Members of Congress Support a Meaningful Moratorium on Retransmission Consent Disputes, Internet Regulation, and other Links

Lawmakers Troubled by Cable - LIN TV Spat  [Multichannel News]

Representatives Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Nathan Deal (R-GA) wrote a bipartisan letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin asking him to join with the other four commissioners to implement a short moratorium on the right of local broadcasters to pull their signals off of cable and satellite systems.  The moratorium would last for about three months during the digital transition. 

The Representatives are right to be concerned because the government is receiving an increase in applications for digital converter coupons from cable customers.  From who?  From cable customers  who lost LIN TV signals, many of which are major network affiliates.  They lost them when LIN declined to renew carriage rights or extend their old deal while they continued to negotiate with two cable operators, Time Warner and Bright House. ...

The point is, most of those customers will never need the government-subsidized digital converter because they have cable and I'd bet the Time Warner - LINN dispute is settled long before February 17, 2009.  They simply don't realize that the loss of the broadcast signal was the result of a business negotiation failure, not the digital transition.

"It is concerning that some of these coupon requests could come from confused Time Warner Cable and Bright House customers who might not need converter boxes, and very likely would not have applied for coupons but for the fact that LIN TV's broadcast signals were dropped," Eshoo and Deal said.

Both Eshoo and Deal support a so-called quiet period, mandated by the FCC, in which no TV signals could be pulled. Their quiet period would start before Dec. 31, 2008 before thousands of current carriage contracts expire.

Although four FCC members have agreed to seek public comment on various quiet period dates, Martin has so far refused to join them, despite expressing general support for a quiet period in House testimony in September.

I wrote about the moratorium a short time ago.  This is a no-brainer.  What harm would there be to have everyone take a three month timeout from consumer-affecting negotiation tactics while the nation goes through a confusing but critical process?  There are limited dollars available for the coupon program and the last thing we need, particularly in these economic times, is to issue them unnecessarily to those who don't need them.

Representatives Eshoo and Deal are long-standing, well-respected members of the House Telecommunications Subcommittee.  I know them both from when I testified before their committee and I can tell you unequivocally, they know this stuff as well as anyone.  For the sake of the American TV consumer, I hope their sage advice is heeded.

Competition works when regulators let it -- Comcast is doubling speeds; adding new super fast tiers [The Precursor Blog]

The Precursor Blog highlights several new Comcast broadband speed tiers as a success of broadband competition in the absence of excessive regulation. Part of Comcast's recent announcement include a 50 Mbps tier that is part of their DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade. The pricing of the new Comcast speeds are allowing Comcast consumers to double their speed at the same cost, according to the prices listed in this article.

In the article, Scott Cleland concludes,

The reason that net neutrality supporters are so threatened by competition policy and the real world success of competition meeting the needs of consumers -- is that competition better serves consumers than their one-tier regulated vision of the Internet ever could.

I've written about this before.  What Mr. Cleland doesn't say is that many of the biggest supporters of net neutrality regulation are very large Internet companies.  They cloak their agenda of self-protection by draping it in the flag of consumer protection.   They really seek to stifle competition by making it nearly impossible for entrepreneurs to invent and distribute the next new thing.

On a more global level, whether or not to regulate industries is going to be a very different debate in 2009.  No matter who wins the presidential election, the world's financial woes are shaping the discussion.  True, the banking system and home mortgage industry have made some serious mistakes.  However, I would contend that much of the problem was actually caused by something I call "informal regulation."

What do I mean?

For years, it's been the policy of several administrations and Congress to "encourage" more and more home ownership.  One of the main ways they encouraged that social agenda was to nudge banks toward more lenient lending policies.  In practical terms, that simply means they have to lend to less credit worthy borrowers.  And that's exactly what the bankers did. 

Hey, there's culpability all over the place.  I agree that a new review of banking regulation is desperately in order, with good cause. 

But that doesn't mean we should start regulating everything that moves.  Broadband is a huge business and consumer success.  It is still a major creator of sorely needed jobs here at home.  Millions of customers are signing up every year. 

Never forget.  The current regulatory environment has encouraged investment and entrepreneurship.  Let's stay the course and let consumers judge with the decisions they make in broadband's highly competitive environment.

Time Warner Talks Last Mile & Bandwidth Caps [GigaOm]

GigaOm interviews one of Time Warner Cable's network engineers about the architecture of cable broadband Internet, and how responsible network management endeavors to provide an enjoyable online experience for all users on the network. Time Warner Cable is testing download caps, and the interview covers that issue as well. There's also YouTube video of the interview. 

NYT's Sulzberger: 'We can't care' if newspapers die [CNET News]

The chairman and publisher of the New York Times talks candidly about the future of newspapers in the Internet age, and how the New York Times has adapted to the changes. CNET covered the NYT's Arthur Sulzberger Jr. as he keynoted the WebbyConnect conference. When asked if newspapers in a printed format will exist in 10 years, Sulzberger told the audience that the answer is "we can't care" what the answer is.

Sulzberger's comments about the NYT's decisions to adapt to the importance of web search by eliminating its digital subscription service and upcoming integrations of blog content to the NYT's site are a couple examples of the continuing evolution of the NYT. 

So there's really something to their slogan, "All the news that's fit to print."

Comments

[Chris Buechler]

With speeds that keep ramping up, ISPs are going to have to start educating users, and dealing with complaints from those who have lower end routers. Ones you buy today are faster, but the common Linksys WRT54G and similar boxes are barely adequate for Insight's 20.0 service and may be inadequate depending on the number of connections (I wouldn't touch such a thing personally, I use open source options like pfSense). Especially with DOCSIS 3.0 speeds exceeding 300 Mbps as a possibility in the future. Most home grade routers sold today aren't capable of 1/3rd that speed.

Of course I remember my very first cable modem from Insight came with a 10 Mb Ethernet port, and the option to use a 9 pin serial connection instead - that's a 128 Kb connection! The service was faster than that, but the fact that it was an option and a bit less than a decade later it's more than double the capacity of that 10 Mb Ethernet port is amazing. At that rate, we'll have Insight 150.0 around 2016.

On net neutrality, I think both sides blow this out of proportion into a self-serving argument. Large Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, etc. are for this not for any real reason related to competition, they're largely just advocating an even playing field for everybody. i.e. if Insight makes a deal with Microsoft to provide better performance for Hotmail than for Gmail for a price. I'm paying for an Internet connection, and my ISP should be treating traffic equally, aside from network management efforts to combat extremely excessive usage.

One of the telling statements came from I believe it was AT&T's CEO, stating that Google should have to pay them because they use their bandwidth. No, that's not how it works. Google pays their providers for the bandwidth they use. Any Google traffic on your network was requested by your customers, who are paying you for the bandwidth they're using. It seems some ISPs basically want to turn to extortion schemes to make companies pay up to "enhance" performance of their sites for the ISP's customers.

Some of the net neutrality proponents take it way too far, but I also think ISPs are taking it way too far. I should be assured that my ISP will treat my Gmail traffic the same as it would Hotmail traffic, or any number of similar situations.

Another situation that has proven to be a problem in the past is the desire of ISPs to *block* competition. There have been multiple cases of ISPs who offer VoIP service either degrading or blocking access to any other VoIP provider. That kind of anti-competitive behavior should be illegal.

A well-crafted net neutrality policy that protects consumers may be needed (as residential broadband is not truly competitive in many parts of the US), but it also needs to not go too far. Well-crafted and government policy is such an oxymoron of late it might be best to leave things alone. Any body consisting of a member that describes the Internet as a "series of tubes" and thinks an email delayed by 3 days is due to network congestion "in the tubes" doesn't need to be regulating it.