Imagine if you paid for your home’s plumbing by the type of waste transported through the system. You’d pay one rate for solid waste, another rate for liquid, and yet another for any, um, mysterious blends. The billing would be a confusing nightmare and specially designed waste monitors would have to be implemented to virtually “sort” the various waste types.
Now imagine paying for your Internet connectivity in the same manner, based on the type of content you produce and consume. The current connectivity model of paying by the diameter of the pipe would be replaced by a model where specialized content monitors would tally your monthly bill based on the type and amount of content you consume. The same monitoring system would apply to anything you produced and distributed via the net. It’s called content-based billing and it’s the wet dream of the new economy carpetbaggers:
“Content-based billing will allow carriers, cable operators, and Internet service providers to bill for basic access and for the varying types of content and content-based services delivered over their networks. It will allow everyone to generate more revenue from existing bandwidth. Most importantly, it will pave the way for a move from revenue models built on legacy systems and bulk bandwidth to models built on differentiated content-based services for individual market segments.”
The core origin of the Internet’s success and importance is its open end-to-end architecture, or more accurately, the principle of its open end-to-end architecture. In an end-to-end network like the Internet, the network itself is dumb; the intelligence is pushed to the applications at its edges. Complexity swirls around the edges, while the center remains simple and stable. The result is a system that is as stable, flexible, and malleable as possible. David Reed described the net’s design requirements to Lawrence Lessig in Lessig’s The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Networked World: “We wanted to make sure that we didn’t somehow build in a feature of the underlying network technology… that would restrict our using some new underlying transport technology that turned out to be good in the future…. That was really the key to why we picked this very, very simple thing called the Internet Protocol.”
As Lessig points out, the underlying design of a system, in this case the Internet, affects the “freedoms and control the system enables.” One of the features of the simplicity — the dumbness — of the Internet Protocol is that because all it does is package and route data, it doesn’t much know or care about different kinds of information and therefore is incapable of discriminating. Lessig concludes that the net’s inability to discriminate between information types means that the net is also incapable of discriminating against innovation. “If a new application threatens a dominant application, there’s nothing the network can do about that,” he writes. “The network will remain neutral regardless of the application.” As a result of the design choice of creating an end-to-end system, the original Internet developers ensured that the owners of the component networks were specifically prevented from controlling how the net would grow.
Predictably, the owners of the networks hate this lack of control and inherent neutrality. Their latest scheme to subvert the end-to-end nature of the net is content-based billing coupled with the ongoing and rapid consolidation of the broadband industry.
Three months ago, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — without a hearing or even public comment — ruled that cable companies do not have to open their networks to competition because their broadband offerings are “information services” not “telecommunications services.” In one fell swoop, the FCC exempted cable broadband from the entirety of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The agency is currently considering a similar proposal which would free the telephone companies from mandatory competitor access to their networks in providing Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service. Currently, all DSL providers enjoy legally mandated access to the networks owned by the telephone companies because the latter are, you guessed it, “telecommunications services.” The consumer impact of these rulings is carefully analyzed by Jeffrey Benner’s excellent “Getting a lock on broadband” published in Salon.
The lone Democrat on the FCC, Michael Copps, wrote in his dissenting statement that the agency ruling was unconstitutional:
“Today we take a gigantic leap down the road of removing core communications services from the statutory frameworks established by Congress, substituting our own judgment for that of Congress and playing a game of regulatory musical chairs by moving technologies and services from one statutory definition to another. Last month I remarked that we were out-driving the range of our headlights. Today I think we are out-flying the range of our most advanced radar.”
Currently Internet service provider (ISP) customers have many choices of providers for DSL connectivity to the Internet, although in most cases the DSL line itself is provided by the local telephone company. If the proposal before the FCC is approved, customer choices for DSL service in any given US geographic location will be limited to a single monopoly: The local telephone company. This is already the case for most cable service where most areas are served by a monopoly provider. The lack of competition will clearly result in higher prices for individual and small business broadband Internet connectivity. Once a duopoly on broadband Internet access is in place (one monopoly for cable and another for DSL, or maybe just a single monopoly for both) and combined with content-based billing, it’s a certainty that the bulk of Internet content will be corporatized in very short order. It will be too tempting for the media conglomerates to restrict access to content they don’t control or which threatens their interests. Just how likely do you think your cable company will be to allow streaming video on its networks, especially streaming video that competes with its cable television offerings?
If you think this corporatization is implausible, consider another piece of the puzzle: The current FCC trend to relax restrictions on media property ownership by individual companies. The regulations, referred to as “ownership caps” — that restrict the size to which media conglomerates can grow, how many media properties in a single market they can own, and the types of media properties (“cross-ownership”) in a single market they can own — have all been scrapped or are being reviewed. As Benner writes, “… it is quite plausible that a single media company could control the broadcast television stations, newspapers, radio and broadband Internet access in a single city.” And those media conglomerates are just itching to lock down the Internet with industry-sponsored legislation such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA).
Still not convinced of the threat to your Internet activities? When the FCC ruled that cable broadband is not subject to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it exempted the cable companies from the provision that prohibits their tampering with content on their networks.
Mark Cooper, the Consumer Federation of America’s research director summed up the situation for Benner in the Salon article:
“The past two decades on the Internet have been a uniquely consumer-friendly environment. Now that is up for grabs. The essential ingredient of the Internet was preventing the owner of the facilities from dictating content. Now, eight cable companies will decide what the public will be offered, not 8,000 ISPs.”
Supporters of deregulation argue that regulation of broadband — especially open-access requirements imposed on the telephone companies’ networks — limit competition because it discourages investment in adding bandwidth and new networks. The holy free market grail, according to the proponents of deregulation, is “platform competition.” So what if a single company owns cable broadband access, they argue; consumers can always choose another competing platform: DSL, wireless, or satellite. Benner does an excellent job of deconstructing the mythology supporting this argument by quoting FCC statistics indicating that cable broadband has double the users of its closest platform competitor, DSL, and that while 58 percent of US zip codes had access to more than one broadband option, 28 percent had no broadband options at all. Benner also cites a National Research Council report finding that “interplatform, or ‘facilities based,’ competition, is important and should be encouraged. But it also predicted that it would not take hold everywhere and should not be relied on exclusively for consumer protection.”
Particularly galling is the cable industry’s hypocritical support for retaining open-access rules for the networks owned by the telephone companies. Call it open-access for thee, but not for me. AT&T and AOL Time Warner together own the vast majority of the cable networks and have heavily lobbied the FCC to retain open-access rules for DSL networks, arguing — are you ready for this — consumer protection.
Here are some suggestions for beginning the discussion in working toward a solution to these impending problems:
- Let your ISP know right now that you won’t tolerate content-based billing. Similarly, ISP’s need to let their upstream providers know that they won’t tolerate it either. Only support those ISPs who honor, respect, and pledge to support the neutral, open, end-to-end architecture of the net.
- Begin to establish community-based ubiquitous and redundant 802.11x networks everywhere, connected only to upstream bandwidth providers who agree to respect the Internet commons. If the citizenry owns and controls the plumbing, media conglomerates can neither restrict access to the pipes nor cram their crap down our throats.
- Undertake the creation of a national broadband initiative. Previous administrations did it with social security, the interstate highway system, and rural electrification. Charter a limited-life corporation in each state to undertake this endeavor. Work to ensure platform diversity and mandate continuation of the neutral, open, end-to-end architecture.
- Legislatively limit corporate cross-ownership of media properties within a given market to a single media property.
- Legislatively prohibit any bandwidth provider from tampering with or limiting access to content they did not create.
- Mandate open-access provisions for all bandwidth providers.
I’m not proposing these as absolutes because I’m sure there are holes in each of them. Thanks in advance for taking the time to stick your fingers in the holes.