Policy Blog Entries by Tim Schneider

During exam period this past spring, I took a break from studying to check out student projects at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program Spring Show. If you’re not familiar with ITP, I can’t do much to describe it briefly here, check out their site. Suffice it to say that their classes are a whole lot more fun than Contracts. I wandered the packed rooms, my backpack full of outlines and study guides rudely bumping passersby as around me LEDs flickered and projects clicked, hummed and sang.

About a third of the projects (perhaps hoping to be the next Dodgeball) used mobile phones and SMS, either regular text messaging, or MMS, which can send pictures, audio or even video via a cellular network. The best ideas were simple yet brilliant, a massive photo scavenger hunt, shared subway delay messages, a shared list of places to do. They used social-network style collaboration (tagging/folksonomy) and play, and the toolbox of the latest wave of web innovation: blogs, the Google maps and flickr APIs. These, along with ubiquitous rounded corners, white space and bright pastel graphic design invoked the current Web 2.0 explosion/bubble. I think I’ve seen people using “Mobile 2.0.” But you probably haven’t heard of many of these SMS-based services, much less used them to share, learn and play.

Cell phone use is at historically unprecedented levels, and phones have truly incredible functionality, with built-in GPS, still and video cameras, bluetooth, and more and more storage. We have ubiquitous, incredibly versatile devices that people carry with them everywhere they go , and a supporting network that gets faster and faster. Why is there so little innovation in SMS applications and services?

Maybe it has something to do with the nature of the network.

The folks over at NewsForge have a great article describing the barriers to entry for third-party SMS applications on cell phones. The author, James Glass (a pseudonym), draws a connection between net neutrality regulation and the lack of innovation in SMS:

CBS just announced a partnership with Amazon’s CustomFlix to offer custom-made ninety minute videos of clips from the CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes for $24.95. The service, “CBS News Archive” is in the obligatory beta—-old media can do this too—but it’s worth checking out. It looks like the coverage goes back to at least 2000, and you can watch “trailers” of the clips before you order.

I’d like to take a minute to point out how close to awesome this is. A searchable archive of television news footage? A long tail for TV news? But then, force consumers to wait for their footage to arrive in the mail, locked up in a DVD format you need to break the DMCA to extract. For 25 bucks.

Ooh. So close.

Maybe there’s consumer demand for this, only time will tell. Personally, I have my doubts. At the very least, props to CBS for experimenting with a new revenue model, rather than riding existing business models off of various legislative cliffs.

Of course, the timing is convenient. In all the hubbub over net neutrality many have forgotten that the Senate Telecom bill, S. 2686 still contains both the audio and video broadcast flag. The video broadcast flag contains an exception for “news and public affairs programming whose primary economic value is timeliness,” ostensibly because the ability to excerpt and share news is important to civic discourse. Perhaps more importantly, the networks hadn’t made any compelling argument as to how they’d make money off old news and public affairs broadcasts. That is, there’s no obvious business model that would be threatened by allowing individuals to record and distribute excerpts of TV news footage.

Until now.

Which is to say, just keep an eye on that news and public affairs exception.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK) is as well known for his temper as he is for his power over spending and influence over legislation. His outbursts on the Senate floor and his ties featuring the Incredible Hulk are trademarks.

Yet while his threat to quit the Senate over the funding of a bridge in Alaska may have brought a lot of time on news shows, it took a speech he gave at a markup on Net Neutrality to make him a multi-media star.

Almost two weeks ago, we posted an excerpt of audio from the Senate markup of the telecom bill, a long oration by Senator Stevens explaining why he was voting against a Net Neutrality amendment. In doing so we seem to have inadvertently sparked an internet meme, the Internet as a “series of tubes.” This Technorati chart gives a sense of the trend:

While it’s been great to watch the conversation grow on blogs and epic comments threads, (even sparking a backlash!) it’s been even more fascinating to watch the parallel creation of Stevens-inspired user-generated content: a t-shirt, a powerpoint slideshow, even a song and a techno remix! The read/write Internet in action …

Wednesday, June 28

3 PM (or so)

Senate Markup of S. 2686

Public Knowledge Intern Bill Herman, who’s been reflexively recording anything he can since getting a digital voice recorder for dissertation interviews, records the Senate markup of S. 2686 from the Real Audio stream playing on Alex’s laptop. Ostensibly, this is so that Art Brodsky, out of the office, can listen to it later. Through this single act, Senator Stevens’ famous (within certain circles) “series of tubes” speech is saved from obscurity.

5:59 PM Alex Curtis posts audio of Senator Stevens’ comments on Public Knowledge’s blog.

Thursday, June 29

10:11 AM Art Brodsky sends out a heads up to the PK press list, alerting them to the Stevens post.

5:46 PM Following up on Art’s email, Ryan Singel posts excerpts and commentary on Senator Stevens’ speech on Wired Blog 27 B Stroke 6. Subsequent stories link to his article, and our audio.

Sunday, July 2

9:32 AM Metafilter: “Shun the frumious net neutrality…” (74 Comments)

11:45 AM BoingBoing: “Sen. Stevens’ hilariously awful explanation of the Internet”

Time unknown Digg “Senator Ted Stevens Downloads the Entire Internet and Complains It’s Slow!” (375 Comments)

Senator Stevens’ Wikipedia entry is quickly updated to include a sizable entry on his “series of tubes” speech.

Monday, July 3

5:29 AM Slashdot: “How the Internet Works — with Tubes” (652 Comments)

11:30 AM

Meryl Yourish publishes her delightful Powerpoint presentation to assist Senator Stevens’ in explaining how the Internet works. Friends convert the .ppt file to a series of jpegs and a pdf to conserve bandwidth.

11:46 AM

A t-shirt! According to this BoingBoing post, the author released this under a Noncommercial Creative Commons license, so others could make their own.

Thursday, July 6

6:43 PM The backlash begins. In a post entitled “More Educating; Less Snickering, the folks over at the 463 blog take the blogosphere to task for mocking Senator Stevens’ ignorance of the Internet, and advocate educating policymakers on information technology policy. Cynthia Brumfield at IP Democracy echoes these sentiments the next day.

“aprigliano” posts a remix combining the audio from the Ask a Ninja Net Neutrality video and Senator Stevens’ comments.

Saturday, July 8

Dan Mitchell, at the tail end of his New York Times “What’s Online” column on the Long Tail, notes Mr. Stevens’ difficulties sending the Internet via email to his staff.

My personal favorite, this haunting melody appears on MySpace Music performed by newly created Brooklyn folk/ghettocrunk group, the “Ted Stevens Internet Fan Club.” (This page is now gone, mysteriously)

The folks at Boldheaded prepare this catchy techno remix of Senator Stevens’ comments,”Ted’s Techno Tubes.” But the picture is what makes it …

The telcos and the cable companies don’t like Net Neutrality, but wireless providers (cell phone companies, represented by CTIA) are REALLY REALLY opposed to Net Neutrality.

What are they so afraid of? What is it they want to do that net neutrality won’t let them?

All signs point to a converged future where cable, telephone, satellite and cellular all offer broadband services that compete with one another. Of course, right now all these technologies have different rules. Personally, I’m glad I’m not the regulator who has to sort all of this out. The fight over net neutrality is part of this process, the convergence of the heavily regulated telephone networks and the comparatively unregulated cable networks. Telephone networks were required to be neutral, cable networks were not (or at least, not explicitly so until the Supreme Court said so), and when the two started competing the weaker regulation prevailed.

Now imagine what happens when cell phone companies and telcos and cable all offer the same service. To some extent, they already do: the discredited FCC broadband penetration figures that net neutrality opponents keep citing consider wireless broadband services like EVDO equivalent to cable modems and DSL. Yet the services they offer are much different, and the differences go a long way toward explaining why wireless providers are so opposed to net neutrality.

Consider Verizon’s EVDO service, which offers broadband speeds over cell phone networks, for use with mobile devices, or even fixed routers. But as customers are finding out, Verizon’s “unlimited” wireless broadband is not, in fact, unlimited. The customer agreement (scroll down) clearly stipulates this:

Unlimited NationalAccess/BroadbandAccess services cannot be used (1) for uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games, (2) with server devices or with host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, Voice over IP (VoIP), automated machine-to-machine connections, or peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, or (3) as a substitute or backup for private lines or dedicated data connections.

Doc Searls directs us to a customer who found this out the hard way. From the Verizon letter terminating the service:

We recently reviewed your Verizon Wireless National Access and/or BroadbandAccess account and found that your usage over the past 30 days exceeded 10 Gigabytes. Your usage was more than 40 times that of a typical user. This level of usage is so extraordinarily high that it could only have been attained by activities, such as streaming and/or downloading movies and video, prohibited by the terms and conditions.

Verizon will tell you that these restrictions are imposed because they have limited bandwidth, etc. But as Mitch Ratcliffe at ZDNet points out, there’s the small matter of this Verizon service, which, curiously, seems to encourage EVDO subscribers to engage in “uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games,” so long as they’re Verizon’s movies, music and games.

Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem? There’s your problem.

Looking forward to that bright broadband future.

At Tuesday’s broadcast flag hearing, Mitch Bainwol of the RIAA declared that XM’s new devices “will starve—literally starve—Creativity.”

Who could be against creativity? Creativity is like a puppy: almost universally acknowledged to be a good thing, certainly not anything we’d want to see “starved—literally starved.” I kept having a mental image of a puppy named Creativity, maybe a puppy like this:

Thanks Martin!

And then the representatives from the MPAA or the RIAA: “You see this puppy? Do you want this puppy to be destroyed/starved/ deincentivized?” Kind of like this famous magazine cover.

But Gary’s right, there are other types of creativity that matter, creativity that isn’t controlled by ten companies, creativity that is just as threatened by the legislative agenda of the content industries: the analog hole, the broadcast flag, fighting DMCA reform. And other endangered puppies, maybe a bucket of puppies, with names like Democratic Discourse, Home Taping, Parody, and Fair Use. We haven’t always done a good job of describing what’s at risk, so consider this a first step.

Check out these puppies (sorry for the gratuitous puppy linking), that would be threatened by the video broadcast flag and analog hole legislation, three sites that legally use excerpts of television broadcasts to offer commentary on politics and the media. While there’s an exception for “news and public affairs programming whose primary economic value is timeliness,” the networks get to decide what these programs are: an exception that swallows the exception. As you can see, the broadcast flag is non-partisan; these shows will be locked down whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat.

• Crooks and Liars
• Hot Air
• PowerLine Video

And a bonus puppy, this from the House Commerce Committee itself, whose homepage currently features a legally excerpted video from ABC News, including comments by Chairman Barton!

Also, thanks to flickr and its members for the Creative Commons licensed pictures of puppies … and the hour of my life I will never get back.

Last Friday, PK took a field trip out to the Digital Media Conference in McLean, Virginia, to catch up on the latest happenings in, um, Digital Media. The morning sessions opened with “Industry Roundtable: Perspectives from Leading Associations and Interest Groups,” featuring representatives from the content industry (MPAA, RIAA, DiMA, ESA) and device manufacturers (CEA). As you can see, the panel was a little stacked. At past panels, moderator Gary Arlen (check out his account of the day) wore a referee’s jersey to keep things under control, but this time opted for an equally effective sports-themed tie. Congratulations to CEA’s Michael Petricone for his spirited defense of consumers’ rights.

What was striking about the panel was not the content industry’s legislative agenda (the usual: analog hole, broadcast flag, and opposing DMCA reform), but the disconnect from the rest of the conference. The room was mostly empty, while the room next door—a panel focusing on “the Battle for the Digital Consumer” —was packed. The consensus in that room, and really of the conference, was that the winners of the digital media game would be those who could give consumers what they wanted when they wanted it.

The question left unasked and unanswered by the content industry reps was the long term viability of a business that is openly antagonistic to the desires of its customers …

And yet, content matters! One of the recurring themes of Friday’s conference was that the companies best positioned to take advantage of the new market were those who owned their own content. Why? Because then you don’t need to deal with the licensing battles that hinder any innovation in content delivery. While the big industry associations are using litigation, legislation and even international treaties to lock down content, some people are getting out there, distributing their content, and making money.

People like the Discovery Channel. In the first keynote of the day, Dawn McCall of the Discovery Networks International described the over 100 unique outlets her company uses to get their content to consumers. A fleet of cable networks, but also podcasts, webcasts, mobile devices, iTunes downloads, HD, even tours of national parks on Google Earth. You name it, they do it. She credited her company’s explosive growth to the decision to own their own content, and a deliberate effort to be platform neutral.

Changing the content to fit the platform, rather than forcing the platform to fit the content. Interesting idea, but one you won’t hear much around Washington these days.

Gary Shapiro of the Consumer Electronics Association, at today’s House Commerce hearing on the Audio and Video Broadcast Flags:

“We have to stop measuring creativity by the financial interests of ten companies.”

Amen.

More and more, the debate over net neutrality centers on the question of government regulation, and the telcos and cable companies have done a pretty good job of invoking the bogeyman of government intervention in markets. Hands off the Net, right? At yesterday’s Senate Commerce Committee hearings, Blair Levin, managing director and telecommunications analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus and Company testified on the potential impact of net neutrality regulations on investment. Investment analysis may not be your cup of tea, but Levin’s testimony is intelligent and thoughtful, a far cry from the dogmatic anti-regulation rhetoric that we often hear from the anti-Net Neutrality side. And he comes to some surprising conclusions about the link between net neutrality and network investment.

He begins by addressing the link between government and regulation in the telecom industry:

In listening to the debate on network neutrality, one often hears the view that any regulation will hurt investment in the network. In my view, this is like believing that a piece of a puzzle is the entire puzzle. That is, while it is true that regulation, looked at in isolation, has a negative impact on investment in the enterprise being regulated, it may not be true when one looks at the whole picture. The decision of whether, and if so, how much to invest in infrastructure involves a complex weighing of a number of factors.

That is, it’s not a direct negative correlation between regulation and investment. The picture is much more complicated, and in many cases in the telecom industry, regulation has helped to spur economic growth. In fact, the same companies now fighting net neutrality once sought government regulation to make their new business models possible. Levin gives some examples:

While some have suggested the government should never be involved in such matters, it is important to remember that government has often intervened in value chain disputes to help jump-start new industries and stimulate competition. To help the fledging cable industry, government imposed regulations on owners of utility poles and mandated compulsory copyrights for broadcast content. To help the Direct Broadcast Satellite industry, government imposed program access rules on cable-affiliated programming, which, as noted above also stimulated broadband investments. To help broadcasters, government imposed must-carry and retransmission consent rules on cable operators. To help wireless, the government limited the wireline companies’ ability to change excessive terminating access charges. To help various providers of telecom services, such as the long-distance industry and competitive access providers, constraints were placed on the way incumbent local exchange carriers could price or deny access to certain of their facilities.

The last example, of course, is the forty-year old net neutrality rules that the FCC and the Supreme Court did away with last year. The entire testimony is worth a read, and while I don’t agree with all of Levin’s conclusions, it’s good to see commentary that rises above the “soundbites, lies, misleading arguments, and propaganda” that have clouded the net neutrality debate.

In case you missed it, the National Grange recently issued a statement opposing net neutrality legislation. They’re concerned about the effect net neutrality regulations will have on smaller rural-based carriers, and the rate of broadband rollout in rural communities. The Grange is a storied organization that has done a lot for rural communities over the last 150 years; they were the driving force behind rural free delivery at the turn of the century, there’s even a monument to their work on the National Mall. But as someone who’s spent most of my life living in towns of under 2,000 people, I thought I would take this opportunity to disagree with their take on net neutrality.

Rural people have been a pawn in telecommunications politics for at least a century, beginning when the radio networks used the lack of radio reception in rural areas to push for high power, clear channel stations (for a good overview of this, check out James Foust’s Big Voices of the Air). Rural people are convenient for incumbent communications providers because 1) everybody likes them and 2) they don’t talk back. This is one of the neat quirks of US broadcasting for rural residents: since the production of content happens in urban centers, rural people are always listening, but rarely speaking. This in turn goes a long way towards explaining the shameful depiction of rural people in the mass media.

This is the same model that the cable companies use and the telcos want to replicate: centralized production of content pushed out over fat, asymmetric pipes, consumers’ content choices limited by who can pay for the pipe. This is what the net neutrality fight is really about. An open, neutral Internet shakes this model to pieces, by allowing those on the fringes—rural people—to create and publish content that can be seen, heard, and responded to in the center of the largest cities. To talk back, for once.

The Grange is probably worried that the battle over net neutrality will hold up national video franchising, which they believe will help spur broadband deployment in rural areas. Whether you agree with this or not, a non-neutral net itself will do nothing to address this problem. If anything, it might make matters worse, as Harold Feld of the Media Access Project pointed out recently. Imagine that a local telephone company decided to take advantage of its broadband monopoly by telling a content provider, “I’m sorry, but if you want to reach customers in Cherryfield, Maine, you’re going to have to pay extra.” For content providers whose revenue depends on advertising, the obvious response is not to pay, since rural customers tend to be a less desirable, less influential demographic to begin with. A non-neutral Internet could actually reduce the incentives for companies to provide rural broadband access, by making it comparatively less profitable.

You might have heard the argument the telephone and cable companies are circulating, that net neutrality rules stand in the way of developing reliable telemedicine programs. It’s an argument designed to fall on sympathetic ears; everyone wants the best quality health care for the elderly and disabled. It’s also false. If these companies get their way and net neutrality rules are not put in place, network operators would become the new HMO’s, reducing competition and limiting the health care choices of patients. Explaining where their argument goes astray also provides a good opportunity to clear up some confusion on just what net neutrality means.

Different types of Internet traffic have different needs: no one would notice a few seconds of delay in email, but the same delay for VOIP would make Internet phone conversations impossible. Telemedicine traffic over the Internet should be handled differently than email, and net neutrality wouldn’t prevent network operators from doing that.

What Net Neutrality does do is prevent the companies who control Internet access from cutting an exclusive deal with one telemedicine provider on preferred terms, effectively immunizing that provider from competition. Forced to choose between a provider who can guarantee a reliable connection and one who has been shunted to the slow lane, consumers would have no choice at all. Network operators would effectively decide what options are available to health care consumers.

Net neutrality allows network operators to speed up telemedicine information traveling over their networks, provided they speed up all telemedicine information. This maintains a level playing field for competing providers, encourages innovation and keeps prices low. Most importantly, it keeps network providers from acting as yet another gatekeeper between consumers and their health care choices.

Which is why, just today, OR-Live joined the It’s Our Net Coalition in support of net neutrality. They provide live broadcasts of surgical video over the Internet, as an educational resource for physicians and patients. Their statement nails it: “We believe that life-saving information should remain available to everybody, not just to a privileged few.”