The first three months of 2010 has rolled along very quickly, as the FCC has worked through a plethora of issues. It rolled out the National Broadband Plan (NBB), applications for new network licenses, review of NBC Universal - Comcast merger and a lawsuit filed against it by Comcast.
The 360 page NBB plan recommends extensive overhaul of the FCC itself and the regulations it enforces. It ignores very few issues regarding access to broadband, the future of explosive wireless usage and the need to ensure that creativity is not handicapped by lack of bandwidth. Everything seems to be covered, even the issue of taxes and the impact of how that could impact internet growth. One issue that is well covered is reform of the Universal Service Fund, which enables funding used strictly for telephone service to be used for broadband build out or upgrades. Congressman Rick Boucher (D-VA) has drafted legislation in preparation of reform policy proposals by the FCC. Thus it appears all issues as per the executive summary to be a well documented plan with clear goals. Except one. Net Neutrality.
Did the FCC miss a step? The NBB highlights several areas of concern that the FCC believes can affect what many believe are net neutrality issues. But let’s face some ugly facts: Everyone has their own definition of what it truly means. No blocked content, equal access to bandwidth available, regardless of origination of the content, no throttling of provider service connectivity to where a user goes, privacy of where the user has been, the list is endless. Does the FCC come out and state net neutrality goals and regulations it wants? No. Is it mentioned in the executive summary? Not once. Is it mentioned in the NBB official plan? Zilch. Appendix: nothing…someone hit the delete key?
The FCC certainly talked about net neutrality more than a few times in public discussions, presentations, and inputs from the public and industry. Read the entire document, I dare you and don’t cheat by reading it before going to bed, as FCC Chairman Genachowski said in his remarks during its announced release; it’s a real page turner, in other words a great way to fall asleep.
You won’t find a single notation or specific comment about Net Neutrality. Did the FCC kill it? Did industry lobby to keep it out of the report? Were the Commissioners divided on the issue? There are several possible answers. The answer is probably all three.
The NBB plan proposes broadband speeds that most consumers can only drool about. 100 MB download and 50 MB upload is a lot of bandwidth for a consumer last mile internet service. Considering the ambitions of new social media applications and Voice IP and Video IP, the FCC’s answer maybe that if the user has enough bandwidth to simultaneously run any of these applications, there should be no need for network management that throttles what a user can and can’t see online.
Filtering of content is also missing from the NBB. What this suggests is the FCC had two choices, create a political sparing war between Congress and Industry with itself in the middle or up the ante and avoid these issues all together. The report hints that broadband must be affordable. I have no idea how that should be defined and neither does the FCC.
The other issue with Net Neutrality is the problem of ensuring service definitions it would bring into question. And since the Internet is international in scope, and scale, it is an issue which the FCC has no desire to begin debating, given the role of the State Department and USTR (Trade Representative). The Commissioners are divided on this issue. Chairman Julius Genachowski, perhaps wisely, avoided having the report voted on as a matter of FCC policy and simply sent the report to Congress without Net Neutrality as a component. Doing so avoided any appearance of conflict within the Commission.
So what took Net Neutrality’s place as a priority? Wireless broadband. Spectrum distribution, auction fairness and telecom allocation dominated a good portion of the hearing. The growth and use of wireless broadband has skyrocketed, if you can really call it broadband. 3G and 4G networks are being built at a rapid basis. The problems are hidden technical challenges with capacity - user ratios. Wireless comes to a crawl to those that truly understand the technology, architecture, and customer ratios implemented. This is where the FCC Commissioners politicized the broadband plan within the FCC and at the Congressional hearing held Thursday. Exhibit A: Commissioner Robert McDowell said it was a nice plan during the unveiling. Since then, it’s been polite delivery of poison (criticism) ever since. And that was only last week…
The last significant influence on why it is not in the NBB plan is ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement which is still being negotiated. Is the FCC quietly telling political leaders that there is no way to stop illegal file downloading and pirates will do so anyway? Perhaps intellectual property owners have said the issue is broadband direct market access to consumers needed to be faster for the IP holders to make the business case to build media portals of their own. The FCC’s plan documentation sidestepped a very public issue which everyone thought would be addressed in the plan. Don’t worry, you’ll hear from Congress about the why’s, if’s, how comes’ of Net Neutrality over the coming weeks, but it’s all noise that will soon drift away. Congress will use it as a political tool to simply attack across the aisle. It was ugly on Thursday.
The first of many Congressional hearings was completed this morning. The Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet Committee (say that three times fast…) was packed. At stake is not just future regulation of telecommunications in the country but where $7.2 billion of Recovery Act dollars should be spent. If you need further sleeping aids, watch the hearing on C-Span on your laptop. The battle will be between your brain falling asleep or your laptop’s battery draining to zip. Opening remarks by the politicians and commissioners alone took an HOUR and 45 minutes …zzz. But I digress, sure enough…
