In the fast-paced, highly-competitive market of wireless phone and Internet access, this announcement stands out. The wireless carrier with the second-most subscribers, AT&T, is to acquire the number four carrier, T-Mobile USA. Some would say that this is a grave threat to competitiveness, risks reducing competition and increasing prices on everyone, and so should be stopped by the benevolent masters of the Obama administration. I disagree.
This is a young and vibrant market, with many competitors already out there, and more yet to come. The acquisition of a lagging company by the #2 company only puts pressure on the #1 firm, Verizon Wireless. Not only that, but existing regulations are plenty strong, and will almost surely result in resources being made available to lesser firms, reshaping the market without reducing choice.
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Long week on my end, but thankfully it’s over as soon as I’m done writing this. But the top story is danger at the FCC. The regulator is still threatening to overstep its bounds and circumvent the Telecommunications Act, which strictly limits the amount of power the FCC has over Information Services. So now they want to redefine high-speed Internet access as something new and different they’re calling BIAS, and then regulate the daylights out of it. This is bad stuff and must be watched. Read the whole article if you’d like to know more.
I am so glad DC Republicans are so strong on the problem’s surrounding Obama administration’s regulatory excesses and the talk is moving to full-on regulatory reform.
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This edition of Tech at Night is unfortunately delayed. It’s almost 4am now as I’m able to start this (7am eastern) because I had a bout of Net Neutrality to deal with. All websites loaded at the same speed on my DSL: zero. Total downtime.
So, late or not, let’s go. As I warned on Monday, Net Neutrality is forcing ISPs like AT&T to impose reasonable caps on their services. Known freeloader Netflix demands that AT&T users who don’t use Netflix subsidize those who do, which is of course completely unfair, which is why AT&T isn’t allowing it. Anyway, the rate caps aren’t that small, and $10 per 50GB over isn’t bad at all. Ask any wireless Internet user what you’ll get for $10.
More FCC power grabs are on the way, it seems. The FCC has what you might call a conflict of interest: the wireless market must be declared non-competitive for the FCC to be allowed to intervene. Who decides whether that market is competitive or not though? Yup, the FCC. So Fred Campbell warns that the FCC may ignore the Congress and just say whatever it takes to do whatever it wants. Boy am I glad we have Republicans in DC who are on top of the FCC already. This may take swift action to combat.
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Good evening. I’m going to start tonight with a clarification from Friday. While I identified last week’s Net Neutrality push poll with Consumer Reports, the poll was actually signed on by CR’s publisher, Consumers Union, and conducted by the Consumer Federation of America. As that one television network says, I have now made a report, and you can decide for yourself what to make of it.
Meanwhile we still have a bunch of Net Neutrality fighting going on. Republicans are on to something with the Congressional Review Act plan of repeal, and the forces of Net Neutrality are worried. Al Franken wants to start putting people in jail over it, this despite the FCC’s failure even to publish the rules of the Net Neutrality game.
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I went ahead and took Martin Luther King day off, so it’s a double dose of stories to cover tonight. Though first, in case you missed it, make sure to see my post today on Marsha Blackburn‘s call to action against stifling, destabilizing Internet and technology regulation.
Other than that, the big story this week so far has been the FCC finally approving the NBC Universal/Comcast merger. I don’t even know why the center-left is even supposed to be worried about that merger at this point. After all, they passed Net Neutrality, right? Anyway, it’s a real shame that this approval has only come with a number of special set asides for left-wing causes, but as I’ve said before, I’m guessing the shareholders will take what they can get after all of this delay.
Of course, the neo-Marxists are sobbing hysterically about this development. Let’s all pause, lower our heads, and take a moment to laugh at Free Press’s Josh Silver.
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Net Neutrality (which Mike Wendy calls a “Private Property Slap-Down”) may not be any longer the top issue on the Obama administration’s side of things, but questions still remain. And the funny thing: all the Net Neutrality advocates in the world working in the White House were no big deal. But all of a sudden it’s a concern that a former AT&T President going to the White House is a problem.
But yes, the FCC wants to change the subject. Now suddenly the press is to open up more bandwidth for wireless Internet access. Funny, I was assured during the Net Neut debate that wireless access didn’t effectively exist. Now the FCC wants to expand it. More spectrum isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we do have to watch how it is acquired.
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Now that the FCC has made itself the center of attention by planning a big power grab online, it may be the case that the FCC gets some unwanted attention. The Free State Foundation is calling out the FCC for not being very open even as the FCC is calling for an Open Internet™. Here’s the punchline, but read the whole thing, and that’s not something I say often in this space:
But preserving the Open FCC is much more fundamentally important to the public, over the short, medium, and long term. I have my doubts concerning how the FCC’s dumping of 1900 pages of documents into the public record on the eve of the date it cuts off public participation is consistent with preserving an Open FCC.
The last time I saw a data dump this bad was when Saddam Hussein was toying with the UN Security Council. That’s just great company for Julius Genachowski, FCC Chairman, to have put himself in.
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Happy Weekend. As I write this it’s already the 11th, so you have two shopping weeks left before Christmas. Oops, is it still legal on the Internet not to say Holiday?
Some quick hits for the weekend as we continue to wait on the FCC to explain itself and its plans for radical new Internet regulation.
George Ou points out that if Netflix gets to demand free peering with Comcast, then Netflix ought to demand free shipping over the postal service. After all, if neutral means free, then that’s the next step, right? Just shows how absurd the radicals really are in all of this. Network investment costs money and that money must be recouped with profit, or else that investment isn’t going to happen.
And again, if that investment stops happening, we all lose out.
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Just as I was saying copyright was soon to replace Net Neutrality as the big tech issue of the moment, circumstances prove me wrong. Instead, regardless of the results of the December FCC meeting and the future of that whole Net Neutrality debate (more later), the coming issue now is going to be peering.
Some will play word games and say it’s all covered under the blanket issue of Net Neutrality, but be careful. Net Neutrality as promoted and sold by Free Press, the FCC, Google, Verizon, and others has been all about the so-called last mile from the Internet to your home or business, including wired and wireless access. That’s what the FCC is talking about regulating as Net Neutrality, that’s been the focus of the scare stories calling the need for Net Neutrality a Crisis™, and we cannot now let them do a bait and switch.
So in your mind, I suggest separating the Comcast/Level 3/Netflix issue from the Free Press/Net Neutrality issue. The former deals with the back end of the Internet, from the user’s perspective, while the latter deals with the front end that we directly pay for and use.
They’re both important though, so here’s my explanation and view of the Comcast/Level 3 Peering controversy broken out as a separate post because it got so long. To sum it up, Comcast did the right thing, because Netflix and Level 3 were being unfair and trying to take advantage of sharing deals made in good faith.
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Good morning. Last night Tech at Night didn’t quite come because I was not feeling well at all. But there’s stuff I want to highlight so this morning I’m going to make it happen. Here we go!
Want to be more like Europe? Well, in one way, we do: The EU has rejected Net Neutrality regulation as unnecessary. The EU’s equivalent of an FCC Chairman says “We should allow network operators and services and content providers to explore innovative business models.”
Can we actually stand to be more regulated than Europe, and drive innovation across the Atlantic? I don’t think so. We absolutely cannot tolerate proposals like this to force AT&T, Verizon, and others to open their wireless networks to each other, essentially partially nationalizing and socializing a major part of our telecommunications infrastructure going forward.
I can think of no better way to kill the wonderful wireless revolution we have going on, and end investment in it, than to turn everyone into free riders off of each other. This would devastate rural Internet access by creating a tragedy of the commons out there. We cannot let this happen.
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