I’ve been hesitant to comment on the FCC’s proposed Net Neutrality rules until I could read them. You’ll recall the actual rules weren’t released at the time of the vote a couple weeks ago, just characterized this way and that for the press pending the eventual release of the actual order. Well they finally published the rules last week and I’ve since made my way through all 400+ pages (no executive summary commenting for me). And while there are no big surprises — much less smoking guns — in the FCC report, I think that taken along with this week’s Wall Street Journal story about an Apple over-the-top (OTT) video service the trend is clear that the days of traditional cable TV are numbered.
What booms through the FCC document is how much it’s written in response to the Commission’s loss last year in Verizon Communications Inc. v. FCC. Most of the more than 1000 footnotes in the order refer to the legal defeat and place the FCC’s current position in that legal context. FCC lawyers have this time really done their homework, suggesting that it will be difficult for cable interests to win like they did last year.
Just to review, last year’s version of net neutrality from Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler wasn’t especially neutral at all, proposing a two-tiered system that would have allowed ISPs to sell fast-lane service to OTT video streamers like Netflix. But that still wasn’t good enough for Verizon, which sued for even more. A key component of Verizon’s argument in 2014 was that the Commission had no legal basis for regulating fast-lanes at all with the Internet defined as an information service. If the FCC wanted to regulate fast lanes, Verizon argued, they’d have to claim the Internet was a telecommunication service regulated under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. One can only guess Verizon lawyers felt the FCC would be reluctant to open up the legal can of worms of Title II regulation, which might have had the FCC approving your ISP bill and maybe throwing-in a fee or two.
But the Verizon lawyers, like pretty much everyone else, didn’t include in their reckoning the influence of HBO’s John Oliver. Just as Verizon Communications Inc. v. FCC was winding its way through the courts, Oliver’s Last Week Tonight program did a 13-minute segment explaining Net Neutrality and the FCC’s then-proposed two-tier system (referred to as “Cable Company Fuckery” — is fuckery even a word? My word processing program says it isn’t). Oliver ended with a stirring call for viewers to send comments to the FCC and, lo, four million HBO subscribers and video pirates did just that.
So the FCC, having lost in both the law courts and the court of public opinion, embraced a version of Title II Internet regulation in the current order. They did just as Verizon had suggested, but of course Verizon wasn’t really suggesting anything of the sort and was just using Title II as a weapon.
The new rule specifically prohibits paid fast lanes and may well undermine a number of ISP deals last year with Netflix in which the streamer agreed to pay special fees for uninhibited access to users. It’s important to note that these Netflix deals may still continue if the payments are viewed primarily as being for co-location of video servers, not peering. The distinction here between co-location and peering is important. Co-location charges are legal under the new order while peering charges are not.
In my view what we have at work here are conflicting business models and visions of the future of TV. It has been clear for a long time that cable TV service as we’ve known it since the Cable Act of 1992 is changing. Back in 1992 Internet service hardly mattered while today cable ISPs make more money from Internet than they do from TV. Last year’s proposed two-tier service seemed to support the idea that cable ISPs could eventually replace subscriber channel package fees with OTT peering charges. Let a thousand OTT networks bloom as cable companies eventually became schleppers of bits, maybe dropping their own video services entirely, opting for less revenue but more profit thanks to OTT peering fees. But this wasn’t enough for Verizon, which pushed even harder — too hard in fact.
In the long run I think the future will be the same. Eventually the cable ISPs will become mainly ISPs and some version of OTT co-location will become a major profit center. This is the business loophole that will eventually — and properly — emerge. Ironically it argues against the current trend of massive video data centers since the video servers will be geographically dispersed to cable head-ends. But it makes great sense from a network management standpoint since it means only one copy of every TV show need be sent over the Internet backbone to each cable system, not one copy per viewer.
Now to Apple’s video ambitions. Dish and Sony are already rolling-out OTT video services with no doubt many more to follow. Nobody is yet offering all the right pieces but it will eventually happen. Apple’s entry into the OTT streaming business, first with HBO Now and shortly with many more networks and channels, is significant not only because it validates the whole OTT market segment, but because Apple has so much darned money — more than $180 billion in cash.
Having so much cash means that Apple can afford to wreak a lot of havoc in television with very little risk to its core business. They can take OTT further because making money with such a relatively small business isn’t that important. They can easily do radical things like (this is just an idea, not a prediction) buying-up the services of every member of the Writers Guild of America, inserting Apple deeply and inextricably into the Hollywood creative process. Apple can do pretty much whatever it pleases and there’s not much any other company can really do about it, which is why we’ll over the next couple years see dramatic changes throughout cable TV.
And while the current FCC Net Neutrality actions probably help Apple (and Netflix, and most likely you and me, too), these changes have been coming for a long time.
“Apple’s entry into the OTT streaming business, first with HBO GO…”
HBO GO is their existing service, for current cable subscribers only. It’s already been available on AppleTV and as an iOS app. Their new OTT service which doesn’t require a cable subscription and was announced last week at Apple’s event is called HBO NOW.
Fixed, thanks.
Co-location may be a wonderful answer to a lot of this, and is at least a very logical technical solution. Net neutrality or not, some basic laws of supply and demand come into play. If I only have OTA tv, and DON’T stream netflix, etc… why should I subsidize another user who is a heavy streamer? My data transfer profile means I CAN accept jitter, my usage is spikey, and so my traffic is friendly to the data transfer needs of others. The costs to meet the needs of HD streaming should be paid by those taking advantage of those features. Also, in regards to peering, historically these agreements were in place because they were a mutual benefit, and data in/out was roughly equal. If I want to transfer data to someone, one of us has to pay for it, we’re taking up bandwidth.
Although I support the spirit of net neutrality, the engineering demands to keep pace and in this case shift design paradigms, must be paid for, and so in practice I think the answer is much less clear. Perhaps pay per GB will be coming sooner now. That’s too bad, because I transfer a lot of data, but it’s bit torrent or rsync, so I don’t need consistent, smooth transfers. A movie I download overnight doesn’t have to be delivered in real time, so why should I pay to transfer the data in a consistent, low lag way? What if I could be charged less for traffic with less stringent requirements? Oh wait that’s what we were all fighting against… 🙂 In an ideal world, being charged less for that would be great… just like I think in an ideal world net neutrality would be great. Let’s not pretend this is going to fix all our problems 🙂
But the market, of course, IS ideal, because markets?
I look forward to your demonstration of waving a hundred at a piece of fiber and increasing its throughput. Until then, market-autists need to stay out of this discussion.
you can wave all the Benjamins at my GPON networks you want, and we’ll up your speed up to a gig, no problem. buy all you want, we’ll make more.
that’s not what net neutrality is about.
your gig is still the same priority level as everybody else’s IP traffic at our ISP. control is by a priority bit that is pretty much universally accepted in the same way now by every piece of equipment.
what you CANNOT get is waving your Benjamins to get a higher setting of the priority bit than VoIP, which is less tolerant of delay and interruption, or internal network management commands, which have to have the highest priority so we can catch a runaway issue and work with it.
you CANNOT buy a higher priority than any other user of the same service on the same network, and I hope at one point (have not read the 400 pages,I have folks who do that for me) that all ISPs will be using the same priority setting for the same service. that’s sort of thought as best practice now and that is what you get when you talk to the engineers and support guys at the equipment vendors.
You don’t want my excessive streaming video habit to bother your Internet service but your use of BitTorrent, etc. make it so you are unaffected. So what’s your point?
The point is we can either redefine what modern traffic looks like, and remember the asterisk next to all of these quoted speeds – “Up to X Mbps”. Or, we can differentiate the types of service being offered and charge more for better performance.
Is Netflix truly living up to their side of expenses when for $8/mo I can stream 24×7 for the whole month? Given 3GB / hr for HD, times 5000 hrs in a month, that’s 15TB of data, for $8, plus royalty fees. Wow, great price Netflix, how do you do it? Oh wait, you under provision, knowing that that usage pattern is outside the norm. So my $8 really buys me maybe… 2hrs/day * 30 days = 180GB/mo. And even that, is a smoking deal for bandwidth given that it looks like transferring 180GB out of E2C costs around $16 – twice netfix’s price. What’s happening is under provisioning, of course, the SAME thing ISP’s do. If we all started using netflix at this rate… then they’re changing their prices, or their allowed usage, or they’re going out of business.
The root here is who should pay for this change in usage profile? Do we charge by traffic type, traffic consumed? Not only are the numbers large, the requirements for transport are more strict – which is why I raised the bit torrent and rsync example, these are more friendly traffic. Is it right for someone to say “excuse me, this is traffic that we haven’t designed for, that will cost money to support, that not all of our users take advantage of” yet the demands impact everyone? You can flip a bit to prioritize, but eventually you have to upgrade speed the only way possible – by waving dollar bills at the fiber.
If you want to setup a VISP that rides on top of time warner, that fully supports all streaming everywhere be my guest. I’m guessing, however, it will cost a bit more than $8 extra compared to a service that did not support streaming, but provided the same 20Mbps web browsing, VOIP, etc experience. Anti-competitive behaviors aside.
So is the issue net neutrality, or is the issue plain and simple the value we’re getting for our money, and where the true costs lie for the services we’re consuming? I think it’s the latter. Greed and complacency are rather lo-tech problems.
You call it under provisioning; I call it statical multiplexing. Netflix should only allocate enough resources to cover peak demand, plus some additional amount for good measure. No sense wasting resources to service demand that won’t happen.
What is your perspective about the references to “lawful content”? (or similar words like legal & illegal in some references)?
[a search finds “lawful” itself over 100 times]
For example, the ban on throttling says that “Degrading access to legal content and services can have the same effect as blocking and will not be permitted”. Who gets to define which bits on the wire are “lawful” or not? And if blocking is put into place, how do we prevent collateral damage to lawful content that just happens to be hosted on the same or similar server as “unlawful” content?
It begs the question – why is “lawful content” so important in this report to have so many references?
For that matter, what’s fuckery? I get your point but really doubt there’s a conspiracy here. If censorship rears its head we’ll see those same four million commenters strike it down.
I find it hard to believe that George Soros and the Ford Foundation spent a reported $196 million on NN because they were worried that Netflix might get shafted. No, I think progressives have been eager to get their hands on the internet because it’s filled with “hate speech” and political content that they don’t like. Plus, with Title II regulation, they can impose fees that can be dispensed to favored groups to “alleviate disparate impact” or whatever. So I expect the FCC will try to use their new power help Democrats and hurt Republicans in the run-up to the 2016 elections.
I’m sorry, but that is absolutely the most idiotic thing I’ve read in a long time. First of all, the entire thrust of Net Neutrality advocates is that nobody, least of all ISPs or wealthy content providers, should be able to give preference to their own content or those of its partners. Thus, if I come up with some kind of business platform that could conceivably provide competition to Netflix, or Amazon, etc., my ability to provide my service competitively rests on the quality of my service, NOT on the quality of bandwidth that Netflix or Amazon could outspend me on. As a liberal, I can assure you that never, not ever, have I for one minute contemplated this as some sort of means by which political speech I don’t like could be smothered. And changing internet service into a Title II service would in no way whatsoever lead to that outcome. SHORTER VERSION: As soon as you brought in the George Soros boogeyman, you lost all credibility whatsoever.
Still, there are numerous references to “lawful” content, without any mention of who decides what is lawful. Perhaps the decision will be left to an international ruling body. Perhaps that body will allow each country’s blacklist to be incorporated into a world-wide blacklist. It’s hard to predict how more government control will be exercised. Although I avoid using swear words, I’m getting increasingly annoyed by the use of bleeps on the late night talk shows, both audio and visual.
>that is absolutely the most idiotic thing I’ve read in a long time
Indeed
The antiPiracy people, including a few governments, have been trying to get The Pirate Bay offline for ten years. What makes you think they can get “hate speech” offline if the speaker is sufficiently determined?
The problem is that even if their cause is hopeless, it won’t prevent them from spending taxpayer money to try.
30 seconds at google would answer that question. hint: you couldn’t give fuck all.
Cromulent: “Used in an ironical sense to mean legitimate, and therefore, in reality, spurious and not at all legitimate. Assumes common knowledge of the inherent Simpsons reference” https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cromulent Being unfamiliar with the Simpsons reference, all I get from the definition is that it means ironically legit and not at all legit. But what does “ironically legit” mean?
Irony means saying a thing but meaning the opposite. So if something is commuicated as ironically legitimate, what is meant to be communicated is that something is illegitimate. Irony and sarcasm (a form of irony) play particularly poorly on the internet and in print in general because they often rely on non-verbal cues, both tonal and physical, to make the receiver aware of the irony. Moreover, the ability to sense irony and the means to express it varies from culture to culture. For instance, expressing sarcasm in the Southern U.S. often just gets interpreted as being mean instead of attempting to be humorous.
Thanks Jason, I guess he’s just saying that “fuckery” is not a legitimate word, since cromulent means ironically legitimate.
If something is “ironically legit” (is that even a thing?) it would mean it is legitimate in an ironic fashion. Perhaps, outwardly illegitimate, but in a certain context becomes legitimate.
So Matt, can we assume you disagree with the Urban dictionary definition of cromulent “Used in an ironical sense to mean legitimate, and therefore, in reality, spurious and not at all legitimate.”
“lawful content” is the big loophole to allow traffic management and blockage against alleged copyright violators, terrorists, darknets and other traffic someone might find objectionable. In my opinion it really breaks the assertion that the ISPs will be treated as Title II common carriers, because a common carrier isn’t supposed to have any control or liability of the content they transfer between producer and consumer.
I must be stupid. ISPs have always charged different rates for faster speeds. What is the issue?
ISP’s have always charged the consumer for extra speed, but has not (untile recently) charged websites for extra speed.
Since RXC has annoyed everyone in the telecom industry, in the future, I can see his website being accessible at dial up speeds.
That is absolutely incorrect. I have purchased internet connections for my small business web site for over a decade. All ISPs charged different rates for different speeds to businesses and their web sites. The rates are always more expensive than residential rates and almost always have symmetrical up and down load speeds.
Come on! Are you serious!!!! You actually think my tiny website pays the same per month as any giant corporation using 1,000,000 times the bandwidth!!!!
Sure, businesses pay proportionately for the amount of bandwidth they need to send bits from their server to their ISP. The net neutrality debate is over whether those businesses should have to pay an additional amount to speed the transfer of their bits from the ISP to the end user. That bandwidth is already paid for by the user so why should the ISP be allowed to charge for it twice?
Sure, you already pay for the bandwidth, but we’re talking about extra fees to ISPs to “ensure delivery”, which is just another way of ISPs attempting to get you to pay twice for the same service.
Comcast and other ISPs did this to Netflix, and Comcast in particular decided to mess with Netflix’ delivery streams while negotiations were ongoing. If there’s one way to piss people off, it’s to mess with the delivery of something they already paid for in the hopes of making yourself a boatload more money.
You pay for the connection at your end, not at your consumer’s end. What is being blocked by net neutrality is the ability of the ISP at the consumer’s end from also charging you for preferential bandwidth.
Is this statement incorrect:
“proposing a two-tiered system that would have allowed ISPs to sell fast-lane service to OTT video streamers like Netflix.”
Do they mean a two-tiered-system of QoS?
Am I insane? Are millions of people writing billions of words that are all incorrect? How is that possible?
With the upmost respect I’ll allow that insanity is possible here. Yes, fast-lane refers to Quality of Service but I chose not to dive that deep because the FCC, itself, used the fast-lane term. Of course it refers to QoS, but does that mean when you drive over my foot I have to cite your front-wheel-drive diesel-powered car in the police report?
So does the CEO of Verizon get the “Stupid CEO of The Year Award”?
Well the year is still young, but possibly…
Here are the small business prices that Comcast charges small businesses for internet.
http://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet/plans-pricing
NOTICE DIFFERENT PRICES FOR DIFFERENT SPEEDS!!!!!!!!
WHAT PLANET IS EVERYONE LIVING ON!!!!!!!!
ISPs have always sold varying amounts of bandwidth to businesses and homes alike, so you are correct in that. You would also be correct, had you said it, that a data provider (typically a web site) will often limit the speed at which it will deliver bits to a single customer, all in the interest of serving more simultaneous users. The issue here is somewhat different, it’s the ISP limiting the data rate between (usually video) server and customer while remaining well within the bandwidth the customer is paying for. Say I buy a six megabit-per-second DSL line from AT&T and want to stream video from Netflix at one megabit-per-second. One is less than six so I should be okay. But AT&T would like to only guarantee Netflix, say, 600 kbps unless Netflix pays a fast-lane premium. Understand Netflix is already paying their backbone providers for that megabit but in this example AT&T wants to charge an ADDITIONAL fee to carry the stream at full speed over the last mile — a mile that, once built, costs them NOTHING per bit. And yes, you can pay more for a higher tier of service, but under that scenario to get a better stream Netflix would still have to pay. That’s a core issue. Does this make more sense?
Bob,
Thanks for the additional detail. I had not been able to find any information regarding what you just provided.
but-but-but maintenance. backhoe repairs, washout repairs, mouse nesting repairs, equipment card failures, lasers going dim and receptors going opaque. in the best of circumstances, the optical send/receive stuff in a fiber link will get an average of 5 years life, and even as SFPs it’s costly. repeater cabinets dim and die at the 25 mile marks. last time I saw the figure in a trade mag around 2000 it cost some $400 just to give a tech a ticket and have them start their truck. it hasn’t gotten cheaper.
that’s one extra fixed expense that isn’t really fixed for the telcos. another is once Vendor X has sold you a trainload of fiber stuff, and sales slow down, they discontinue the line. maybe every 4-5 years, maybe sooner in last mile stuff. so now you have to figure out how to stretch what you have until you certify in the lab that the claims are true, figure out how you can work the new stuff into the network, and start replacements.
so the cost of using the bitstream isn’t fixed lifetime. paying salaries goes up. the bonus pool goes up, and it takes another 5 VPs a year for whatever it is they do that needs another 5 VPs a year. maybe another foursome and somebody to check the scores.
But those aging factors and their associated costs have nothing at all to do with the number of bits that have actually travelled through the infrastructure. Most of what you cite comes down to calendar life expectancies that have nothing to do with how much I use or don’t use the Internet. To charge extra for it is just an excuse — an excuse against FCC regulations, by the way. Internet service is a business, I know. But if I’m buying X megabits-per-second and paying for x megabits-per-second then I expect to be allowed to USE x megabits-per-second.
…and the other reason they want to charge extra for Netflix to reach 1 Mb/s is because they’ve ridiculously under-provisioned their networks. If 100 customers out of a substation each have 6Mb/s service, they don’t necessarily have 600 Mb/s available on the network. The actual numbers change depending on the infrastructure installed in the neighborhood, but they still sell more service than they can actually deliver simultaneously to all their customers. That’s also where the * after all advertised speeds comes from.
RXC writes:
> … but in this example AT&T wants to charge an ADDITIONAL fee to carry the stream
> at full speed over the last mile — a mile that, once built, costs them NOTHING per bit.
Yes, this is true. But it’s more fundamental than that. I pay my ISP $X per month for my 7mbps download speed. Nowhere in the contract does it say whose bits I can download, or that there’s preferential treatment for certain of the bits. And I certainly did not agree to be stuck up (robbed, held for ransom) to get bits from, say, Netflix faster. If they were to succeed at this practice, Netflix would have to raise their rates.
How many times do I have to pay for the bandwidth to my house? (The right answer is, “once.”)
Re: ” I pay my ISP $X per month for my 7mbps download speed “. That’s not exactly true, download speeds are not guaranteed, but based on the “normal” usage of all subscribers sharing that ISP’s available resources. “Normal” was defined prior to widespread use of IPTV. The current non-recordable streaming model of IPTV is extremely wasteful of bandwidth, because each and every device must have its own private stream at the time the content is to be displayed on that device. Sure, the cable company could devote the entire cable to the internet, by removing all current TV “channels”, but that doesn’t change the inherent wastefulness of non-recordable IPTV for popular content.
It is intriguing, to say the least, to think of the fun Apple could have with all that cash. But then, if Apple were the type of company to spend freely maybe it wouldn’t have all that cash. It’s Apple’s focus that got it where it is, and it’s Apple’s focus that keeps it where it is.
Bob, you missed a very important point: The document refers to “content providers” and “consumers” over and over again. I thought we were all now empowered to be both. Wasn’t that the point of the Internet? To get rid of the Hollywood cartels? Oh, but the new episode of House of Cards is up! And I can watch it with my Chromecast! Why would I ever want to do anything else?
Enjoy your VT-100!
I’m a content provider. I’ve been doing exactly this since 1997 and something very much like it since 1987, yet I am neither Netflix nor NBC. There are tens of thousands of me. At its peak the U.S. newspaper industry had 1,800 daily papers — most of them with some sort of political or economic affiliation, yet we didn’t feel especially afflicted by them, did we? Bloggers today are often politically or economically identifiable, too. But because it is so cheap now to enter the media space and there are so many of us our individual impact is muted, which isn’t all bad. What counts is there’s plenty of discourse and Net Neutrality won’t touch that one way or another.
As long as you keep producing “lawful” content I’m sure you’ll be fine. Of course, the New York Times produced “lawful” content when they published Edward Snowden’s information. Somehow, Snowden is wanted for treason for producing “unlawful” content. How’s that possible?
Perhaps it’s related to copyright or to the matter of “for your eyes only”. Alcohol is legal, but not legal if sold or served to a minor. The Snowden info is not his to share, and if he were given permission to share it, it would not be for public distribution.
Call me a pessimist but I think the CEO of Verizon was as stupid as a fox. The carriers (and it may become more appropriate to call them carriers again than SPs) will charge the consumer more to achieve equality and there will be a free for all for co-location and intelligent content delivery at COs (acronym for Co-Location Offices now).
The consumer will suffer higher costs (in exchange for somewhat higher speeds and less latency) from the carriers, vendors get new equipment to get rid of coax, etc., and the content providers will have profitable and unbridled rising “coloco charges” (not my acronym but Comcast’s) to deal with and the NSA will have its snooping probes locations increased and available at no cost.
Everyone but the FCC and government tax bureaucrats will lose something while appearing to have won. The wild west of the Internet has met its end with the barbed wire of Title II.
You could be right but I don’t think so. The market is getting new competitors all the time — this in a business (Internet service) where prices pretty much don’t go up. If my ISP raises his prices I can go to another. If all ISPs raise their prices too much they’ll lose customers. It’s a volume business so the last thing they want to do is lose customers. They had a sweet little deal going with two tiers but got greedy.
“If my ISP raises his prices I can go to another.”
Must be nice to live in a place with that kind of choice. Sascha Segan in his latest points out that, for about a third of the US, there is only one choice for high speed internet.
Which is another reason why we need Title 2, and the FCC to allow municipal broadband.
Apple is setting the table for their 50″ 5K iMac PC/TV. Look out Samsung, etc (tvs), Comcast, etc (content providers) Apple is getting ready to eat your lunch.
I don’t think Apple will do a TV. The profit margins are simply too low. Look for something like a Chromecast with a better UI and more programming options.
I very respectfully disagree.
Perhaps it is just me exasperated by the lack of usability of TV remotes and TV interfaces crying out to be solved by a company with a history of doing such.
Besides, isn’t that one of the arguments used just before they released the iPhone? That and the carrier hegemony (which in my mind is analogous to the content providers hurdle they must overcome today for the TV) where, remarkably, they turned the industry upside-down.
Regarding margins, the Apple supply chain today is very different than it was then. (Unlike 2007) Now Apple is the 500lb gorilla. If they want to ‘put a Mac in every living room’ the holy grail of consumer electronics, this may be the way to do it. It sure as heck aint a shiny watch, imo.
Cost wise, an iMac TV is just an (bigger screened) iMac with a TV tuner, if they can make money on an iMac I don’t see why they could not make money on a $2K TV that is BOTH a TV and PC and a hub for other devices (home automation / security) and sell 10 times as many.
I think the following can be said: NN is all about whether the CARRIERS can play throttling games with the pipes.
Let’s say you pay your hosting provider for a big pipe to the internet backbone. And I, Joe Consumer, pay Comcast for a 100 mbps connection to the net. If Comcast likes you (i.e. you paid extra to them for the fast lane) I’ll get your content at 100 Mbps. But if you didn’t pay up, I’ll get your content at 2.5 Mbps because they are throttling down people who won’t pay the protection money (“Nice bandwidth you got there… It’d be a shame if something happened to it.)
So – you, Mr. Smalltime Content Provider, can’t compete with the outfits that can afford to pay up (and you’re stuck paying your backbone provider for access that Comcast is negating) and I’m getting screwed because I’m not getting the speeds I paid Comcast for.
In a system where providers have to pay extra to avoid being slowed down, the smaller companies will get squeezed, Joe Consumer will pay more for premium content (the money to pay the blackmail has to come from somewhere) and progressive voices will have trouble being heard. (The right wing has MUCH deeper pockets and the corporations are in bed with them as well)
The co-location stuff is probably the tip of the iceberg on how the Verizons and Comcasts of the world will figure ways around the ruling. Wheeler, who IS a dingo, has already stated the this will not be a “restrictive” application of Title II status and that they will refrain from regulating many aspects of the business that a “traditional” Title II designation would normally make rules about.
Even if the telcos lose in court, don’t expect full-throated support of the public good.
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BTW – I’m not sure how much sense the following makes:
“But it makes great sense from a network management standpoint since it means only one copy of every TV show need be sent over the Internet backbone to each cable system, not one copy per viewer.”
As is, these streams flow from CDN’s like Akamai who serve from many different places, so I’m not sure it would change anything much if the telcos replacing the CDN’s.
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DarthVaderMentor: Even a watered down Title II designation provides far more safeguards against the intrusions you fear than does an unrestricted corporate playground. The NSA is going to do what it does in any case – but title II provides at least some opportunity for public scrutiny.
—————-
Also BTW: If “fuckery” wasn’t a word before, it’s absolutely one now.
I think CDNs will be the first to die.
“four million HBO subscribers and video pirates”
I resent that phrasing. I’m not an HBO subscriber but I still saw the video legitimately. It was posted on Youtube by John Oliver’s own show.
He’s referring not to people who watch John Oliver’s clips, which are widely (and legally) available, but the people who pirate HBO drama programs like Game of Thrones.
As to the question of whether “fuckery” is a word: Amy Winehouse made good use of this word in her popular “Me and Mr. Jones” around 2006, so it was definitely in the popular lexicon by then.
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/amywinehouse/meandmrjonesfuckery.html
A really great way to check on usage is Google’s Ngram viewer. I compared the usage of “fuckery” to “hijinks”, and Google shows that it the ratio of usage is maybe 20:1 in 2005, making a good case for legitimacy.
http://tinyurl.com/lksq4a9
Unfortunately, Google has not updated the corpus (based on book scans) since 2008. I suspect there would be an Amy Winehouse bump visible right about then and continuing to this day. In the contemporary Google search, the hit counts of the two words are actually much closer than that. (876K to 577K).
Fun fact: dictionary.com says “hijinks” is a form of “high jinks” used with a plural verb. News to me.
– Mark
So the 1934 act declared the FCC was to regulate the Internet as a public utility?
The Act of 1934 set the FCC up to regulate communications. at the time, all you had was radio, telephone, telegraph/teletype/fax. against that background, they set out regulations for what they knew. as new uses came about, they whistled up regs for them… technical, bandwidth, and usage. this is just one more bag on the side of the file cabinet.
The original act was in 1934, Congress rewrote it in 1996.
So this is an open-ended claim of government power that can be extended without limit in the future. And
It was the chance conversation of two men somewhere behind her that came beating suddenly against her closed attention.
“But laws shouldn’t be passed that way, so quickly.”\
“They’re not laws, they’re directives.”
“Then it’s illegal.”
“It’s not illegal, because the Legislature passed a law last month giving him the power to issue directives.”
it’s executive branch actions under Congressional authorization codified into law. authorizations can be modified. courts can rule excesses or validate powers. courts can even make broad rulings that extend powers.
dynamic country we got here. no wonder everybody wants to grab a knob and play with it.
IIRC, an article here years ago talking about Cisco playing a role in decentralized storage of video in their backbone hardware, and that would help keep network congestion down. It sounds like Cisco could be a big winner here.
I was genuinely surprised by how much influence John Oliver’s show had in this debate (and in others). First AG Eric Holder puts a kibosh on federal civil forfeiture seizures soon after JO’s show on the subject, and now this. It’s reminiscient of the influence major TV network news anchors (like Walter Kronkite) used to wield. When he had Mr. Wheeler saying, “and for the record, I’m not a dingo,” you knew he’d made an impression of SOME kind.
I concur with your comment about the surprising level of influence of John Oliver’s show given 1) the relatively newness of the show and 2) the relatively small HBO subscriber base. Heck, John Oliver himself may be surprised by the impact!
1. he had a high profile gig for many years on The Daily Show, including a period when he was the main host.
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4. youtube.
Comment
Re: “only one copy of every TV show need be sent over the Internet backbone to each cable system, not one copy per viewer.” No doubt that will reduce congestion between the source and the cable company, but what about the “stream competitive” local network, where minimum speeds are never specified, and traffic congestion can easily happen at prime time. Once the cable company caches the content, the only sensible thing to do is continue to make it available on channels as they do now. That way they would extend the “one stream” model all the way to the customers’ TVs/DVRs. The internet model would create simlutaneous competing streams to each and every device on the cable system (computer, TV, DVR, phone, tablet). Each of these streams would require high bandwidth, non-bufferred, delivery, at prime time.
Bob,
A long time ago you posted a column in which you envisioned Apple (IIRC) implementing a bittorrent like service within its OS and within AppleTV. The notion would be forward deployment of movie content so as make content flow over the periphery of the network rather than traverse the backbone. I can’t locate that prediction and I’m wondering if you had thoughts on its new relevancy or irrelevancy. One might suppose that OTT shifting broadcasting/multicasting to narrowcasting that a million viewers of “Seinfeld” would require 1 million times the backbone capacity than broadcast. Yikes and hence the need for distributed file sharing. Only companies engaging the services of Akamai or similar forward position will have any chance of delivery content in that congestion. Thus if apple or microsoft or chrome OS were to use its OS as forward positioning it could corner the market quicker than others. Perhaps netflix could make an viewer app that did that too.
Conversely, one might worry that there is far too much content to forward position. That is less clear since it takes some math and statistics to figure out how this scales. perhaps in cities, the number of subscribers fans out in a way that people likely to watch the same thing closely in time would be sufficiently co-located to avoid traversing the backbone, while having enough disk capacity to store enough movies.
Anyhow whats your current thought on this?
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