F.C.C. Is Expected to Propose Regulating the Internet as a Utility

Comcast is great on the surface and in the short term; good bandwidth, few outages.

The knife-twist comes when they decide to impose data limits with essentially punitive caps designed to quash competition, or dramatically "monetize" your accustomed use of their product.

I don't think that making them a utility is a great answer either; this opens the door to taxes that are disconnected from use and politicizing connections based on content. I think the long-term resolve to keep bandwidth competitive will be lost when governments see it as a cash cow (of course you don't mind another penny per gigabyte, because it pays for roads/schools/whatever).

A structure that encourages (or even requires) competition would be best, I think. Maybe neutrally administrate that last mile and share it between all parties (sorry, TWC and Comcast, you had your chance, now we've nationalized your build-out because you couldn't play fair).

The devil will be in the details. How much is the price of the lease? Who determines that price? What then would be the motivation for upgrading the last mile infrastructure for the owners of it?

Yes, that damn government killing innovation. After all, AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon invented the internet all on their own, why should the government get a say in how their networks are run? Can you imagine how horrible the internet would be if the government had been involved from the start?

That isn't the worst by a long shot. I'm all for net neutrality, but Title II classification for ISPs really worries me.

I was co-founder of a VOIP startup in 2003, and a significant percentage of our time and resources was spent dealing with how the service was going to be classified for purposes of the Telecom Act. A bunch of the states were wanting to regulate VOIP providers as telephone companies, the FCC was on the fence (the pulver / fwd decision wasn't out yet[1]). Almost everyone was advocating for VOIP to be classified as a interstate information service so that we could avoid the onerous outdated state-by-state telephone company regulations. We got what we wanted (VOIP classified as a information service), but then a few years later we ran into the problem of ISPs blocking/interfering/throttling VOIP connections. The FCC in its first net neutrality foray went after some of the companies (See e.g. Madison River[2]) for blocking VOIP. However, the interesting thing was they could only go after Madison River under their Title II authority because Madison River happened to be a DSL provider and subject to Title II authority. When they went after Comcast for Bitorrent blocking of course they lost[3].

If we had been subject to Title II and regulation as a telecommunications service almost all of the states had regulations they would have applied to us included such gems as: * tariff filing * price caps or approvals * required interconnection with legacy carriers * requirements to use legacy telecom protocols * surcharges for stuff like E911, relay service, universal service, etc. * obtain state approval before offering new services or products or discontinuing services or products * obtain state approval before opening a new facility * provide notice to the FCC and the state of network changes * intercarrier compensation * mandatory build outs (to offer service you have to offer service through all of area X) * required the use of specific accounting methods and cost assignment and reporting rules that make the tax code look simple and friendly * countless other stuff down to things like how much and what kind of UPS capacity we would have. Do we really want to open the door for every ISP to have to get approval from some government agency before it can interconnect to another network, put in a switch or open a new POP? They might not do it now, but once the regulatory framework is in place, it always seems agencies are willing to enact a new regulation a lot quicker than they are willing to get rid of one.

As an aside one of the things the ISPs were publicly saying around that time was that they didn't have the technology to block or degrade VOIP even if they wanted to. Of course now this sounds absurd, but some policymakers were buying it. We actually traveled to DC and ended up demoing for several of the FCC commissioners how easy this would be to do (along with how hard it would be to detect) with a couple of lines of code. On one of these trips we ended up in an elevator with Kevin Martin [4] who was chairman at the time. He said his opinion was it was a mistake for the VOIP providers to race to get classified as an information provider to avoid the state regulation, taxes, etc., because it was going to end up permitting the ISPs to block/degrade the service. I don't know if I agree with him, but I see his point now. In the end VOIP providers ended up subject to a lot of the regulations anyway (as "interconnected VOIP providers"), but without the protections of Title II[5].

I think something does need to be done about net neutrality but I think the best solution is to encourage competition and more/smaller ISPs instead of giving the FCC carte blanche to regulate the Internet as a utility. Dane Jasper of sonic.net has laid it all out much better than I could[6]. It is essentially giving up and saying we are going to live with Internet access being run by monopolies like the power company. It puts us back to the Bell System in 1982, and that makes me sad.

[1] https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-04-27A1.pd...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_St... and https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-05-543A2.pd...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_St...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Martin_(FCC)

[5] http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/voice-over-internet-protocol...

[6] https://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2014/11/12/neutrality-is-just-a-s...

I wish I had a link to review this but I don't think that's the case. As I recall, Netflix published data showing that there wasn't actually a bandwidth problem and they offered to upgrade the equipment. They've ended up paying Verizon which is what verizon was really after.