Blog: Net Neutrality

Maybe it's the criticism Verizon has been getting on blogs, in the press, from academics, and in Congress for its anticompetitive behavior. Maybe it's pressure from activist groups like Save the Internet. Maybe it's the upcoming spectrum auction, where the FCC implemented some (but not enough) rules to encourage mobile competition, and Verizon sees the writing on the wall. Maybe it's because they refused to launch the iPhone on their network, and instead Apple ended up with an exclusive with AT&T. Maybe it's Google's recent announcement of their open Android platform.

Whatever the reason, yesterday Verizon—the most control-freak-ish of mobile carriers, the one that cripples phones to disable WiFi or Bluetooth or anything that might compete with their high-priced service add-ons, the one that refused to give NARAL SMS access, whose BREW system locks out all but the deepest-pocketed developers—that same Verizon Wireless yesterday announced that it will open up its network to any phone, the "cellular Carterfone" Tim Wu has been advocating.

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Earlier this month, Barack Obama released his plan for technology policy at a speech at Google. Larry Lessig immediately endorsed it, and Public Knowledge had lots of praise. Lessig, PK founder Gigi Sohn, and many Silicon Valley executives have been advising Obama, and their positive influence is clear on the plan.

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Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal calls out the telephone companies for stifling innovation and limiting consumer choice. The telcos claim that their market is competitive, that they are empowering rather than restricting their customers, but unlike Congress, Mossberg isn't fooled. (Mossberg doesn't receive tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the telcos.)

A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that ... severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world.

That's why I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the "Soviet ministries." Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them.

Great framing by Mossberg, and great that someone of his stature is laying out the facts.

Advocates of a completely unregulated broadband ISP market argue that left to its own devices, ISPs will offer the array of products to consumers that best fit consumers' needs at the optimal price points.

Yet for millions of people who live in Comcast's service area, there is only one choice for fast Internet - Comcast. And Comcast gives customers two choices: residential cable Internet for around $60/month, or business Internet for $1500/month. But residential cable has a secret bandwidth limit, and as Consumer Affairs reports, if customers exceed the limit, Comcast cuts them off. Want to pay more for twice the download capacity, like you can on with cell phone minutes? Too bad, no.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Department of Justice believes that everything is peachy keen in Internet land. Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge debunks the DOJ, comparing the range of broadband Internet choices in the U.S. (for most people, that's just one, and for lucky people, two) with the huge array in the UK. The Consumerist arranges it into a nice side by side comparison chart.

Why can't we have a real market with real competition, instead of ideologues like those at the DOJ using "free market" rhetoric to actually stifle the development of an actual free market? Sounds like the people at the DOJ didn't get past the first chapter in their economics textbooks, to the part where it explains how barriers to entry are one of the primary impediments to a healthy market.

We've all sat in a hot, stuffy room, uncomfortable, and know the amazing feeling of a brief gust of wind blowing fresh air into the room, cutting through the muggy feel just briefly before subsiding, leaving us craving more. Last night's Democratic debate felt that way. CNN opened a window - brief, limited, controlled - but they opened it, and the refreshing feel of the outside air tasted so delicious.

I had the opportunity to attend last night's South Carolina Democratic debate in person. The room looked and felt like any other produced, managed television event. The candidates started out rehearsed, giving their prepared sound bites in response to each question. But the questions were real, as were the questioners, and as the debate went on, the candidates changed. Not radically, but they began to respond more directly to the questions. They started talking to the questioners. They resisted when Anderson Cooper tried to force them to discuss trivialities like whether they have chartered campaign planes instead of the real issues of global warming. While of the campaign videos followed tired old campaign commercial patterns, a few were funny and felt genuine.

Television still dominates politics and candidates still speak in a way that will play on TV. Last night was one debate, but cable news continues to fill tens of thousands of hours with content controlled by a small group of journalists. Still, last night, we could see a glimmer of a better way where candidates speak to citizens. Briefly, a gust of fresh air was swirling through that large auditorium. The Internet is blowing this fresh air through the rooms of our politics, our economy, and our culture. Anyone can blog, or sell their own t-shirts, or release their own music.

To some, however, this open economy is scary and dangerous. How can we know which books are good without Barnes and Noble to select them? How can we avoid buying shoddy jewelry or fake silver without the controls retailers have in place? And what will happen to a civilized centrist political consensus when just anyone gets to speak their opinions? To some, the gust of air is chilly and brings in the salty smell of the sea and a whiff of garbage. Maybe conditioned air is best. Maybe we should leave it to the professional HVAC technicians to manage our air.

In the early days of the Internet, you could sign up for access through a service like AOL, Prodigy, or CompuServe, which resembled shopping malls. Each piece of content was carefully selected by editors. Or, you could get direct Internet access, which had enormously more content to read, communities to join, and products to buy, but it also carried spam and other dangers, fooling people into buying worthless penny stocks or giving their bank account numbers to Nigerian scammers. More content and community, because nobody had to ask AOL for permission to be on the Internet. Spam, because even the spammers didn't have to ask permission.

Most of our communications networks work more like AOL than the Internet. Television and cable professionals decide what you see on TV. The cable companies decide what channels to offer. Radio managers choose shows for their stations. And Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile determine which phones to offer and in many cases what applications you are allowed to install on those phones. They want to keep the air clean (according to their standards). You can choose between AT&T and Sprint, between NBC and CBS, and they do compete vigorously, but within a professionally selected range of offerings. Nothing unpredictable, but little participation from citizens and limited innovation from entrepreneurs.

Without the openness of the Internet, we wouldn't be experiencing the tremendous growth of citizen involvement in politics. Without it, we couldn't learn about nearly any subject instantly from Wikipedia – even if the information hasn’t been vetted by gatekeeping Britannica editors. Without it, we couldn't buy all the many hard-to-find products on eBay from around the world – even if they don’t come with corporate guarantees of quality. Without it, millions of people wouldn't be finding love on dating sites – though they occasionally meet sketchy people as well. The market chose the freewheeling Internet model over AOL's controlled "walled garden". Internet access boomed while the managed online services went out of business. Clearly, citizens are willing to be unpredictable and take advantage of open systems. And I believe citizens are able and willing to be their own gatekeepers, which has worked on sites like Craigslist and Digg.

Many of the former gatekeepers are opening up to the idea of opening up, even if begrudgingly. Newspapers are blogging to remain relevant as subscriptions decline. Candidates are competing for supporters on Facebook and MySpace. And CNN is letting citizens write the debate questions. Meanwhile, others are fighting the trend. Many pundits and commentators attack bloggers. Books about the Internet "killing our culture" get widespread attention and praising reviews in the New York Times. The RIAA, according to Rolling Stone, is facing obsolescence because it refused to try to work with the Internet constructively.

So far, the telephone and cable companies are choosing to hold on to old, closed business models. An upcoming auction of new wireless spectrum could follow "open access" principles to create a new wireless network more like the Internet, but Verizon and AT&T so far oppose this. We should give consumers this choice between the current networks and an open one. Net Neutrality is about preserving the ability to choose an open network as new fiber-optic networks replace today's DSL and dial-up modems.

The fresh air of creative citizen participation is starting to blow into Presidential politics through the window CNN opened. And this week, we have an opportunity to open the window in telecommunications as well. Senator Dick Durbin is conducting a series of discussions on OpenLeft.com to make policy by talking to citizens.

The question we ask ourselves when choosing a President is what kind of America we want. The question we must ask ourselves and Senator Durbin is the same - what kind of network do we want? Should we leave it to the professionals to decide what applications we use and what content we see? Or do we want the Internet to keep being open, so anyone can blog or sell products or create the next Amazon or Facebook without permission? Do we want to expand that openness to mobile technology? Or do we want to return to the tight control of the AOL era, or Presidential questions being written by a small panel of Washington elites? I hope Senator Durbin will open the windows. It's awfully stuffy in here.

The field of computer science, at base, is about efficiency. Algorithms are evaluated based on the time they take to run - "big O notation", using formulas like O(n²) or O(n log n) telling how much time it takes to accomplish a task based on the size of the input. Programmers love to optimize systems, to make them run faster and better and more reliably. And one of the great joys of computer engineering, unlike, say, architecture or bridge building, is that if something doesn't work optimally, it's often not that expensive to simply rewrite it.

It's easy to think government ought to work the same way. After all, government is simply a social construct, governed by a set of rules (laws) just as a computer program governs a machine's behavior. (Larry Lessig famously wrote how "code is law".) If some aspect of government isn't working, why can't we just reprogram it?

Unfortunately, government is not just a socially programmed system executing a set of legal instructions, but it's a complex one with lots of dependencies. In software, you might choose to simply rewrite your code, but you may be running it on an operating system you didn't write, with an application server you didn't write, accessing a database you didn't write. (If they're open source, you can try to submit patches, but they won't always be accepted). Or maybe your client needs you to integrate your code with some legacy system written decades ago on an IBM mainframe in FORTRAN.

When dealing with a system we can't fix, we try sending it data and seeing what it will do. If I call this function, this happens. If I put that data there, that happens. Software engineers start acting like biochemists - if the cell's concentration of ions is such-and-such, then the cell will exhibit so-and-so behavior. You can complain about the cell or curse the people who wrote the FORTRAN code, but you can't reason with these systems and explain to them why they're wrong.

To get results, we must treat government similarly. Think of Congress as a black box that reacts to various stimuli. Send them ten thousand letters from citizens in their districts about an issue, and they'll pay attention. Get a lot of people to give money to their challenger, and they'll think long and hard before voting against your point of view. Make it clear that voters care about an issue, and they'll care, too.

People on Capitol Hill like to think they're impartial stewards of the country, thinking dispassionately about the Right Thing to Do. But usually there's no consensus on what that right thing is. And when people in Congress do the wrong thing, it's easy to get frustrated about their backward thinking. Ed Felten, a terrific advocate for engineers, wrote a clever post rightly excoriating Rep. Howard Berman for saying he'd consulted "all the interested parties" on patent reform legislation when in truth he'd only consulted all of the Beltway lobbying groups, not citizens. Many commenters chimed in that politicians only listen to the groups that give them money and "know which master they are serving."

Back when Berman was appointed chair of the House IP Subcommittee, Larry Lessig wrote a scathing critique of the Democrats, newly in the majority. "'Radical' changes in Washington always have this Charlie Brown/Lucy-like character (remember Lucy holding the football?): it doesn't take long before you realize how little really ever changes in DC. Message to the Net from the newly Democratic House? Go to hell." Lessig saw Berman's appointment as a rejection of the blogs and activist groups on the Net that regained them the majority.

Felten is right that Berman wasn't considering the public interest. Lessig was right that the leadership wasn't considering Net activists' concerns when appointing him in the first place. But simply saying that on a blog is like saying that a cancerous cell shouldn't be dividing so darn much. True, but we don't just talk about it, we develop chemotherapy and radiation and drugs to stop it. Instead of just blogging or whining on comments, we need to be developing antibodies to the special interest groups. The ordinary citizens, who Congress isn't listening to, need to make themselves heard, by writing letters, making phone calls, signing petitions, giving money, and voting.

We know it works. Just look at Net Neutrality, an issue that most people still don't understand. But a coalition of groups from Free Press to MoveOn to the Christian Coalition worked together and didn't just talk, they bombarded Congress with advocacy. And it got results. Several major Presidential candidates and the Congressional leadership came out in support of Net Neutrality. The stimulus was strong enough, and the response meaningful. That fight is far from over, but it shows what citizens can do when they take action.

Next time you read about the latest assault on Internet freedom, don't just blog about it. To Lessig, Felten, Cory Doctorow, and all the other great bloggers, don't just write about how much it sucks, direct people to get involved to fix it. Encourage them to join or give to groups like Save the Internet, Free Press, Public Knowledge, EFF, or the political action commitee I founded, IPac, as well as many more.

For a long time everyone complained bitterly about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior and its operating system dominance. Then some hackers got together, enlisted more hackers, and created an alternative so good that most Web sites don't run on Microsoft software and (coupled with several more innovations) some people say "Microsoft is dead." We can make the IP extremists' and the information gatekeepers' positions dead in Washington, too.

Recently, much of the debate in telecom policy has revolved around network neutrality on broadband networks. But Tim Wu has a great new paper about how the wireless companies are far worse. Not only do they practice traffic discrimination in violation of net neutrality principles, but they go to great additional lengths to deprive consumers of useful features and innovative products.

None of these are new, but Wu assembles them into a convenient, detailed list, including:

• Preventing consumers from using phones other than those approved by the carriers
  
• Crippling phone features such as photo sharing, WiFi, Internet browsers, and even simple call timers so consumers can see how much time they are spending on the phone
  
• In the case of Verizon's BREW system, forcing application developers to go through an extensive screening process to even begin writing applications, and then another complex approval process to get the application launched
  
• Making it nearly impossible for applications to use the features the phone already possesses, especially GPS location information

Simple policy solutions could open up the wireless market to innovation without needlessly regulating the industry. Wu lists a set of good ideas. Even just the first one - ending the stranglehold carriers have to restrict which phones they allow on their networks - would go a long way. Without the ability to keep phones out of the U.S. market carriers would lose the ability to mandate that the manufacturers cripple phone features, or to impose burdensome approvals on the applications.

The FCC recently required a similar opening up of cable networks with its CableCard standard, which allowed electronics makers to build new cable set-top boxes with new features and required cable companies to let consumers connect these devices to the cable network without approval from the cable company. I'm actually somewhat surprised that the FCC, so often in thrall to the companies that made big campaign contributions to the Republicans, would

The openness created by CableCard (if it works - the cable companies are fighting it) is a perfect example of fostering competition and making markets work. There's no reason liberals and conservatives alike shouldn't embrace this kind of policy - it's only telecom industry money standing in the way.

In the early days of the Internet, there were two types of Internet access: the walled garden "online services" like Prodigy, CompuServe, and what became the most successful of them, AOL; and "raw" Internet access. The first type gave you a managed, controlled, predictable experience. In order to reach users on one of these services, the provider had to work out a special deal. That was time consuming and expensive, but ensured a certain baseline level of quality and decency.

On the other hand, the Internet itself grew to be orders of magnitude larger in the information and services available, because a site operator did not have to get permission from AOL or anyone else. With that freedom came some amount of chaos: there was no guarantee of quality, spam grew, and some even worse stuff. But ultimately, this won out. The managed online services started offering access from their services to the larger Internet, and all but AOL ultimately went out of business, unable to provide greater value than Internet itself where millions of people were creating countless Web sites and services.

Meanwhile, we have another network which is still all "walled gardens" - the cell phone network. As this anonymous entrepreneur writes, creating a service that runs over SMS on a US cell phone network requires the site offering the service to pay thousands of dollars just to have an "aggregator" negotiate with the wireless carriers on your behalf, comply with many asinine and intricate requirements, and wait months for approval. And "unmoderated chatting, flirting and/or peer-to-peer communication services" are prohibited outright by Verizon.

I can create a Web site by paying as little as $20 a month for hosting (free if I just host it on the same server as other sites I run), plus about $9 a year for a domain name. With services like Blogspot or Google Pages, it's free. And if my site doesn't make any money, that's okay. But if it's not profitable for the cell carriers, they won't allow it. When the overhead to create an SMS service and the bar to make it worthwhile are so high, no wonder we haven't had even a tiny fraction of the amount of innovation we have on the Internet.

Fascinatingly, some commenters on that article, who come from the wireless industry world, defend the status quo. One commenter writes that the decency requirements are necessary because of parents who complain to the carriers; another, that because the bandwidth is relatively low, the carriers need to manage the experience to keep out spam and satisfy customers.

It's surely true that for some customers, the purity and cleanliness of a walled-garden experience is desirable. After all, AOL is now building its business around making the Internet safe by blocking spam, viruses, and content unsuitable for children. But consumers have a choice. On the wireless networks, there is no choice. There is no carrier who allows unfettered SMS service creation or allows software developers to release software to install on their phones without restrictions.

Perhaps consumers would still opt for the safer, more managed networks, but I believe they wouldn't. After all, last time consumers has this choice, they chose the wilder but more innovative network. Let's give them the choice again and see what happens.