression, but here again, the obvious remedy is to look for more pro-competitive policies. In any event, this is far enough outside their usual wheelhouse that you’d think it would make more sense for them to remain, well… neutral on this one.

The Phantom Menaces in the ACLU’s Case for Net Neutrality is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This morning on WNYC in New York City, I debated Josh Silver of the pro-Internet-regulation group Free Press. It was a healthy exchange of views, except for a few barbs and innuendos thrown by Silver, who is obviously frustrated by his group’s lack of progress in seeking a “government takeover of the Internet.” (He wanted to debate in simple, ideological terms like that, so I indulge here.)

What was most interesting to me was how unsophisticated Silver is with respect to government and regulation. Take a look at his plea:

What we’re asking for—what we need are regulatory agencies that are not captured by industry and that actually act on behalf of the American public. And that’s what they were created to do. The FCC—1934, with the advent of radio—was created to make sure that the public interest was protected. And what we’ve seen is industry capture of regulatory agencies has made those agencies fail again and again and again.

And the only thing that’s gonna work is if the Obama administration and the FCC stand up and say, “No more business as usual. We are going to protect net neutrality. We’re going to protect competition, and make sure there’s choices for consumers. And we’re going to end the status quo in Washington that has really broken our entire political system.”

The Obama administration and the FCC did stand up and say “no more business as usual,” but that’s what politicians do to seduce voters. Then, once in power, they go about business as usual. Lucy always yanks away the football, Charlie Brown.

Silver is not alone in having these sweet, sad “good government” sentiments. Many of my interlocutors, with whom I often share outcome goals, believe strongly in achieving those goals by remaking governmental and political systems so that they finally “work.” They believe so strongly in this approach that they seem to think it’s just around the corner—if only we prohibit some speech here, some petitioning of the government there. Y’know, “take the money out of politics.”

Hopefully this fantasy will never come true, because it requires reversing fundamental rights such as free speech in all its instantiations—a handover of power from people to the government and elites that run it.

In the absence of that perfected, all-powerful government—thank heavens—we must organize the society’s resources using the best machine we’ve got for discovering consumers’ interests and delivering on them: an unhampered marketplace, now energized and enhanced by the Internet.

Advocates of Regulation Are to Charlie Brown as Washington, D.C., Is to Lucy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Washington Post editorializes this morning on the “Google-Verizon” proposal for government regulation of the Internet:

For more than a decade, “net neutrality” — a commitment not to discriminate in the transmission of Internet content — has been a rule tacitly understood by Internet users and providers alike.

But in April, a court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission has no regulatory authority over Internet service providers. For many, this put the status quo in jeopardy. Without the threat of enforcement, might service providers start shaping the flow of traffic in ways that threaten the online meritocracy, in which new and established Web sites are equally accessible and sites rise or fall on the basis of their ability to attract viewers?

What a Washington-centric view of the world, to think that net neutrality has been maintained all this time by the fear of an FCC clubbing. Deviations from net neutrality haven’t happened because neutrality is the best, most durable engineering principle for the Internet, and because neutral is the way consumers want their Internet service.

Should it be cast in stone by regulation, locking in the pro-Google-and-Verizon status quo? No. The way the Internet works should continue to evolve, experiments with non-neutrality failing one after another . . . until perhaps one comes along that serves consumers better! The FCC would be nothing but a drag on innovation and a bulwark protecting Google and Verizon’s currently happy competitive circumstances.

I’ll give the Post one thing: It represents Washington, D.C. eminently well. The Internet should be regulated because it’s not regulated.

“If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

What Was That Ronald Reagan Line Again? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) sent out an email today suggesting that WiFi is threatened by the Google-Verizon “deal” on ‘net neturality regulation.

The Google-Verizon framework was written so as not to apply to wireless Internet services,” says Franken. “If you use wi-fi or access the Internet on your phone, this is a serious problem.

This doesn’t exhibit a basic understanding of the technologies. WiFi is a wireless technology, but it’s not what they’re talking about when they say “wireless.” They’re talking about the communications services provided by wireless carriers. iPhones switch back and forth between AT&T’s service and WiFi pretty seamlessly, so the error is forgiveable—unless, say, you’re someone who claims authority to regulate these technologies.

But perhaps Senator Franken does not hold himself out as having that authority. What struck me about the missive is Senator Franken’s somewhat inverted take on power arrangements in the federal government:

This evening, I’ll be speaking at an FCC hearing in Minneapolis. I’ll urge the commissioners to reject the Google-Verizon framework, stop the Comcast/NBC merger, and take action to keep the Internet free and open.

Folks, Article I, section 1 of the United States Constitution creates the United States Senate, with section 3 describing the Senate’s makeup and some procedures.

The Federal Communications Commission is not a constitutional body. The best view is that Congress has no authority to establish an FCC like we have today. The better view is that Congress should not maintain the sprawling FCC we have today. And the only correct view is that FCC is a creation of Congress, beneath it in every relevant respect.

Senator Franken is supposed to oversee the FCC, not act as a supplicant, “urging” it to do x, y, and z.

Does it matter a lot? No. Senator Franken is mostly making a symbolic appeal to gin up constituent support. But he’s also symbolizing the abasement of the legislative branch to an independent agency that has no constitutional pedigree.

Cato’s Constitution Day conference is September 16th. Obvious issues like “Senator or Independent Agency: Who is the Boss of Whom?” won’t be on the docket….

And Don’t Trust Politicians With Government Either is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Google and Verizon’s proposed framework for net neutrality regulation has provoked cries of protest from advocates of aggressive regulation at places like Free Press and Public Knowledge. Some of the loudest objections have concerned the distinction between the “public Internet,” which (at least for wireline broadband) would be subject to neutrality requirements, and vaguely defined “differentiated” or “managed” services—presumably things like IPTV or digital telephone service—which would not. This, according to the pro-regulation camp, would amount to a massive loophole that defeats the purpose of imposing neutrality rules. As Public Knowledge writes in their press release:

Thus, it is conceivable under the agreement that a network provider could devote 90% of its broadband capacity to these priority services and 10% to the best efforts Internet. If managed services are allowed to cannibalize the best efforts Internet, whatever protections are agreed to for the latter become, for all intents and purposes, meaningless.

This may be right. But if so, it sounds like a reason to be chary of the whole regulatory project. Neutrality or no neutrality, after all, there are a variety of ways to get digital content from producers to subscribers. Traditionally, the cable running to your home comprised separate dedicated channels for cable TV and broadband Internet traffic—though the trend now is toward a more efficient model where the TV content is also delivered as packet-switched data. If you’d rather watch Jersey Shore from the Jersey Shore, you can stream your video to a mobile device like a tablet or smartphone via Internet, but that’s hardly the only way to get your Snooki fix: There’s also, for instance, Digitial Video Broadcasting Satellite to Handheld (DVB-SH) or Qualcomm’s MediaFLO operating on their own dedicated frequencies.  Imposing neutrality rules on wireless broadband (as the Google/Verizon proposal would not — again, to the dismay of regulation fans) shouldn’t affect these services.

My concern, then, is that if neutrality rules foreclose the possibility of cross-subsidy from the providers of subscription-based video streaming or VoIP services, these alternatives become more attractive. Maybe Netflix or Hulu Plus want to be able to offer a deal where your subscription price includes priority delivery of their packets to your smartphone or tablet, making non-WiFi video streaming feasible even if you haven’t sprung for that kind of top-shelf bandwidth for all your wireless data. If neutrality regulation forbids that kind of deal, even with respect to these kinds of “managed services,” one possible effect is to skew investment away from building out next-gen IP networks and toward these kinds of niche services, which strikes me as inefficient. Indeed, it’s precisely the effect Public Knowledge seems to fear, and there’s no obvious reason to suppose that it’s going to be a big problem within IP-based broadband services, but not affect the choice between alternative modes of digital content delivery.

I should close with the caveat that I haven’t looked very closely at the economics here, so while I think the effect I’ve just sketched is theoretically plausible enough, I couldn’t say with any confidence how significant it’s going to be in practice. That said, given that the case for neutrality regulation seems to rest on a smattering of genuine cases of bad behavior by providers and a whole lot of dire speculation about consumer-unfriendly practices that might emerge, I’ll permit myself a little extra latitude to deal in hypotheticals.

Net Neutrality and Unintended Consequences is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The New York Times starts its commentary on proposed Internet regulations with a clever ad hominem argument: “The Republican attack on the Federal Communications Commission’s proposal to classify broadband Internet access as a telecommunications service sounded a lot like the G.O.P. talking points on health care reform.”

The GOP are being like themselves. Accordingly, Times readers should think their viewpoint is yucky. It’s not the most substantive argument you’ll come across today.

There are good reasons not to encumber the Internet with regulations designed for the telephone system. Here are four: The Internet is not like the telephone system, and the FCC  doesn’t have the institutional ability to manage a changing, competitive system of networks. Extending “universal service” telephone taxes to the Internet will drive down adoption and frustrate universal service goals. The FCC is subject to capture by the very interests from which the Times thinks regulation would “protect.” The Internet’s large cadre of technologists and active consumers will do a better job than the FCC of protecting consumers’ interests. 

But ad hominem is more fun. So let’s ask why the New York Times didn’t disclose that, as a content provider, it has a dog in the fight? Net neutrality regulation would act as a subsidy to content providers like the Times, ultimately paid by consumers as higher prices for Internet access.

Internet Regulation: How About This Ad Hominem? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the fall of 2007, word emerged that Comcast had degraded the Internet traffic of some customers, whose use of a protocol called BitTorrent interfered with other Comcast customers’ Internet access.

Comcast handled it badly, and sites like TechLiberationFront covered the “Comcast Kerfuffle” extensively. Consumers prefer unfiltered access to the Internet.

By springtime, Comcast had sorted things out and made a deal with BitTorrent to develop a neutral traffic-management protocol.

Four months later, the FCC weighed in, finding that Comcast had acted badly and telling Comcast not to do that again. Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit concluded that the FCC exceeded its authority and reversed the FCC’s order against Comcast.

The court’s decision marks another turning point in the debate over whether the federal government should regulate Internet access services. What’s entertaining about it is that the problem was solved two years ago by market processes—sophisticated Internet users, a watchdog press, advocacy groups, and interested consumers communicating with one another over the Internet.

The next step will be for advocates to run to Congress, asking it to give the FCC authority to fix the problems of two years ago.  But slow-moving, technologically unsophisticated bureaucrats do not know better than consumers and technologists how to run the Internet. The FCC’s “net neutrality” hopes are nothing more than public utility regulation for broadband. If they get that authority, your online experience will be a little more like dealing with the water company or the electric company and a little less like using the Internet.

As I’ve noted before, Tim Lee’s is the definitive paper. The Internet is far more durable than regulators and advocates imagine. And regulators are far less capable of neutrally arbitrating what’s in the public interest than most people realize.

The FCC doesn’t have authority to regulate the Internet. Congress and the president shouldn’t give it that authority.

The FCC Doesn’t Have Authority to Regulate the Internet–and Shouldn’t is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

For more technical audiences, I wrote recently on the Tech Liberation Front blog about Google’s claim to favor “openness” when, in fact, its crown jewels—search and ad serving—are closed systems.

Google is “free to be wrong about philosophy, of course,” I wrote. “It doesn’t matter at all—except when Google tries to impose its philosophy on others. And in the debate over ‘net neutrality’ regulation it has done exactly that.”

Now Google is in the sights of those proposing public utility regulation of Internet search. It would be entertaining ironic comeuppance for Google, but “search neutrality” regulation would ossify an innovative business and deprive consumers of the benefits of competition.

‘Search Neutrality’ Regulation? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Former Google executive turned Obama administration deputy chief technology officer Andrew McLaughlin made some unfortunate comments at a law school technology conference last week equating private network management to government censorship as it is practiced in China.

By many accounts, President Obama’s visit to China was unimpressive. It apparently included a press conference at which no questions were allowed and government censorship of the president’s anti-censorship comments. On its heels, McLaughlin equated Chinese government censorship with network management by U.S. Internet service providers.

“If it bothers you that the China government does it, it should bother you when your cable company does it,” McLaughlin said. That line is wrong on at least two counts.

First, your cable company doesn’t do it. There have been two cases in which ISPs interfered with traffic in ways that are generally regarded as wrongful.  Comcast slowed down BitTorrent file sharing traffic in some places for a period of time, did a poor job of disclosing it, and relented when the practice came to light. (People who don’t know the facts will argue that the FCC stepped in, but market pressures had solved the problem before the FCC did anything.) The second was a 2005 case in which a North Carolina phone company/ISP called Madison River Communications allegedly blocked Vonage VoIP traffic.

In neither of these anecdotes did the ISP degrade Internet traffic because of its content—because of the information any person was trying to communicate to another. Comcast was trying to make sure that its customers could get access to the Internet despite some bandwidth hogs on its network. Madison River was apparently trying to keep people using its telephone lines rather than making Internet phone calls. That’s a market no-no, but not censorship.

Second, if the latter were happening, Chinese government censorship and corporate censorship would have no moral equivalency. In a free country, the manager of a private network can say to customers, “You may not transmit certain messages over our network.” People who don’t like that contract term can go to other networks, and they surely would. (Tim Lee’s paper, The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality Without Regulation, shows that ownership of networks and platforms does not equate to control of their content.)

When the government of China forces networks and platforms to remove content that it doesn’t like, that demand comes ultimately from the end of a gun. Governments like China’s imprison and kill their people for expressing disfavored views and for organizing to live freer lives. This has no relationship to cable companies’ network management practices, even when these ISPs deviate from consumer demand.

McLaughlin is a professional colleague who has my esteem. I defended Google’s involvement in the Chinese market during his tenure there. But if he lacks grounding in the fundamentals of freedom—thinking that private U.S. ISPs and the Chinese government are part of some undifferentiated mass of authority—I relish the chance to differ with him.

Mistaken Moral Equivalency is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The American Consumer Institute has released a collection of essays addressing the likely consequences of ”‘Net Neutrality” regulation for investment in broadband and for consumer welfare. These are important things to consider, in case it needs saying.

Net Neutrality Regulation: Consequences for Investment and Consumer Welfare is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Though I hadn’t heard of it before, I was delighted to see a publication called VOIP News cite the Cato Institute as one of 15 “Greatest Enemies of Net Neutrality.” As VOIP News says, we are indeed a “voice of reason during political debates.”

Alas, I’m selectively quoting. What they actually said, snidely, was that Cato is a “hired voice of reason during political debates, because of its pseudo-academic affiliations.” (I don’t know why they italicized “voice of reason” – I always thought Reason was the voice of reason.)

But my selective quotation is as accurate as the selective research that VOIP News did for this fluffy hit piece. You see, Cato recently published a lengthy paper that articulates the benefits of net neutrality (referred to as the end-to-end principle).

Where do you find that in the paper? Here’s the first paragraph of the executive summary:

An important reason for the Internet’s remarkable growth over the last quarter century is the “end-to-end” principle that networks should confine themselves to transmitting generic packets without worrying about their contents. Not only has this made deployment of internet infrastructure cheap and efficient, but it has created fertile ground for entrepreneurship. On a network that respects the end-to-end principle, prior approval from network owners is not needed to launch new applications, services, or content.

The paper expresses well-founded concerns about net neutrality regulation—taking a good engineering practice and making a mandate of it for lawyers and bureaucrats to implement. From the executive summary’s third paragraph:

New regulations inevitably come with unintended consequences. Indeed, today’s network neutrality debate is strikingly similar to the debate that produced the first modern regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission. Unfortunately, rather than protecting consumers from the railroads, the ICC protected the railroads from competition by erecting new barriers to entry in the surface transportation marketplace. Other 20th-century regulatory agencies also limited competition in the industries they regulated. Like these older regulatory regimes, network neutrality regulations are likely not to achieve their intended aims.

It’s tough sledding, working through most of a one-page executive summary. But many publications go that far in researching the pieces they publish.

I do sincerely appreciate the nod to our prominence in this debate. I hope VOIP News does a better job of portraying where we stand and why in the future.

VOIP News: Cato Is Tops! But Let’s Clarify Something is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

One of the perennial tropes of the network neutrality debate has been the tendency of the pro-regulation side to paint it as a David-and-Goliath struggle between big, evil corporations and the little guy. Way back in 2006, James Gattuso pointed out how silly this is: in fact, the push for network neutrality is backed by some of the largest companies in Silicon Valley. Julian points out a particularly lazy example of this kind of ad hominem that happens to target Cato: It seems that we’re one of the “15 greatest enemies of net neutrality.” And that along with CEI, Cato “seems to draw its funding from a smattering of every major corporation ever to fund lobbyists.”

As Julian points out, if “VoIP News” had done its homework, it might have discovered that Cato makes its annual report freely available online. Then they they would have noticed that corporate support accounts for about 1 percent of Cato’s budget, and that none of Cato’s corporate funders are major opponents of network neutrality regulation.

Shoddy reporting aside, the “VoIP News” article does actually highlight an important point: the people who built the Internet are deeply split on the issue of regulating the Internet, with eminent computer scientists including Bob Kahn (co-inventor of the Internet’s TCP/IP protocols with Vint Cerf) and Dave Farber (another networking pioneer) on the anti-regulation side. And based on conversations I’ve had here at Princeton, Kahn and Farber are far from the only computer scientists who are skeptical that the FCC is up to the job of regulating the Internet.

In a vacuous appearance on Rachel Maddow last week, blogger Xeni Jardin cited Vint Cerf’s support of regulation and urged viewers to “side with the geeks who actually built the Internet.” She did not, of course, mention that Kahn and Farber, who fit that description as well as Cerf does, are on the other side. “The geeks” are as split on this issue as everyone else.

Update: Tim Carney has an excellent article making a similar point: Internet companies like Google and Amazon, who have lobbied hard for network neutrality, gave overwhelmingly to Obama over McCain in the 2008 election. This doesn’t prove Obama and Chairman Genachowski are insincere in their support for network neutrality. But it does mean we should take both side’s arguments with a grain of salt.

Siding with the Geeks on Network Neutrality is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Jeff Eisenach and Adam Thierer have a great essay in The American honoring the 50th anniversary of Ronald Coase’s article “The Federal Communications Commission.” It’s timely given the FCC’s proposal to establish public utility-style regulation of the Internet under the banner “net neutrality,” and it’s a good general warning to Neo-Progressives who “see market failure as the source of most problems, and government as the centerpiece of most solutions.”

How Did the FCC Come to Acquire This Power? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Some people have labored under the impression that “net neutrality” regulation was about the government stepping in to ensure that large corporations would not control the Internet. Now that the issue is truly joined, it is clear (as exhibited in this Wall Street Journal story) that the debate is about one set of corporate interests battling another set of corporate interests about the Internet, each seeking to protect or strengthen its business model. The FCC is surfing the debate pursuing a greater role for itself, meaning more budget and power.

Tim Lee’s paper, The Durable Internet, dispels the idea that owners of Internet infrastructure can actually control the Internet. The preferred approach to “net neutrality” is to let Internet users decide what they want from their ISPs and let ISPs and content companies do unmediated battle with one another to create and capture the greatest value from the Internet ecosystem.

If the FCC were to reduce its power by freeing up more wireless spectrum—either selling it as property or dedicating it to commons treatment—competition to provide Internet service would strengthen consumers’ hands.

‘Net Neutrality’ Regs: Corporate Interests Do Battle is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In an effort to achieve “network neutrality” online, the FCC is starting to write new regulations for Internet providers.  Reuters reports:

U.S. communications regulators voted unanimously Thursday to support an open Internet rule that would prevent telecom network operators from barring or blocking content based on the revenue it generates.

The proposed rule now goes to the public for comment until Jan. 14, after which the Federal Communications Commissions will review the feedback and possibly seek more comment. A final rule is not expected until the spring of next year.

Cato Director of Information Policy Studies Jim Harper appeared on Fox News this week to discuss the FCC decision. “This is governmental tinkering with a market place that is working really well and growing right now,” said Harper. “The last thing we need is to cut that off.”

Watch:

There are ways to achieve net neutrality without regulation, says Timothy B. Lee:

An important reason for the Internet’s remarkable growth over the last quarter century is the “end-to-end” principle that networks should confine themselves to transmitting generic packets without worrying about their contents. Not only has this made deployment of internet infrastructure cheap and efficient, but it has created fertile ground for entrepreneurship. On a network that respects the end-to-end principle, prior approval from network owners is not needed to launch new applications, services, or content.

…Like these older regulatory regimes, network neutrality regulations are likely not to achieve their intended aims. Given the need for more competition in the broadband marketplace, policymakers should be especially wary of enacting regulations that could become a barrier to entry for new broadband firms.

Read the whole thing.

Understanding the Consequences of Internet Regulation is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Some of the most prominent Internet companies sent a letter yesterday asking for protection from market forces. Among them: Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Twitter.

A Washington Post story summarizes their concerns: “[W]ithout a strong anti-discrimination policy, companies like theirs may not get a fair shot on the Internet because carriers could decide to block them from ever reaching consumers.”

No ISP could block access to these popular services and survive, of course. What they could do is try to charge the most popular services a higher tariff to get their services through. Thus, weep the helpless, multi-billion-dollar Internet behemoths, we need a “fair shot”!

Plain and simple, these companies want regulation to ensure that ISPs can’t capture a larger share of the profits that the Internet generates. They want it all for themselves. Phrased another way, the goal is to create a subsidy for content creators by blocking ISPs from getting a piece of the action.

It’s all very reminiscent of disputes between coal mines and railroads. The coal mines “produced the coal” and believed that the profitability of the coal-energy ecosystem should accrue only to themselves, with railroads earning the barest minimum. But where is it written that digging coal out of the ground is what creates the value, and getting it where it’s used creates none? Transport may be as valuable as “production” of both commodities and content. The market should decide, not the industry with the best lobbyists.

What happens if ISPs can’t capture the value of providing transport? Of course, less investment flows to transport and we have less of it. Consumers will have to pay more of their dollars out of pocket for broadband, while Facebook’s boy CEO draws an excessive salary from atop a pile of overpriced stock holdings. The irony is thick when opponents of high executive compensation support “net neutrality” regulation.

Another reason why these Internet companies’ concerns are bogus is their size and popularity. They have a direct line to consumers and more than enough capability to convince consumers that any given ISP is wrongly degrading access to their services. As Tim Lee pointed out in his excellent paper, “The Durable Internet,” ownership of a network service does not equate to control. ISPs can be quickly reined in by the public, as has already happened.

A “net neutrality” subsidy for small start-up services is also unnecessary: They have no profits to share with ISPs. What about mid-size services—heading to profitability, but not there yet? Can ISPs choke them off? Absolutely not.

Large, established companies are not known for being ahead of trends, for one thing, and the anti-authoritarian culture of the Internet is the perfect place to play “beleaguered upstart” against the giant, evil ISP. There could be no greater PR gift than for a small service to have access to it degraded by an ISP.

The Internet companies’ plea for regulation is bogus, and these companies are losing their way. The leadership of these companies should fire their government relations staffs, disband their contrived advocacy organization, and get back to innovating and competing.

Internet Companies’ Bogus Plea for Regulation is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog