You're Being Held Hostage and You May Not Even Know It

To me, net neutrality isn't about fair business practices between businesses. That's certainly part of it, but it's not the crux of the issue. To me, net neutrality is about consumer protection.

Your broadband provider would like to charge companies - particularly content companies - extra in order to bring you their content. Setting aside the utterly delirious reasoning behind this for the moment, let's think about this from the consumer's perspective. You're paying your ISP to provide you access to the internet - the whole thing. When you sign up for service, you're signing up for just that: access to the internet. Period. What your ISP fails to disclose, at least in any useful detail, is how they intend to shape that access.

For your $40, $50, $60 or more each month, you might get high-speed access to some things, and not to others. You don't get to know what ahead of time, or even after you sign up - the last thing your ISP wants is for you to be well-informed about your purchase in this regard. They'll do whatever they can to convince you that your service is plain, simple, high-speed access to the whole internet.

Then, in negotiations behind closed doors, they're using you as a hostage to extort money from the businesses you're a customer of. Take Netflix as an example: you pay your ISP for internet service. Netflix also has an ISP, or several, that they pay for internet service. Those ISPs have what are called "peering arrangements" that determine who, if anyone, pays, and how much, when traffic travels between their networks on behalf of their customers. This is part and parcel of what you and Netflix pay for your service. You pay Netflix a monthly fee to receive Netflix service, which you access using your ISP. Netflix uses some part of that monthly fee to pay for their own internet service.

Your ISP has gone to Netflix and said "hey, if you want to deliver high-definition video to your customers who are also my customers, you have to pay me extra, otherwise my customers which are also your customers will receive a sub-par experience, and they might cancel their Netflix account." They're using you as a bargaining chip without your knowledge or consent, in order to demand money they never earned to begin with; everyone involved is already paying their fair share for their connection to the global network, and for the interconnections between parts of that global network.

To me, when a company I do business with uses me, and degrades my experience of their product, without my knowledge or consent, that's fraud from a consumer standpoint. Whatever Netflix might think about the deal, whether Netflix is right or wrong in the matter, doesn't enter into it; I'm paying for broadband so that I can watch Netflix movies, I'm paying for Netflix so that I can watch movies over my broadband connection, and my ISP is going behind my back and threatening to make my experience worse if Netflix doesn't do what they want. Nobody asked me how I feel about it.

Of course, they could give full disclosure to their customers (though they never would), and it wouldn't matter a whole lot, because your options as a broadband consumer are extremely limited; in the majority of cases, the only viable solution is cable, and when there is competition, it comes from exactly one place: the phone company. The cable companies and phone companies are alike in their use of their customers as hostages in negotiations.

What about fiber broadband? It's a red herring - it's provided by the phone company anyway. Calling fiber competition is like saying Coke in cans competes with Coke in bottles - it's all Coke, and whichever one you buy, your money goes into Coke's pocket.

What about wireless? Wireless will never, ever be able to compete with wired service, due to simple physics. The bandwidth just isn't there, the spectrum isn't there, there's noise to contend with, and usage caps make wireless broadband a non-starter for many cases, especially streaming HD video. Besides, the majority of truly high-speed wireless service is provided by the phone companies anyway; see the previous paragraph.

Why aren't they regulated? The FCC is trying, in its own way, but there's little traction; the cable and telephone companies have the government in their collective pockets with millions of dollars of lobbying money, and We The People haven't convinced Our Government that we care enough for them to even consider turning down that money.

In the United States, we pay many, many times what people pay in much of the developed world, and we get many, many times less for what we spend. On top of that, our ISPs are using us as bargaining chips, threatening to make our already overpriced, underpowered service even worse if the companies we actually chose in a competitive market - unlike our ISPs - don't pay up. This is absolutely preposterous, it's bordering on consumer fraud, and you should be angry about it. You should be angry enough to write your congressman, your senator, the president, the FCC, and your ISP (not that the last will do you much good, but it can't hurt.)

Some excellent places to find more information:

• Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make—and break—online video on Ars Technica
• Sorry, Comcast and Verizon customers: RCN delivers faster Netflix on Ars Technica
• Cheapest 150Mbps broadband in big US cities costs 100% more than overseas on Ars Technica
• A Guide to the Open Internet
• What is Net Neutrality on Public Knowledge

On the "Digital Civil Rights" Movement

The Yearly Kos Conference is holding a panel on net neutrality and other issues which are more and more often being grouped under a new banner of "Digital Civil Rights". I agree with many of the points being raised, but calling this a civil rights issue, I think, is misleading, in that they are trying to evoke ideas of the civil rights movement of the 1960's. This has little to do with equality in treatment, and everything to do with an aging government failing to come to grips with the new, digital age.

They even tried to make it about racial equality, noting statistics that minorities frequently use the internet on mobile phones rather than on computers. This isn't about racial equality. It's about giving the lower classes fair access to our new, digital world. And while it's still true that minorities are disproportionately in the lower classes, that's a completely unrelated issue - and, in my mind, a much more important one, and one we've been battling for decades.

But I'm not here to talk about racial or sexual equality. I'm here to talk about the failure of our government to keep up with the fast-paced advancement of technology in the digital age. This nation invented the modern computer, and the internet, yet while we trip, stumble, and fall, other developed nations have taken this new technology and hit the ground running. The US is ranked 14th among nations in broadband penetration. Broadband here is more expensive than almost any other developed nation, it's slower than in other developed nations, and it's available to less of the population. Not coincidentally, the US is also the only developed nation without a national broadband deployment policy.

We have in this country the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) going on a vast crusade against their own customers, bringing countless illegitimate and frivolous lawsuits to bear against hundreds of people nationwide, demanding obscene compensation for infractions that, quite often, never occurred. Unfortunately, the RIAA has enough political power to keep their witch-hunt going on unchecked.

We have in this country a deeply-entrenched broadband duopoly, again with enough political weight to keep themselves in power into the foreseeable future. They have little to no incentive to reduce prices, increase speeds, or widen deployment into rural and low-income areas. Monopolies and duopolies are a free-market failure that hurt the consumer in countless ways, limiting innovation and elevating prices. And, should they decide to start bringing to bear their threats of bandwidth shaping for the highest bidder, there will be no free and neutral alternative for internet access.

Don't think it's an issue? Look at Japan: 50Mbps DSL is available for $35 per month, 100Mbps fiber is available for $50, and 1 Gbps service over power lines is available for $90. I'm currently paying $43 for a paltry 6 Mbps, and I'm lucky to even have such "high" speeds available in my area; the majority of DSL customers in America are limited to 1.5 or 3 Mbps service, if DSL service is available at all.

So why are things in such a sad state in the country that originated the digital revolution? It's very, very simple: wretched companies with no concern for the consumer have far too much power, and the people have far too little. Is there a simple solution? Of course not. The unchecked political power of big corporations is a staple of American politics, and I don't see it changing any time soon. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are on the take from Big Business, leaving voters to choose the lesser of two evils.

Public Airwaves for the Public Good

I just learned about a really important issue, and signed a petition about it. The federal government is on the verge of turning over a huge portion of our public airwaves to companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast--who will use them for private enrichment instead of the public good.

These newly available airwaves are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to revolutionize Internet access -- beaming high-speed signals to every park bench, coffee shop, workplace, and home in America. Phone and cable companies don't want this competition to their Internet service--they'd rather purchase the airwaves at auction and sit on them.

You can sign the petition I signed here - urging the government to make sure the public airwaves are used for the public good:

http://civic.moveon.org/airwaves/?r_by=-5971883-538sJA

Sustainability, Energy Independence and Agricultural Policy

Long, but definitely worth the read.



The Oil Drum | Sustainability, Energy Independence and Agricultural Policy

One of the biggest threats the USA faces today is a serious shortage of energy. Vulnerabilities in our system have been made glaringly obvious several times; since the 1970's the USA has had social and economic upheaval due to the actions of foreign oil producers, and two hurricanes in 2005 showed just how fragile our remaining domestic supplies of oil and natural gas are. The fact that the nation has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve shows that this is a matter of national security.

For such a serious matter, it's being treated in a very casual fashion. There is no national program to manage oil demand in the event of a supply crisis, or employ market forces to help. Neither is there a long-term initiative to reduce oil dependence and the size of the threat. While the US looks to become dependent upon imported natural gas in addition to oil, there's nothing in the works for a Strategic Natural Gas Reserve. And as for a national building code or even minimum standards for building codes, there's nothing worth mentioning.

Other, less-serious problems have been dealt with far more competently. The USA had a plan for achieving the goal of saving the peregrine falcon and bald eagle from DDT, and another for saving the world's ozone layer from halocarbon emissions. Both of these were carried forward both domestically and internationally, with considerable success on both programs. Given the last ten years of concern about global warming and three decades of concern over energy supplies, you would expect something similar would be in the works for those also.

Foreign Perspective on the State of the Union

The American hostility towards Iran

"One of the notable features of President George W Bush's State of the Union speech was its hostile attitude towards Iran."

This is the title and tagline of the BBC's article analyzing President Bush's State of the Union address last night. And it's not off base. Bush may manage to drag America headlong into the third middle-east conflict of the Bush Administration. It's no wonder the entire rest of the world thinks that America is destructively stupid on an epic scale - it's true.

History of the Oil Wars

YouTube - History of the Oil Wars

Very interesting video on the state of oil in America, and how we've gotten where we are. Highly recommended.

Freedom of the Press (to cover up information)

By way of Slashdot I discovered this post about Extremely odd behavior from the Washington Post re: the President's Rumsfeld lie. I highly recommend you take a look - the article is extremely extensive, so I won't go in depth on it here - just read the article.

HBO Special: Hacking Democracy - Available on Google Video

Google is hosting HBO's Hacking Democracy for free viewing on Google Video. I highly recommend anyone who cares take a look. Also see Ars Technica's How to Hack the Vote and Steal an Election.