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Former UK official eviscerates NN as "extreme" and "impractical"

An article in the Register on the first significant NN debate in the UK is a wonderful read.

It is always helpful to get the reaction of an outside perspective to cut to the quick of an issue.

  • Alun Michael, the former UK trade minister "described the clamour for preemptive technical legislation as "extreme... unattractive and impractical"
    • "It was, he said "an answer to problems we don't have, using a philosophy we don't share.""
  • The current top UK regulator over the net neutrality issue Douglas Scott "concluded by saying neutrality wasn't an issue, so long as customers could migrate to an alternative provider quickly and easily."  

I reccommend reading the whole article.

Abusing American's privacy: part of Google's competitive advantage?

Google made news recently by adopting new privacy measures, which puts a spotlight on a real big public policy disconnect.

What I find most interesting about Google and the subject of privacy, is the glaring incongruity of these facts:

  1. Google, as the dominant search engine with ~50% of the market, arguably has more and deeper private and intimate information on American consumers than any other company in America;
  2. Google has among the weakest privacy policies of any major corporation in America;
  3. Google is not subject to any specific privacy regulations or regulator like other similarly situated major corporations that have lots of sensitive consumer information -- like financial services firms and communications companies.

Let me put that more simply:

The U.S. is way ahead of Europe on broadband!

Only 40% of European Union homes have Internet access and only 16% have broadband, according to EC Consumer Protection Commissioner Meglena Kuneva who spoke yesterday at the Digital World Conference in Berlin.

  • Those lagging numbers are in stark contrast to America's performance where 70+% of American homes have Internet access and 45+% have broadband according to FCC data.

NN proponents have tried to manufacture that there is a broadband crisis in the U.S. and that we are falling behind the rest of the world. It just isn't true.

  • That's why I wrote the commentary "America's Unique Internet success" in the Washington Times a couple of weeks ago, in order to debunk this fabrication designed to create a reason for the Government to intervene in the broadband marketplace.
  • America has a great broadband policy and strategy -- its called competition and deregulation!
    • And it works!
      • The Internet is the single greatest deregulation success of all time.
      • And the U.S. has substantially more facilities-based broadband competition than any other nation in the world.

"Google will sway 2008 Elections" -- Google's Clueless arrogance

Google has no sense of when to keep their mouth shut, because their corporate arrogance and cluelessness appears boundless. 

I could only shake my head at the headline in Comm Daily today prompted by a Google official speaking at a Washington conference.

    • "Google sees itself as a force in a political race that could hinge on making the best of Web and other tools, Google Vp-Global Communications Elliot Schrage said Thurs. at the Politics Online conference in Washington."
    • "Candidates are starting to see the Web's power, Schrage said: "Already candidates and campaigns are spending tens of thousands on adwords campaigns alone." The company invited declared Presidential candidates to its offices to "talk technology and policy" and will post videos of the talks if candidates permit it, he said. Google is trying to "make services easier to use" through a "special sales and political team dedicated to helping political camps, he said."" 

Generally company's are more responsible and circumspect about bragging about their own company's ability to influence or "sway" and election. The U.S. Government takes Federal Election laws seriously and is attuned to ensuring the electoral process is not manipulated in any way.

Europeans see NN as away to undermine U.S. Competitiveness

Net neutrality is not only a domestic issue but also a policy weapon some Eurocrats see as a way to undermine American competitiveness to Europe's advantage.

  • Make no mistake, NN has a powerful competitiveness, trade and foreign policy dimension.
    • Keeping the Internet free of regulation and promoting competition and the deployment of new technologies are critical to maintaining America's competitiveness.
  • Other nations are begining to see the NN concept as a clever way to slow down U.S. innovation and "level the playing field" through regulation to improve their competitive position relative to the U.S.
    • Some of the more socialist-minded nations like France are beginning to see that they can advance relatively, if they can slow U.S. innnovation down -- with "competition" restrictions that favor the EC and relatively disadvantage the U.S.

Why I wrote my commentary, "America's Unique Internet success" in the Washington Times a couple of weeks ago," was to drive home this important insight that America truly is unique when it comes to the Internet

More disarray in the ItsOurnet coalition?

I read with interest and amusement Drew Clark's piece on GigaOM about "Is Google changing its position on Net neutrality?".

  • My key point is what is Google's official position on Dorgan-Snowe, the highest profile Net neutrality bill which is co-sponsored by Democratic Presidential Candidates: Senators Clinton and Obama?
    • That is what matters. The rest is just backchatter, interesting though it is.

Drew Clark's piece in GigaOM is one of the better reports I've seen outlining the increasing disarray of the ItsOurNet coalition, the front group for online giants promoting net neutrality legislation.

Kudos to Cisco's Pepper on excellent NN editorial in TechNewsWorld

Dr. Bob Pepper of Cisco, and formerly a top policy advisor to several FCC Chairman, wrote an excellent opinion piece in TechNewsWorld: "Network Neutrality: Avoiding a Net Loss". 

  • Why it is a good read is the clarity of thought about how market forces, not regulation, has been the key to empowering consumers and creating freedom of choice.

Viacom Sues Google for "clearly illegal" business model -- its a growing pattern

The WSJ is reporting that Viacom has sued Google for $1b in damages for stealing its copyrighted content.

  • "YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google," Viacom said in a press release. "Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws."

China reining in Bloggers -- and NN wants Govt to protect free speech?

Reuters is reporting that China's chief censor will tighten control of bloggers in China.

NN proponents in the U.S. have ignorantly been calling NN the "First Amendment of the Internet."

  • These people clearly have not read the First Amendment or had any history on the origin and motivation behind our wonderful American First Amendment constitutional protections.
  • The First Amendment prevents GOVERNMENT from restricting people's free speech.
    • Our Founding Fathers understood that threats to freedom come from GOVERNMENT not individuals of companies.

I really don't think NN proponents have thought this one through.

Debunking the new U of Florida NN study -- think "Rosanna Rosanna Danna"

A new net neutrality study by an associate professor of the Business School of the University of Florida, bases its entire approach and conclusions on two embarassingly and obviously wrong pillar assumptions. 

  • They have wasted a lot of people's time by not grounding their game theory model on solid ground, but on the quicksand of erroneous assumptions. 

What assumptions did they get wrong? and what is the big deal?

  • The first pillar assumption they got dead wrong can be found in the first sentence of the abstract of their paper: "The Debate on Net Neutrality: A Policy Perspective"
    •  "Whether to legislate to maintain "net neutrality", the current status quo of prohibiting broadband service providers from charging online websites for preferential access to their residential and commercial customers, has become a subject under fierce debate."
      • Hello? The authors don't even know what the status quo is!
      • Why would net neutrality proponents be lobbying for new legislation, if NN was currenlty the law of the land?
      • Obviously these "researchers" did no research becuase if they did they would know that the ~30 million cable modems users have never been subject to net neutrality rules and that the ~225 million wireless users have  not been subject to them since 1993!
      • With a just a teensy amount of research they would have discovered a little Supreme Court case called "Brand X" in summer of 2005 which declared that the FCC had the authority to not apply NN-like rules to DSL. The FCC then referenced that decision a few weeks later in formally rule that DSL was an info service not subject to common carrier-like NN rules.
  • The second pillar assumption they got dead wrong was again in their first sentence in their conclusion section on page 29.
    • "The absence of meaningful competition in providing broadband access to consumers in many areas of the United States makes the broadband provider a de facto monopolist, and therefore the sole gatekeeper in determining what content gets to the end consumer, and in what fashion."
      • Obviously these "researchers" did no research at all, because no credible source argues that broadband is a monopoly in the United States. 
        • The FCC's latest broadband competition report, shows that cable has 44% share, DSL, 36% share and wireless and other have 20% share. It also shows that in the latest reporting period, first half of 2006, wireless broadband represented 58% of all new high speed additions.
          • That FCC report also showed that: 96% of U.S. zip codes that have at least 2 broadband providers; and 87% of U.S. zip codes that have at least 3 broadband providers.
        • If the researchers only turned on their TVs or radios, or read a local newspaper, they would see competing ads for broadband offerings. I guess their are no windows in the University of Florida's "Ivory Tower."
        • Even those most-in-denial-of-the-facts in the NN movement claim a "duopoly" and know better than to assert that the current market is a "de facto monopoly." If they did they would lose any remaining credibility they have.
      • Many professors would fail a graduate student that made such careless and completely unsupportable core assertions to support their model and conclusions.

Lastly, when I was reading this embarrassingly-poorly researched and constructed paper, the image that came to mind was that of the great late commediene, Gilda Radner, playing one of the most famous characters of Saturday Night Live:  "Rosanna Rosanna Danna."

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