Net Neutrality Is Dead and Munchkins Are Dancing In the Street

We are the FCC, sir. WE are omneepeetent!

 

Hooray! Net Neutrality is repealed. The Democrats are wailing that the Internet is doomed because businesses that provide goods and services on the Web will not be heavily regulated by the federal government for "the good of the people."

Oh, frabjous day!  The truth is Net Neutrality had nothing to do with neutrality. It had everything to do with power. It's a battle over who controls the Internet - the users and innovators who made it a powerful economic engine or the government which has been trying to figure out how to control and tax the Internet since it got out of hand thirty years ago. People argue that without NN and FCC control, the Internet will be controlled by big corporations like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Centurylink, Comcast, Xfinity and such. Trouble is, every one of those "evil" big corporations SUPPORTED Net Neutrality and spent lots of money trying to get it passed. 

 

Why do you suppose that is? Okay, I'll tell you, young Padawan. It's because the Democrat sponsored bill made the Net into a public utility and gave the FCC regulatory increased powers over who does what on the World Wide Web. Now there would be fewer folk that Big Digital needs to bribe in order to get their way. Without NN, customers decide whether or not they use these digital behemoths' products. If the product sucks, they can go elsewhere to obtain service. With NN, you just grease the right government officials with lobbying dollars and voila! You get whatever "regulation" you want.

Why not make the Internet a public utility? Won't that upset Big Digital? Not so much! AT&T was much happier when the phone system was a "public utility" regulated by the FCC. You see government regulators LOVE big corporations. The more big corporations, the less work the FCC has to do. All those independent little entrepreneurs clog the system with essential paperwork. Big corporations love government regulation because it protects their monopoly. This way the FCC can control the amount of paperwork so as to exert the maximum power with the minimum effort.

And without efficient government paperwork, government bureaucrats either don't have any work to do or they have too much. The trouble with the Internet is that the government has historically little power to censor, control and tax those who do business there. It wound up being the digital Wild West. So, of course Democrats on the FCC board wanted Net Neutrality so badly. 

 

Three reasons:

1. It gave them power to tax Internet users and to control what people say about the government.
2. It gave them an excuse to hire more people and there's nothing bureaucrats love more than more minions. It gives them the illusion of greatness to have lots of hired servants.
3. It furthers the goal of centralization of power in the hands of government.

Don't forget what condition the phone company was in before deregulation. Remember "Ernestine the telephone operator" - the old Lily Tomlin comedy routine? Lily got laughs from Ernestine's bullying of customers. I remember one line where the customer said "You can't do that!" She snorted derisively and said, "We are the phone company. We are omneepeetent!"

It was funny, but not far from truth. Within a year of deregulation, we went from $1 plus per minute long distance to Sprint's ground-breaking ten cents a minute long distance. Mobile phones went from a car trunk full of equipment, $200 a month service charges and a year's waiting list to buying cell phones in Walmart for a hundred bucks and paying $20 a month for service within the space of a couple of years.

The phone system still hasn't shed all the taxes leftover from when it was a "public utility". Do we really want to make the Internet into "Ma Bell"? Apparently at least some of us do not. Thank goodness for them.

Ding dong, Net Neutrality's dead, and this Munchkin is hap, hap, happy about it!

© 2017 by Tom King

Oh Goody - Net Neutrality is Back

 

Here we go again. President Trump put a stop to this nonsense when he was in the Oval Office, but now we've got Obama II and worse.. Net Neutrality, which is like communism in its equal sharing of misery, is back again and worse than before. This is the third iteration of the old net neutrality scheme. This legislation they are trying to push (and heaven help us if it gets bipartisan support), is supposed to give everyone equal access to the Internet by prohibiting those nasty big corporate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from giving preferential treatment, special rates or reserved high bandwidth access to big websites that use a lot of bandwidth like Netflix, Hulu, or Facebook.

Sounds great. Equality for all, right?

Well, the problem is that if ISPs have to provide the same speeds for everyone and the same access, the websites we all use and love are likely to wind up running slower. Streaming services will pause in the middle of your move and often because your neighbors are sucking as much data out of the Internet as Netflix and Hulu so the providers which are using massive bandwidth to service customers won't have as much because Bob who lives down the street in his Mom's basement and spends his time surfing porn sites is sucking data and spewing it out at the same speed as Amazon and Facebook. So even if you get access to all that mythical super high speed Internet the evil corporations won't let you have, the sites you are trying to get faster access to, might very well run slower because the nasty evil corporations have to share resources, not fairly, but the same for all. 

It's no way to run Internet services effectively. Imagine freeways without HOV lanes during the morning and afternoon rush hours. It's the same thing.

The poison pill in all of this (if a less efficient Internet isn't toxic enough) is that little bit of lagniappe that gets stuck into every new law that Democrats and politicians want to pass. The new law would make the Internet a "public utility" regulated by the FCC and open the door to further free speech suppression, a way to tax our use of the Internet, and slower speed for everybody! What could go wrong with the government in charge.

Remember federally regulated public utilities? Remember the phone company back when a long distance call could cost you a dollar a minute and it took you two years, a trunk full of expensive equipment and an expensive car phone monthly payment to get a "mobile" phone? You know when there was only one choice for phone service - Ma Bell or in rare cases some podunk phone company if you happened to live in an area Bell wasn't interested in. That's the kind of stuff we're going to get if you make the net a public utility. There's a reason Facebook, Google, Youtube, Instagram and Twitter don't want to be declared a public utility. They want to be a "platform" which doesn't have the liability or government meddling as if they are declared a public utility or a publisher.

When are we going to learn our lesson?  Making the Internet a public utility on the heels of Barak Obama's attempt to turn over significant control of the Internet to an international organization, is really a bad idea. Here's why:

1. Net Neutrality is a one-size-fits-all solution. It's like mandating that only one flavor of ice cream be sold. There's no room for people to pay for extra premium flavors or for ice cream parlors to develop ice cream sundaes or banana splits or anything new or better. Forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on the Internet and giving control to the federal government, keeps companies from testing new ideas or developing new business models and products that people want. It stifles innovation.
2. Net neutrality is all about the government picking winners and losers while pretending to be just “leveling the playing field.” The government is notoriously poor at planning economies and making decisions about what works best for business. 
3. The technology behind the Internet moves too fast. The biggest trouble with the government regulating the Internet is one of speed. A contractor friend used to say that the government "...measures it with a micrometer, marks it with a piece of chalk and cuts it with an axe!"  I would add that they have to do a multi-million dollar feasibility study first. By the time the government figures out how it all ought to be done, what it will take to do it, the solution is outdated and the technology the feds based their decision on is obsolete.
4. The government can't write regulations that anticipate the way technology will change. Given it can take a bill three years to go through congress, it will likely be aimed in the wrong direction. It's take the FCC more than a decade and they still haven't passed net neutrality. Who believes the government can regulate the Wild West show that is the Internet with any success.  
5. Putting the government in charge of the web stifles competition. Since deregulation of the telephone business and electricity utilities created competition. When people could pay for cut-rate or premium services and choose from several different companies, the quality of service improved dramatically. Net Neutrality is going the opposite direction.
6. Net Neutrality is being sold as a way to protect free speech - instead it's more about regulating speech and stifling what the government considers "disinformation".. How is giving the government the power to control what is being said on the Internet going to protect free speech. It's from the government that we have to protect free speech.
7. There are already anti-trust laws. If the government would just enforce them and make sure consumers can choose among methods of service and ISPs, then customers are put in charge of who provides their Internet service. Instead of the government, consumers get to pick winners and losers among ISPs and websites. They do so with their dollars and spending time on the net.
8. 
   We don't need the the government to meddle in something that is already working better than virtually any other sector of the economy. Even Barak Obama and the Democrats couldn't kill the Internet during our extended recession.

How about let's keep the revenuers from meddling with our very successful business tool. Vote no on Net Neutrality. As Admiral Ackbar so eleoquently put it, "It's a trap!"

© 2017 by Tom King

If you like your ISP you can keep your ISP..............yup!

With the seizing of regulatory power over the Internet by the FCC yesterday, America has received the promise that the white knights over there in the guv-ment are a gonna tame the evil corporate Cable Company beasts and save us all from massive unfairness.

They will do so by turning these wild savage corporate beasts into nice tame and friendly little "public utilities". How has that EVER worked out to the advantage of consumers. Right now, if my ISP jacks around with me and gives me crappy service, I just go buy my service elsewhere. Let the free market sort it out. Haven't we learned from hard experience that the more the feds try to run things, the less competition there will is, the worse the service and the slower they become at solving problems. And innovation just disappears. When phone service was regulated about the only innovation we had during the first 80 years or so was automatic dial-up and push button phones that imitated rotary phones so we wouldn't have to do that dialing thing. Mobile phones required a limo-sized vehicle to carry them around in, huge deposits and year-long waiting lists. Long distance calls could easily run five to six dollars a minute. When the giant government regulation supported phone company was deregulated, long distance rates dropped to 10 cents a minute in practically no time, you could carry a mobile phone in your pocket and customer service reps began to treat you with respect.

The one great thing central planners hate is too many different utility companies to regulate. When we deregulated the electricity delivery system and provided consumers with choices, the prices dropped quickly. All sorts of cool electricity plans were offered that saved us all money.

Why, by all the chocolate fondue fountains in Hollywood, do we want to regulate an industry that's already mostly deregulated. This cannot end well.

If the FCC wants to help, then investigate the ISPs that do all this evil stuff to consumers that you say they do on a case by case basis. The FCC needs no authority to do that. Any citizen could conduct such an investigation if they wanted to do the detective work. If they want to make these guys quit screwing customers, let the FCC give them a consumer rating index where they can mark their scores down for jerking customers around. For those that pinch off bandwidth, let everybody know it and give them a bad consumer service rating. When my bandwidth dropped during the evenings, I complained to Centurylink DSL. Next thing I know they boosted my badwidth by more than 50%. It still runs slower when all my neighbors are streaming NCIS at the same time as me, but I'm hearing from Centurylink that the company is investing in more fiber and if we're patient, we'll like the results. I'm willing to be patient in exchange for the promise of innovation.

This whole thing is a case of the feds offering to fix a temperary problem with a permanent regulatory solution that freezes the problem in place with a half-ass solution. The issue is that there is only so much bandwidth. If the ISPs don't have some freedom to juggle customers around a bit, the whole thing is going to lock up. You can't change the amount of existing bandwidth by merely passins a regulation that says give everybody the same bandwidth. To do that the ISPs would have to cut everyone back. There's only so much bandwidth. Unlike the president, real world Internet Service Providers can't crap bandwidth unicorns on command - at least not ones that will do anybody any good. 

If you don't let the ISP's juggle customer access speeds on the fly, you're just going to have to slow everyone down so that nobody is getting what they need. You can't tell an ISP provider, just to spend more money on fixing the problem without giving them a way to pay for it. All it means is that they cut other services and reduce everyone's bandwidth so that we're all equal, even if that means we're all stuck with inadequate bandwidth.

"So, just let them be satisfied with less of those nasty evil profits," say the manic-progressives on the picket lines. Just tell that to the stockholders and watch the Dow drop like a stone. And before you diss Verizon and Comcasts stockholders, you might want to check. You might just be one of those stockholders through your retirement plan, bank savings, money market accounts or savings accounts and not even know it.

Regulation is a sledgehammer tool and everything it touches is a spike to be smacked down. The providers are working hard to fix the problem you're talking about. Let's not tie the hands of the mechanic who is trying to fix our car. Do you want a temporary fix so you can drive while the right parts are coming or shall we all just sit in the garage and wait for the parts to arrive someday if the regulators don't decide that unless every car in the garage also gets the same part, the mechanic can't fix your individual car. After all, it wouldn't be fair.to the others if you had a newer carburetor than theirs.

Many non-cable ISP's, especially the independent ones are working to make wireless so good that you'll no longer need cable. There's talk of setting a geo-syncronous satellite overhead and beaming the Internet to you that way. When I don't have to pay $3000 to have a stupid cable run 500 yards to my house, I'm going with that ISP and Comcast be damned.

The cable companies are trying to figure out how to survive in a rapidly changing market. Consumers like me are sticking up antennas and plugging them into a hub that lets me switch between on-air stations, my computer's Internet connection, Hulu, Netflix, The Classic Movies streaming site, Youtube, Amazon Prime, two DVD players, a VCR and a hard drive full of movies I downloaded from Amazon. I'm happier than a dead pig in the sunshine and the cable TV guys get nada. I dont' think Net Neutrality bothers them at all. The cable companies would rather be public utilities. Their business gets protected that way and they don't have to work as hard to keep up with technology.

The straw man argument about changing bandwidth, unfortunately, convinces people that we need to regulate. The problem is consumers think if you subscribe to 12mbs, the ISP should deliver 12mbps 24/7. The problem is that the company doesn't have enough bandwidth for that. At some times of day it drops to 4mbps for an hour or two simply because lots more people are using the Internet. I just shift my tasks that demand a lot of bandwidth to times when the net isn't so busy. I can live with that while Centurylink builds out its bandwidth in my neighborhood. We all share the Internet. You deal with some issues when you're building something that's never been done before.

I'm working on the AI voice for a device that acts as a computer companion and helps run your house. It has what they are calling an "emotion" chip. It will attempt to recognize your facial expressions and speech patterns and learn to respond to you appropriately. It's hugely complicated and it isn't happening fast enough for some of the company's investors who heard "emotion chip" and assumed we could find one in some scientist's abandoned laboratory, stick it in Data and have him weeping or telling jokes in a couple of minutes.

Our gains are made in fits and starts, just like the incredible gains we've made on the Internet. Regulating in the way the FCC wants to regulate merely stultifies development. The Internet has thrived because it is flexible. Plenty of attempts to add new capabilities or create new capacity have failed miserably and been abandoned. The current spate of heads-up display devices that pull stuff off the Internet and flash it in front of your face is a case in point. Some looks promising. Some is just intrusive and stupid. It will sort itself unless the FCC decides it needs to "fix" heads up display technology through regulation and then *poof* innovation ceases.

Let the industry sort itself out. In the meantime, at least yesterday, if we didn't like your ISP provider you could change your ISP provider.

© 2015 by Tom King

The FCC Takes Another Run At Net Neutering

Since telephone deregulation, Lily Tomlin's Ernestine
from the phone company sketch isn't funny anymore. The.
phone company now has competition and can no longer
bully customers like Ernestine did in the comedy sketches.

The FCC is at it again after they lost a lawsuit that threw out an attempts to create so-called Net Neutrality regulations. They're back with a 1930s style regulatory scheme that makes the Internet a public utility regulated heavily by the government - coming in February. Net Neutrality they're calling it. I call it Net Neutering.

In essence it gives us locked in rates, locked in connection speeds and ties the hands of Internet providers to regulate the delivery of Internet service as they see fit. If you grew up before the de-regulation of the telephone industry, you'll know what that means.

Prior to deregulation it cost you hundreds of dollars a month and a six to 12 month wait to get a car phone. After deregulation, within a few short years we were carrying cell phones in our pockets for a fraction of the cost. If you'd like an idea what pre-deregulation phone service was like (back when the government "regulated" phone service), get hold of one of Lily Tomlin's old skits about the phone company and you'll get an idea of where the Internet will be headed.  It's rather like communism - everyone equally misereable as government regulation suppresses the quality of Internet access for everyone. It's the old shared misery of communism/socialism all over again.

Think slowing down your streaming video on Hulu and Netflix to where it jerks and jumps so that Joe Blow can publish cat videos that jerk and jump in high def on his blog, just like the big guys. I can guarantee a major degradation across the board since competition between carriers will be virtually eliminated. So where will the motivation be to provide faster service? 

It's the old idea that if everyone is forced to be the same, suddenly, out of the goodness of our collective hearts, we all will strive to make everything better. It's kind of like thinking that if the boat sinks, the way to save lives is to have all the drowning people and all the swimming people clump together into one big mass and hope everyone decides to swim equally hard, only better because they have drowning people clinging to them and trying to climb on their heads.

One thing though: Internet customer service will probably be better - you'll be told they can't do anything about your probably because of government regulation in half the time it takes them to fix your problem now.

© Daily Tech

Won't it be a brave new world once the government controls the last free market on the planet? 

Yeah, right.

© 2015 by Tom King

What's in a Name - Net Neutrality Ain't About Neutrality

The FCC has proposed expanding its power to regulate to include the Internet. The Internet was originally designed as a difficult to damage, decentralized communications network which could survive and remain effective as a communication method were America to come under attack. It has since spread worldwide and introduced the principle of free speech in parts of the world where free speech had heretofore been virtually unknown.

Via the Internet, I can talk with folks the world over. The only limitation to my use of the net is where restrictive governments have added to the basic design to place "kill switches" and blocks between their people and the net.  I believe the FCC chairman is attempting to start a similar process in the United States by taking over "regulation" of the Internet.

While it is true that Internet Service Providers can regulate how traffic passes through their hubs, it is also true that market forces prevent them from doing so in a way harmful to their customers.  The reason is that each provider only has power over their own piece of the net.  Anyone can join the net as provider or information bank, simply by hooking up and can offer an alternative route to the net for the customers of a repressive ISP.  The current system uses the power of free market capitalism to allow the Internet to regulate itself. The Internet is now a global entity and those who work and play on the Internet are connected far beyond our borders.  I believe it morally wrong for our country to appoint itself a regulator of what is the greatest monument to free speech ever created.

The power of the Net is its built-in self-regulation.  Users simply avoid places where service is not fair and free.  They don't make enough money to survive and then close their doors and shut off their servers.  If we give a government agency control over the Net we introduce a whole new route to corruption and influence buying for those who do not wish for an open Internet. For now, a company or individual wishing to control information or eliminate competition has no one to go to (except maybe in China).  Give the FCC power to regulate who does business on the Net and how they do it and you have created an entity that can be bribed, intimidated or influenced to "regulate" in a biased fashion by terrorists, powerful corporations and political forces. In other words, "If it ain't broke, don't even try fixing it!"

Please oppose the FCC Chairman's efforts to regulate the Internet or (worse) turn it into a public utility. Please ask your congressman or senator to vote for H.R. 3924 and S. 1836, which would prohibit the FCC from regulating the Internet.

If we don't do this, we give to the executive branch of our government, a "kill switch" that can be used to shut off free speech and punish those it opposes.  Legislation like The Net Neutrality Act and the Fairness Doctrine, while they sound lovely and Democratic, only serve to create the very tools by which free speech may be stifled.

We have the right to say what we want, but there is another right we also have which isn't much talked about by supporters of Net Neutrality and the Fairness Doctrine.  That is, the right not to listen! Anyone has a right to stand up on their soapbox and speak their mind, but it's up to them to hold their audience's attention.

We have freedom on the Internet now. I've never known a time when freedom was improved by giving the government more power to regulate it.

Tom King - Tyler, TX