Just when it looked as if everyone was agreeing on net neutrality rules, the DC Court of Appeals has said the FCC has no authority to enforce them. We're now in for a period of regulatory chaos where everyone will have to try hard to follow, and influence, the issue.
Call me cynical, Paul, but I think any utterance by a politician is self-serving and has no meaning in terms of either what's best for the country or even what they actually intend to do.
We've had a lot of party changes since 1996 when the Telecom Act was passed, and there's been no success under any of the parties to amend the Act for any useful purpose relating to neutrality. In fact, it's never come to a vote, though all kinds of bills were "introduced".
The problem is that there's no single conception of neutrality, there's no way of applying the FCC's former principles to all of the players actually involved, there's no political will to meddle in the issue for risk of creating backlash from voters and practical problems in the market, and there's no desire in Congress to even understand the real issues. I once offered to donate my time for no cost and no recognition or favors to help in the Telecom Reform debate, and I never even got a response!
Stand with bold Democratic candidates for Net Neutrality
I'm still going through the poll results to see if any of these candidates did emerge victorious even thoiugh someone stated that all the Democrats who went on record to back it — called “bold Democratic candidates” by NetNeutrality Protectors — failed to win their elections yesterday.
Were these candidates just playing the usual politricks by holding on to Net Neutrality to salvage their politcal careers?
The devil's in the details, Paul. Title II regulation gives the FCC a lot of options, but so far they're not hinting on just what options they'd take. I think Title II is the right answer--broadband is a telecommunications service and it should be regulated as one.
It seems the recent court ruling has not stop the FCC developing ambitious plans to regulate the internet. How do you rate this new fight-back by the FCC as revealed in this WSJ article?
We may get some answers to the question of Google's plans as the FCC considers its next steps. Google's certainly not been shy about pushing positions that create competitive advantage or financial gains for the company, and what they say and do as the debate unfolds may reveal where they see themselves going. Look for hints through the summer!
I 100% agree that the LAST thing Google would do is buy their way into a low margin, regulated business.
What they WILL do is cream off the paid services of others. They will find a way. Think what even ONE node in a pricey city center would be worth to Google, and the cost would be WAY below $750 per household.
I do not believe that their FTTH experiments will stop at experiments, they are pretty clearly running a market study to see what is is worth to them. If the revenue is worth it, expect LOTS of 'experiments'
I hope you won't object to my recharacterizing the Google broadband plans as "classical wisdom" rather than "open knowledge". Reportage tends to stress what's exciting and not what's true. Business Week notwithstanding, I think Google's own comments on its FTTH initiative make it clear that they are sponsoring only trials and that they don't plan to invest in a real deployment on any scale. In fact, they really suggested they'd like to help municipalities sponsor their own roll-outs.
The cost is the issue, indeed. Conservative estimates for FTTH cost run to about $750 per household in fiber deployment plus connectivity costs. It's hard to get good numbers on wireless broadband because the cost varies enormously depending on how many users you believe can share a given WiMAX or LTE cell. But it's the financial stats that tell the tale. Google's profit margin is about 28%. Verizon's profit margin is less than 3.5% (Yahoo Finance, as of today). You don't go from a high-margin business to a low-margin business without taking a real beating in your stock price, and I don't think there's a chance in the world that Google would do it.
I'm still not convinced that Google can avoid regulations, even by offering "free" service, but I'm less convinced that free service is an option. You don't build your stock value by giving anything away. Google would need to subsidize broadband from ads, but the whole global ad budget is less than a sixth the global network services spend, so you can't carry free-ness in the form of subsidies very far. It's particularly challenging to target underserved demographics with ad-sponsored services because of the issues of ad targeting. Who targets the lowest quintile of the economic chain with ads? Not many.
The big problem on the WiMAX side isn't coverage it's effective bandwidth. Six WiMAX cells would generate a collective 300 Mbps of bandwidth, roughly. That's less than the capacity of one good PON tree, far less than one cable span, and about the same as the capacity that would feed two modern DSL remote DSLAMs. Ten million users are not going to get much joy from sharing 300 Mbps.
I don't dispute for a moment that Google wants to convert users to depend on them for applications because there's an economy of scale they can play with,because ad sponsorship opportunity is strong, and because regulating information services like applications is probably not in the cards. But I think Google is totally uninterested in being a telecom provider in any form. Only time will tell!
It is a long game, and I suspect Google will thrive on the SNAFU situation that exists.
They definitely do not want regulation- so the way they will skirt it is by offering broadband 'free', especially to poor kids in the inner city (and only by 'accident' the affluent yuppies on the edge of the ghetto)
And about the cap-ex. It is only expensive if they want to get universal. Google could cover 10 Million people in the NYC metro with a half dozen WiMax stations, placed on the tops of existing buildings, or maybe in the windows of peoples apartments.
My guess is Google's initial experiments in this area are to test the water, to see how much of a community they can googlize, to see how fast they can covert them to Google Apps. Then we will see.; And if they need ten billion to get into the communications business, do you think they would have any problem issuing stock or maybe converatble bonds?
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
50 billion household devices will be on the Internet by 2020, according to Cisco. And we're hearing foreign governments are hacking our infrastructure. Surely our refrigerators are next!
YouTube's move to a partial pay-for-view model could help relieve a dearth of good new content but it could also complicate debates in many parts of the world over payment by content providers for delivery of their material to customers.
That's what Larry Page said on Google's earnings call, referring to the conjunction of mobile and the cloud. Well, let's chart it then! We need to be thinking about an Internet where 90% of our traffic goes to 70 destinations within 40 miles of us.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
Congress is considering a bill to extend a moratorium on Internet regulation changes for two years. But with issues like service quality, cloud performance, and privacy looming, we risk contaminating the Internet with fraud.
The risk of the ITU taking over the Internet is overblown. First, it's almost certain its goals are simply to create orderly interconnect and settlement. Second, how good a job has ICANN done anyway? If we don't like international control we should clean up our own processes in both governance and interconnect!
Because 25% to 45% of broadband cost is due to sales and marketing, we could reduce our broadband prices by eliminating advertising and promotional spending by providers.
The government secrets of UFOs are hidden in Area 51, so where are the secrets of net neutrality hidden, Area 52? Nope, they're hidden in Paragraph 148 – and they're a lot more substantive than UFOs!
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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