AT&T previews lawsuit it plans to file against FCC
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Part of the interesting piece is the history of "common carriage": "The idea that certain businesses are so essential that they must not discriminate between customers is as old as ferries. With only one vessel in town, a boatman was generally not allowed to charge a butcher more than a carpenter to move goods. This concept, called 'common carriage', has served the world well, most recently on the internet."
I've never doubted my support for net neutrality, and the legal history of "common carriage" makes this even more obvious.
Which makes me wonder - will the FCC action do anything to expand the provider market, or merely ensure the quality of currently available access?
No, the provider market is unlikely to significantly expand without local loop unbundling; fair access to poles and conduit may help in some cases, but overbuilding is still going to be expensive and limited.
> or merely ensure the quality of currently available access?
We'll have to wait and see what falls under acceptable and unacceptable network management, to see what happens to quality.
If an ISP is required to abide by net neutrality and can only sell broadband when it meets the above requirement, then the FCC is essentially mandating quality and consistency of service.
Also, I don't see anything there about QoS or uptime guarantees. (Uptime guarantee: "One nine." "90%?" "9%.")
Not sure whether guarantees or provisioning levels are defined, but today's definition of "broadband" is 4 Mbps, so all else being equal, the FCC is trying to modernize the language.
Those are fallacies. The lack of guaranteed latency is fundamentally no bigger of a problem than the lack of guaranteed bandwidth. Non-neutral traffic shaping is not necessary to maintain good performance, and in practice a best-effort network can achieve acceptable latency for things like VoIP without having to explicitly identify, classify, and prioritize VoIP protocols. ISPs may be accustomed to using such explicit techniques, but neutral alternatives exist and work better for general purpose connections, so we shouldn't carve out any exceptions here.
The Economist also points out the difficulty of determining when traffic is or should be illegal and blockable. It is not at all apparent to me that ISPs have a need to be involved in subjective decisions like that in order for us to have a functional Internet. Is erring on the side of allowing traffic and prosecuting later really going to cause serious problems, or can we come up with an objective set of guidelines for what constitutes a DoS worth blocking?
How is the ISP even supposed to know it's a DoS otherwise? Maybe you just made the front page of HN and you want the traffic.
This is the absolute classic form of media psychic manipulation: present a false choice and allow endless debate within this window but never question what might lie outside it. Additionally, one side of the debate is accepted as the default and alternatives are only evaluated relative to this one viewpoint.
Another current example is the "work life balance" "debate" as it relates to social media. We are constantly told that we should "unplug" and "find time for ourselves," assuming that the majority of the time we are "plugged" and devoting our energies, via elaborate and exciting abstractions, to some distant venture capital fund.
One relevant term of art here is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
What makes you think they are or would be under this proposal?
The announcement said, "These enforceable, bright-line rules will ban paid prioritization, and the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services."
It says nothing about unlawful content. If blocking lawful content is illegal, but not-blocking unlawful content is not illegal, obviously ISPs will err on the side of not blocking grey-area content. It will only be obviously unlawful content that is blocked, which is really no different than today's situation.
Net neutrality doesn't mean that you cannot optimize the path to get somewhere, just that you don't discriminate. If you need a lower latency or need to lower utilization on certain links, the ISP can do things like peer with the chatty networks.
Especially when writing about the ability to decline service to customers. I'm not sure how net neutrality relates to AT&T having freedom to pick and choose its customers. (Surely the folks that just want their content delivered -- Hacker News, for example -- don't consider themselves AT&T customers.)
Well, Gmail, OpenDNS, Google DNS and Facebook (new homepage), make those arguments less useful. So "caching" is the new DNS.
Not sure how they'll deal with the rise of VPNs and HTTPS though. VPNs and non-cacheable are the most clear argument that people pay broadband ISPs just to deliver their packets.
"We need to use sophisticated computers to switch our networks because we use deep packet inspection to accomplish Fuckery; therefore, we are an information service; therefore, you have to keep letting us use sophisticated computers in the name of Fuckery."
Though it wouldn't help anything of the above anyway, since even with Title II AT&T won't be facing much competition. They'd be just more limited in ways they can abuse their monopoly.
The courts exist to provide relief in the case of a conflict. Without them, the only conflict solution is violence. If a company has invested billions in network upgrades and has a regulator come in and upset the apple cart- it's either cheaper to accept it or it's disastrous. I know the appeal of hyperbole, but apply occam's razor. Why would they 'waste money' on the courts?
Swapping copper for fiber requires expensive trench digging. Planning upgrades costs billions.
Monopoly is a word which you are misusing. Verizon is the leading wireless ISP in the country. Comcast is the leading wireline ISP in the country. Centurylink is a dominant force in ISP delivery.
Now change pineapples to air and consider a colony on some remote asteroid. Do you get the idea better?
> Monopoly is a word which you are misusing. Verizon is the leading wireless ISP in the country. Comcast is the leading wireline ISP in the country. Centurylink is a dominant force in ISP delivery.
It's not misused. Monopoly is clearly present in areas where there is no choice between all those options you listed (for example for landline Internet). Only few places have multiple choices. And even then they are often colluded - i.e agree with each other not to compete in order to prevent lowering prices and spending money on improving the service. So those cases for users are essentially a monopoly anyway, even if formally they have "choices".
This- I get.
You made assertions without qualifications. I don't know where AT&T is the dominant ISP vs Comcast vs Centurylink. My point is not to be acerbic. It's to say that ISP service delivery is EXPENSIVE. You have to make major investments. Those investments are based on assumptions. If a regulator comes in and unwinds those assumptions, OF COURSE YOU ARE GOING TO SUE. No rational business owner would do otherwise.
The better option would be to incentivize competition, but nobody wants to address how expensive space on telephone poles is. So now we're going to kill the golden goose so everyone can get their netflix & youtube videos.
> The better option would be to incentivize competition
Here I agree fully, but how exactly would you do that without causing ire of the same monopolists who hate competition? For example you could force unbundling, i.e. require to give access to the network to competitors. Some countries do that (France I think) and quite successfully. But do you think AT&T and Co. will like that? They'll start screaming ten times as much as they do now because of Title II.
No, I don't, but I'm not an AT&T apologist. It's networking I care about.
>>but how exactly would you do that without causing ire of the same monopolists who hate competition?
Fuck the carriers who are fighting against competition. My concern is that in 2030, we're going to live with regulations that were established in 2015. Do you remember what the Internet was like in 2000? Do any of the rules that would have made sense then apply now? IoT, M2X, etc. are changing how everything works.
I don't want a bandwidth hogging technology like video to overwhelm innovation in machine learning based m2x spaces. I want video to work- but I also don't think we're done innovating.
In the areas that the FCC regulates, it regularly makes updates to those regulations more often than every 15 years. (This would be more reasonable of a concern if highly-detailed rules were being written into statute law.)
Yeah. Rule 0: deliver the packets. Optional: reorder packets according to customer QoS, but never without customer request.
This is a subsidy to netflix and youtube. Gamers, Teleworkers, et.al. lose. Pre-roll ads are the big winners.
Where? The only thing I can see in the statute that might touch on different treatment regarding wireless carriers actually limits the degree of forbearance that can be applied to "commercial mobile services" in ways that do not apply to other common carriers. compare 47 USC Sec. 332(c)(1) with 47 USC Sec. 160.
Even leaving aside the issue of whether Congress intended to create a voice/data dichotomy: at a purely a technical level, voice and data networks are segregated. LTE only supports packet-switched IP, and unless you're using VoLTE, voice runs over the circuit-switched GSM network.
But 332(d)(2) explicitly grants the FCC the authority to define, through regulation, what the terms "service that is interconnected with the public switched network" mean in the context of defining whether a service is a "commercial mobile service". Given that there is absolutely a sense in which the internet itself is interconnected with the PSTN through many gateways, its not entirely impossible that part of the the proposal at issue expands the existing regulatory definition of interconnection to include any general-purpose mobile broadband internet service, which would bring such services within the scope subject to common carrier rules.
Anyhow, the argument that mobile internet is outside the scope of what may be subject to common carrier status (and thus, Title II regulation) is a different one than the argument you made earlier that there are statutory provisions expressly requiring forbearance from "most provisions" of Title II for mobile services.
These investments arguments are not bunk.
(I know Auernheimer's not well-liked, and I don't agree with his politics, but he deserved to win that case on appeal.)
I might be misreading something, but is he not saying "We know this is useless but we want to waste the FCC's time and resources anyways" ?
I'm not familiar with how lawsuits for these kinds of cases work, but wouldn't this be enough for a judge to throw away any lawsuit they file? If they clearly state t hey have no intention other than to get in the way, it doesn't seem like a valid lawsuit to me.
No, he's simply saying this prior release is not going to influence the FCC vote in any way, shape or form on Feb 26th.
However, a court battle after-wards might (as it did previously with the FCC National Broadband Act and the courts ultimately ruled the FCC had no authority to do what they proposed).
If FCC gets past arguments it didn't dot the i's, then this will go to the Supreme Court where AT&T and Verizon will get walloped. I can explain why, but basically there are 9 votes lined up against the ISPs on reclassification.
No one is surprised by this, least of all the FCC Commissioners considering voting on the proposals. I suspect that Wheeler's staff already has prepared legal analyses addressing most of the issues AT&T might raise in a lawsuit. Its hardly their first rodeo.
Soon, we'll end up with a monopoly guided by regulations from lobbyists and using laws as a weapon against competition. That's hardly better than the problem we seek to resolve.
One way is to do city-owned and maintained layer 1, like Chattanooga (http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/20/technology/innovation/chatta...), and sell access to as many ISPs want it.
The other way is to break the city franchise model. Cities generally grant franchise rights to cable and phone companies, excluding other providers for a promise of universal coverage and a few percent of the revenue.
The latter is what Google Fiber is asking for from the cities it goes into:
- It wants blanket access to all of the telephone poles and other right-of-ways, without having to do per-pole applications, application fees, and approval process that can take weeks/months each.
- It wants to not have to do universal access, but rather only roll into neighborhoods with a high enough density to be profitable.
- It won't pay the city a percentage of revenue. Instead, it agrees to build out free internet access to schools, public spaces, etc.
Google Fiber's model has the advantage of not relying on a city to properly maintain a fiber network, but the disadvantage of leaving poor communities un-served.
It's true that government intervention screws a lot of things up, but so does unrestricted capitalism. We can't solve the biggest problems of today with reductionist ideologies.