It’s unfortunate that the issue of broadband mapping is taking up any time and energy, much less about $350 million in stimulus money. Discussion of mapping takes away from discussion of the real issue – deployment, and why large companies have to be begged to provide service to some areas while they go to court and to state legislatures to prevent others from filling the gap.
The whole point of a legitimate broadband mapping exercise is for the public and policymakers to see where the service is being offered, at what speeds and price and, as importantly, where it isn’t. The “why” it isn’t being offered is a separate question the map can’t answer. The whole strategy of the telecom industry is to keep any mapping from revealing embarrassing information, like low speeds, high prices and spotty coverage and to keep anyone else from verifying the information it does put forward.
It is against that background that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) devoted one session of its marathon roundtable schedule to mapping. Just about everyone on the panel on implementing the broadband mapping part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stressed the need for detailed information and for transparency of data.
Speakers such as Sharon Gillet, commissioner of the Mass. Department of Telecommunications and Cable, talked about the need for transparency and accountability, for accurate, verifiable information. She demonstrated the difference between data supplied by the telecom carriers to the FCC, and data collected locally, with more unserved areas appearing on maps with independent information.
Erin Lee, from the National Governors Association, raised the possibility that information might have to be collected by ordinary citizens if it isn’t provided by telecom carriers. I was on the panel also and made the same point – that NTIA needs a Plan B in the extremely likely event that the operators of telecom networks stick to their traditional posture of providing the information they want to provide,
Any guesses which panel participant wasn’t with the program. That would be the representative from the telecom industry. It’s not surprising, because the industry, along with its cable brethren, doesn’t want transparency nor does it want accurate information to be reported.
It was left to Gillet to put the capper on the discussion. Massachusetts had spent considerable time and energy doing its own broadband mapping. Discussion moderator Robert Atkinson asked her what took up most of her cost and time. Her answer: Negotiating with carriers over data.
The game of hide the ball wasn’t part of the original discussion. It was overlooked in Congress’ enchantment over broadband mapping. The idea of mapping to find the gaps in broadband deployment was an easy sell for legislators two years ago when the stories started circulating on Capitol Hill in legislators’ offices and at hearings. It had all the elements – those public/private partnerships of which Congress is so fond, startling results in a rural state not known for technical capability, lots of pretty charts and graphs, endorsements from not only the telephone companies but also from the Communications Workers of America. And when it came to writing a bill, Connect Kentucky’s friends were front and center, creating a model to connect the nation, as it were. The legislation, called the “Connect the Nation Act,” was introduced April 24, 2007 by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), was written by and for the Connected Nation model, singling out non-profits to receive grants, for example. The key concepts have survived today in mapping bills passed last year, which was incorporated into the stimulus package.
Now with $350 million on the table – an absurd amount by any reckoning – mapping has moved front and center again. While representatives of governments and public interest groups argued for transparency and accountability, the telecom industry was sticking to its guns, trotting out the line Connected Nation used in its comments to the FCC, asking for deference to industry-backed groups.
Connected Nation is already gearing up to capture a big piece of the action, holding a webinar to tell state agencies that CN is one go-to group, one-stop shop that states need to make their mapping dollars work. That would be unfortunate on any number of levels, in part because the industry strategy has been to use public dollars to privatize the mapping function, as PK, Common Cause, the Media and Democracy Coalition and Reclaim the Media argued in a recent report.
And their representative was front and center defending their model which, not surprisingly, puts a premium on protecting their information, as opposed to the new stimulus law, which does not. The original Connected Nation bill, introduced by Sen. Dick Durbin in 2007, was written to the CN model, complete with restricting grants to eligible non-profit groups and lots of mentions of. Much of that DNA survived into the next iteration, which passed last year as S. 1492, also known as the Broadband Data Improvement Act, which was then funded through the stimulus legislation.
The industry representative at the NTIA panel kept up the company line when he urged NTIA simply to aggregate existing state maps produced by those receiving grants. This theme was consistent with the Connected Nation theme, when that group urged the FCC in prior comments not to do any mapping on its own, but to aggregate the work done by state groups. CN made that same argument earlier this week in comments to the FCC. They want grantees under their designated grant program, including “special confidentiality protections” to do the work to be submitted to the FCC. Nowhere in their comments was the mention of the very restrictive non-disclosure agreements that CN requires or the sponsorship of the organization by large telecom and cable carriers.
Enough already. It’s clear that the public sector wants transparency and accountability in broadband data reporting and subsequent mapping. The industry, voiced through Connected Nation, does not. There’s no point in spending lots of time negotiating this. Both the Commission and NTIA should move to Plan B, which is collecting information without involving the telephone and cable companies. There are legitimate, for-profit mapping companies that don’t have ties to communications carriers, there are community groups, there are any number of other approaches that could be used. It won’t be the quick and easy way to getting the information, but it will have to do.
Then we can move on to the real issue of how to bring broadband to areas that those same big carriers don’t want to serve. They know where they are, even if they don’t want to tell us.
Where was all of this
Where was all of this support when the ISPs took away a third of our internet service w/o any reduction in pricing? Of course I’m speaking of UseNet and the newsgroups that have always and traditionally been bundled with any ISPs service offering. Alas, it’s gone the way of the ISP shell account., does anyone remember those? I’m making odds that only 1 in 100 people do. That these people, educated beyond their intelligence and needing a quarter to buy a clue, now want to bemoan the lack of broadband is a day late and a sawbuck short. You should have stood up when there was a REAL internet, you should have stood up before this information superhighway became a cowpath.
Broadband mapping isn’t
Broadband mapping isn’t taking up a lot of most people’s time and energy, but it certainly seems to be taking up a lot of Public Knowledge’s efforts and attention. In particular, its vendetta against Connected Nation seems to be an all-consuming passion. Why?
Apparently, Public Knowledge’s goal is to ensure that the large carriers — the telephone and cable companies — will become a duopoly. Why? Because rather than favoring Connected Nation’s approach, which publishes only aggregated coverage data (perfectly adequate if the goal is to determine where deployment is needed), it is lobbying instead for broadband mapping which would publish the exact footprint of every carrier. This, in turn, would make it trivially easy for the larger carriers to target anticompetitive practices against the smaller ones, driving them out of business.
This dovetails nicely with Public Knowledge’s campaign to regulate the Internet. So-called “network neutrality” legislation (which really isn’t neutral at all, by the way; it favors Google, a large supporter of PK) would impose onerous regulation upon Internet service providers, driving smaller ones out of business and also drying up investment capital for them. (Just the threat of regulation has sent many would-be investors in my independent Internet service provider running; they have no desire to invest in a regulated business.) Competitive providers are destroyed, leaving a duopoly.
Why would Public Knowledge, which (hollowly) claims to be a public interest group, favor an Internet duopoly? The only answer that makes any sense is that the group, like many inside-the-Beltway lobbying organizations, bases its business model on playing “David and Goliath.” And since there’s still quite a bit of competition out there for the Goliaths, Public Knowledge needs to pursue strategies to drive those inconvenient competitors out of business. Then, when a duopoly is firmly in place, the group can raise money by fighting that duopoly — even though it contributed to creating the problem in the first place.
Pure self-interest. As usual, the public interest is the farthest thing from inside-the-Beltway lobbyists’ minds.
@ISP, you say that Google is
@ISP, you say that Google is “a large supporter of PK.”
Public Knowledge lists its funders here:
Google is listed as one of several corporate sponsors for the group’s annual IP3 awards. But according to this info, more than 75 percent of the organization’s funding comes from foundations and very little comes from corporate donations.
Do you have some contrary information?
And can you cite some source for your assertion that net neutrality favors a telecom duopoly? I’ve never heard that one before.
It would be far more
It would be far more convincing if PK published the appropriate section of its IRS Form 990, which has to be correct and complete under penalty of perjury. It’s far too easy to omit amounts, list donations from corporations as having come from individuals (who are often their executives), “launder” corporate contributions through foundations, or play other games. (For example, the New America Foundation, another DC lobbying group which hews precisely to Google’s corporate agenda, claims to have received only about $10K from Google. But then, taking another look at the list, one notices that it has received millions from one Eric Schmidt. Hmmm.)
Also, PK doesn’t list Google’s in-kind contributions of labor via the interns it sends to work for free there. In short, it appears that Google is giving PK a lot more support than you see on those pages — especially since PK hews to Google’s corporate agendas to the letter. Again, the one document that one may be able to trust is the one that they are not revealing. Why?
As for “network neutraity” favoring a telecomm duopoly: that’s simple. Large corporations have buildings full of lawyers whose jobs are to deal with regulation. They also have the ability to cross-subsidize between products (e.g. a cable company can use profits from TV to subsidize Internet). Small, independent ISPs could not do this and thus would not be able to survive onerous regulation of their businesses. They would fail, leaving a duopoly.
@ISP—I have a fair amount
@ISP—I have a fair amount of experience in dealing with corporate donations at a nonprofit, and I think you are probably off-base with some of your claims. Nonprofits like PK have a mission statement, and the entire credibility of the organization rests on staying true to its principles. Therefore, it is very unlikely that any corporate donor would ever convince PK to take a stance that it ordinarily wouldn’t take. Rather, Google supports PK because the organization’s mission happens to coincide with the company’s strategic mission.
These goals change over time, and Google will almost certainly stop supporting PK when it no longer suits them.
Here’s where you’re right: While corporate donations rarely change what an organization says, they certainly affect what an organization doesn’t say. Even though PK will defend Google when their interest overlap, I guarantee that PK will never criticize Google when the company goes against PK’s mission.
For example: Google recently removed an Android app that would have enabled tethering. Doesn’t sound very open, does it? I guarantee that nobody at PK will ever criticize Google for this decision.
David (at least I assume
David (at least I assume that this is David B; correct me if I am wrong), I’ve seen many nonprofits stray very far from their stated goals, and PK is among them. For example, on its “About” page, PK says that its “first priority” is to “promote innovation and the rights of consumers,” while working “to stop any bad legislation from passing that would slow technology innovation, shrink the public domain, or prevent fair use.” And yet, it is discouraging innovation by lobbying for Draconian regulation of technology businesses such as ISPs. It is likewise harming consumers by pursuing regulation of the Internet, which will raise prices and harm the quality of service that users experience.
When a group deviates from its mission statement, the usual way to learn why is to follow the money.