What’s New with Wu

In my chapter on radio, one of the most interesting, though obviously not in a good way, theorists of broadcast radio is Joseph Goebbels, the old Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda for the German government in the 1930s.
Here are his views on the possibility of objective, neutral broadcasting –

The radio must subordinate itself to the goals which the Government of the National Revolution has set itself. The notion that the work of radio can remain an end in itself cannot be refuted enough.

There is nothing at all that is not tendentious. The discovery of the principle of absolute objectivity is the privilege of German professors - and I do not believe that university professors make history…

In other words, the Nazis believed that everything was necessary partisan; aiming for objectivity or neutrality in any form a dream of university professors.  The rejected idea of a communications network as “an end in itself” is interestingly, both the idea of common carriage and the founding principle of the internet’s design.

In his best quote of all, Goebbels liked to say of broadcasting that it is simply:

the spiritual weapon of the totalitarian state.

I was very pleased with Verizon’s “grand opening” announcement –

I take it at face value that they’ve just decided its a good idea to be more open.

In the paper Wireless Carterfone I highlighted a policy that seem destined to get Verizon in trouble: its practice of deciding who gets to send mass text messages. The policy sets Verizon up for obvious violations of Net Neutrality.

Reality caught up as Verizon is now facing criticism for blocking mass text messages from NARA, Pro-Choice America, who Verizon’s policy blocked as too controversial.

This is a test case for what common carriage and net neutrality are all about. It shows the link between net neutrality and free speech: what we see here is a problem of private discrimination, not public. That’s not a concern for the First Amendment, but it has been a concern met with by rules of common carriage –

Declan McCullough, my friend and sometimes mentor in photography, has a recent story called

 TEN THINGS THAT KILLED NETWORK NEUTRALITY

While I appreciate Declan’s taste for drama, the premise of the story is completely false.  Declan seems to believe that, if there aren’t people marching on the streets, and if the rules aren’t being broken, that “Net Neutrality” is dead.

The truth is that AT&T is currently operating under Net Neutrality rules — and in effect, the whole industry has been abiding by net neutrality rules for the entire last year.

That’s why there’s no protests - the carriers aren’t misbehaving — though recent shut-offs by the cable companies may be a problem.

This example may make it clearer.  Say that, for some reason, everyone began obeying the speed limits.  Declan might say “the speed limits are dead” because no one is enforcing the law.  But the better view is that the rule isn’t being violated.

There are a mix of de facto and de jure net neutrality rules in this country that are currently being obeyed. The reason that there’s no protests is because, in effect, the net neutrality advocates won.

I’ve decided to post the original paper I wrote on Net Neutrality but never published in original form.

It was called A Proposal for Network Neutrality and I wrote it in the summer of 2002.

Later I took parts of it and turned it into another paper called Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination

Some of my ideas have changed since I wrote the 2002 paper, but I thought maybe it might be useful for anyone who is doing research into this area.

I enjoyed this letter from football great Steve Largent, asking me to please wake up and get over the 1970s!  Love this.

Someone Please Wake-Up Tim Wu!
By Steve Largent

In a recent essay published in Forbes, Columbia University professor Tim Wu does his best Rip Van Winkle as he attempts to liken today’s ultra-competitive wireless industry to the bygone phone monopoly of the 1970’s.   In his diatribe, Professor Wu characteristically throws fact to the wind as he attempts to paint the wireless industry as a plodding behemoth that is neither competitive nor innovative.  In Professor Wu’s world, there aren’t 233 million Americans using high-quality and ever-evolving wireless devices to surf the Internet, listen to music, take and send photos, watch live television, text message and email, play video games or make phone calls.  Nor do roughly 95% of the American people live in a county with access to 4 or more wireless carriers.  In Professor Wu’s world, companies aren’t competing, consumers don’t have choices, prices aren’t declining and innovation is at a standstill.   Wake up Tim, the 1970’s are over…and no one wants them back.

I wrote this commentary on a paper by Jonathan Zittrain –
Here is his response.

Tim, Thanks for your thoughtful comments on my piece. I appreciate your call for outright warfare rather than compromise in many instances ­ that the forces arrayed economically against an open internet are not much interested in balance except as it might be found in balance sheets. But I resist your call to reframe my argument in terms of the prevailing debate. As you point out, there are already well-developed arguments in now-familiar patterns about network neutrality.

(more…)

This article on Cellular Carterfone is a humdinger! In Information Week.
Meanwhile, I’ve noticed several well-done criticisms of my wireless paper, along with a few funded attacks. All will be answered in version 2.0 of the Cellular Carterfone paper (also known as Wireless Net Neutrality).

A note on Net Neutrality in Europe.

Europe, unlike the US, has largely maintained open access policies — that is, linesharing rules — for DSL. It also has general anti-discrimination rules for telecom, though their operation is complex. For that reason there is much less temptation to adopt new or separate NN rules, since such rules indirectly accomplish the same purposes, using competition to fight discrimination, instead of just a rule.

However there is some chance that Europe’s approach may backfire, as compared to the combo of no linesharing plus NN rules which is the de facto and partially de jure state of affairs in america.

Europe may end up with limited fiber buildouts, limited cable internet yet STILL have certain forms of discrimination resulting from reliance on linesharing as a bulwark against discrimination.

This is just a blog post, though a well thought through point. But it is a possibility. Ten years hence we’ll know.

Kennth Cheung at the University of Florida has released an interesting paper about whether carriers have an incentive to build more bandwidth in a non-net neutral situation.

His paper, which he sent me a few months ago, uses game theory to suggest that outcome. Unfortunately, Cheung has not done such a good job of making the paper available — I only heard it was released through the press release, and the SSRN link on the press release is dead. So Prof. Cheung, if you’re reading this, put the paper up somewhere.
In a different draft paper I’ve suggested another, fairly obvious possibility (my point is not original).

Consider this. If a network operator makes its income from its direct and immediate customer (Bill & Keep), it has an incentive to maximize bandwidth, so as to be able to charge more to that customer.

However, if an ISP earns money from charging termination fees to content providers (or, gatekeeper fees), its incentives become more complex. It may have an incentive to keep the gate relatively narrow — keep a control on the supply.

These are among the reasons that termination-fee based systems strike me as likely to lead in suspect directions