Net Neutrality’s Dead: Time To Focus On The Real Issue: Telecom Monopolization
from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept
Earlier this month a homophobic smear campaign seeded in the press by the likes of AT&T, Comcast, and News Corporation successfully killed the FCC nomination of popular reformer Gigi Sohn. The goal: to keep the FCC in perpetual partisan gridlock, preventing the agency from making any decisions deemed even remotely controversial by the media and telecom giants the agency is supposed to regulate.
With Sohn’s nomination killed, it could take the better part of the rest of the year to appoint and confirm a third Democratic FCC Commissioner, assuming one gets appointed at all. If and when that candidate does get seated, they’ll have very little time before the next presidential election to implement any major policies. As such, the FCC will very likely focus on politically safer fare.
That means meaningful reforms that are popular among consumers, like the restoration of net neutrality, or the restoration of media consolidation limits, are all but doomed (for now):
Now, the White House has been forced to start over, prolonging a vacancy that continues to obstruct the administration’s broadband agenda. The White House hasn’t announced a new nominee or when they’re hoping to confirm someone, but it’s unlikely that Biden would pick someone as critical of cable companies as Sohn. Republicans and “dark money” groups have already proved that they’re willing to spend millions to block progressive nominees. With so little time left in Biden’s first term, stakeholders may even try to thwart a more moderate nominee, especially if there’s an opportunity to continue the stalemate past the 2024 election.
Even if Sohn was appointed, I wasn’t entirely sure that FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel actually had the backbone to revisit the net neutrality fight. If you’re a career politician with an eye on a lucrative post-FCC career, there’s not a lot of political upside in upsetting top telecom donors. Former FCC boss Tom Wheeler embraced net neutrality only in part because he was retiring and had nobody left to impress.
With the FCC effectively lobotomized, states and municipalities have effectively given up on coherent federal leadership on issues like telecom policy. Instead they’re redirecting the conversation back to where it probably should have been all along: the perils of unchecked telecom monopolization, and the need to build cohesive, locally-owned and operated alternatives to monopoly power.
As we’ve long noted, net neutrality rules were just imperfect, stopgap protections to try and protect consumers (and competitors) from monopoly power. If you bring real competition to bear on entrenched monopolies like AT&T and Comcast, net neutrality rules become less important as unethical ISPs would be punished by customer defections to competitors.
(That’s not to say federal consumer protection isn’t important, but it’s hard to watch the agency over the last twenty years and not come away with the sense that the activist battle against entrenched telecom giants has been a profound failure, and is in dramatic need of new, creative tactics.)
The problem: with state and federal policymakers under the sway of entrenched monopolies, it’s very difficult to implement cohesive federal policies that bring competition to bear against monopolies.
Enter a huge boom in community-owned and operated broadband networks, whether they’re cooperatives, municipalities, city-owned utilities, or public/private partnerships. These projects are an organic, grass roots response to federal regulatory capture and monopolization, which is why monopolies have tried so hard to outlaw them with shitty, protectionist state laws.
Again, net neutrality was important. Title II classification of ISPs (which provides the FCC the authority to hold Comcast accountable) remains important. Having competent federal regulators step in to address widespread market harms in the wake of market failure is important.
But in the absence of that, and given the public’s weariness in retreading the complicated, wonky world of net neutrality policy, it’s probably time to shift the policy focus back to the roots of the real problem: mindless consolidation and unchecked telecom monopoly power.
83 million Americans live under a broadband monopoly. It’s clear the federal government is too corrupt and captured to do much about it. As a rightward-lurching court system seeks to lobotomize the federal regulatory state entirely, the onus will increasingly be thrown at the feet of state and local leaders to build meaningful alternatives to monopoly power on a block by block basis.
Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, fcc, high speed internet, municipal broadband, net neutrality, telecom
Comments on “Net Neutrality’s Dead: Time To Focus On The Real Issue: Telecom Monopolization”
Until and unless you can get politics out of the regulatory appointments, the agencies will be reversing what happened previously every time there is a party in government change. The political patronage in appointing commissioners is the root of regulatory failures.
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What does that even mean? Politics is how different groups with different ideas engage and negotiate with each other in the process of defining government policy. It always seems to me that people who talk about getting politics out of policy just mean getting their own way without opposition. But opposition exists, and you don’t get to have what you want just because you want it.
Seriously? These things are completely inside baseball. The number of “consumers” who have even the vaguest notion of these things is probably a small fraction of a percent. You make the mistake of thinking that what matters to you matters to other people.
Consumers care about end products, not about the process by which they are created and delivered. It’s activists who care, and try to make other people care, usually without much success.
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There was nothing homophobic about it.
Sohn sucked, you can disagree with that, but you don’t get to claim it was homophobic without justification, you identarian baiting fuckhead.
Not only is “net neutrality dead”, it was never alive, which is a good thing, because all that ever meant was government control.
Sure, fight telecom monopolies, I agree completely! That is the problem! Meanwhile I don’t want to listen to you cuz you’re a fuckhead who thinks it’s OK to accuse people of homophobia without evidence.
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Damn you liberals are a hateful bunch.
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I know, right?
In all seriousness, pretending your political opponents are some form of bigot without any evidence to that fact is at least as bad as being a bigot. And it’s basically all that liberal arguments consist of these days.
“Fuckhead” is just swearing, you’ll get used to it.
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…said nobpdy who has ever in their life formed a rational thought independently of what they were told to, ever.
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nothing you say ever has any value, you know that, right? There was no point saying this. It added nothing.
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Always nothing but projection from you.
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just as useless
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You seem angry, sounds like you need to find Jesus to help you get through this painful time in your life.
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Apocalypse Maybe
I remember activists claiming that the 2017 net neutrality repeal would lead to the end of the internet. I had friends in real life approach me, claiming the web would break unless we organized some kind of protest. That chicken-little event probably did more damage to the cause than anything else. The doomsday scenarios over the past 6 years never materialized.
If there’s ever again a vote or a key decision, please, no more end-of-the-world hyperbole. Just stick to the anti-monopoly stuff.
The one issue that I see with the smaller ISPs is that they become ripe targets to be bought by the larger ISPs as soon as they are helping the most. They will have to be “owned” by the customers so that they can’t be sold off to the highest bidder as soon as they start becoming popular.
I think it’s an excellent discussion to have and a good rhetorical position to stake out, but I don’t see how a Senate that wouldn’t confirm Sohn is going to rein in the telecoms.
“83 million Americans live under a broadband monopoly. It’s clear the federal government is too corrupt and captured to do much about it. As a rightward-lurching court system seeks to lobotomize the federal regulatory state entirely, the onus will increasingly be thrown at the feet of state and local leaders to build meaningful alternatives to monopoly power on a block by block basis.”
But a patchwork system to challenge tech monopolies at the state and municipal levels can only do so much. To get actual broadscale reform requires active efforts to unscrew the government, starting with getting enough public support for candidates who aren’t captured by corporate interests and are unwilling to compromise their beliefs about helping the people.
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Or we’ll be forced to use means we don’t even want to use.
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Unfortunately, pretty much all candidates are captured by corporate interests. It has been that way ever since Citizens United.
I don’t much see what consolidation has to do with it. If not for the monopoly, whether it was some gigantic ISP or tiny ISP giving shitty service and/or charging too much, people would just switch to a competitor. And if, for example, people found out Netflix connections were slow because their ISP was trying to extort money from Netflix, that falls under “shitty service”; see above. Net neutrality was therefore a bit of a side-show, treating only the symptoms of a problem.
Re: What Competition?
Rural communities have trouble attracting even one service provider, let alone multiple ones who will complete for business. The same thing happens with rural hospitals. Everything is too widespread and sparse for infrastructure to be profitable. So you get government subsidized or government mandated service, and the companies do as little as they can get away with.
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Alright, I guess I was taking certain assumptions for granted due to my foreign perspective. I should’ve been more explicit. There’s no reason why an ISP needs to be fully responsible for building or maintaining infrastructure, in which case there’s no particular reason for them to be local.
…or, what we see in many non-US places: separation of infrastructure and service. It’s not hard to “attract” providers when startup costs are low. In the dial-up days, lots of ISPs had local telephone numbers in pretty rural areas. They maybe had to drop some modems in a local building there, and run a T1 or T3 to a more central location where they’re “really” located.
In my view, ISPs should be able to start up with very low costs, leasing pretty much all infrastructure. Then strategically replace leased pieces with their own, getting closer and closer to their subscribers (when they get enough in an area to justify the immediate cost to save on long-term leasing fees). You’ve got the conduit, the fibers, the most local cabinets/sheds (fiber termination/interconnection points), up to the central offices and backbones.
In very rural areas, it’s probably gonna be a local government putting “last-mile” fibers on poles (they can actually go 50+ miles), routers in sheds, and backbone fibers to whichever closest central location can attract ISPs (perhaps city hall, a county equivalent, or something in the nearest major city). An ISP might never own infrastructure within 500 miles of a small town; but that doesn’t mean they can’t serve the customers, or that the town can’t run their network at a small profit. Electricity already works this way in some areas, and it’s infrastructurally more difficult (you can’t put the transformer 50 miles from the customer).
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Which is precisely how Internet service in North America worked during the dial-up age.
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As was noted…
North America is perhaps the only place where that was true, as even local calls had per-minute charges in most other areas, and those charges were prohibitive to most people who’d want to call an ISP for tens of thousands of minutes per month. (ISDN was billed that way in North America, which is why it never surpassed dial-up. I think only businesses, voice actors, and the families of telco employees really used it.) So, non-American ISPs were effectively forced to make deals with the telephone monopolies in order to advertise unmetered dial-up.
It’s strange how things reversed themselves. You may have forgotten about the multitude of third-party DSL providers in the USA, to whom the local telcos were forced to lease lines at low monthly rates. I think it was around 2005 the FCC decided it was unfair to cable companies, who did not have to lease lines; so they canceled that rule, killing third-party providers. Whereas other countries had seen the success of the American model and forced telephone and cable providers to lease their lines that way. The UK even forced British Telecom to make Openreach a functionally separate company, after they were caught giving preferential treatment to BT. (And I realise Openreach is not an unqualifed success. They apparently are slow to upgrade, and lack any way for ISPs to directly lease lines or conduits once they’re able to afford it.)
The Net Neutrality fight is the tip of the iceberg
The Net Neutrality fight is only one of many issues caused by the same problems. Here are just a few.
1) Upon leaving government, people move to jobs in the industries they were regulating. These are often high paying “thank you” jobs, and often they become lobbyists.
2) People in industry getting government jobs regulating their previous or similar employers.
This is known as the “revolving door”. If I remember correctly, there was an attempt to outlaw it.
3) Any and all money in politics, at every level.
4) Religious influence in politics.
There are more, but I won’t go on. Don’t goad me. :))
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Money is literally speech.
Religions ALSO have free speech rights, but no, you don’t need to be especially religous to not want to kill babies or show porn to kids.
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Well, you do not have to have an abortion when you are allowed to have one, and you do not have to show porn to kids. Problem arise when you decide that your choices should be imposed on other people, or your proposed solutions will destroy what others find valuable and useful.