aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Why your broadband sucks II
Cable companies have always argued, and usually won, that they own their cables so should be free to do with them as they wish. They have another win this week:
The Supreme Court ruled [Monday] that cable companies do not have to allow rivals to offer high-speed Internet access over their systems.
In a 6-to-3 decision, the court said the law on the matter was ambiguous and that the Federal Communications Commission, not the courts, had the authority to interpret it.
The ruling is a blow to consumer groups who want more competition in Internet services and to the leading providers of slower dial-up Internet service, like America Online and EarthLink. The dial-up sellers have had limited ability to offer faster, broadband service because they have largely been shut out of cable systems, which have been the most popular form of broadband service.
Now the idea would be that, like long distance service, you could choose to buy your high speed Internet access from one of many providers offered over the cable system. And, like long distance, prices would fall and innovation would happen and the service would improve and spread.
So much for that.
But it gets worse. The FCC traditionally ruled phone companies had to share their networks and did so for DSL. Then in 2002 the FCC proposed changing those rules. Now it’s likely the change will go through:
Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the F.C.C., in 2002 supported changing the D.S.L. rules for phone companies and was expected to now press for their adoption.
“As I have advocated in the past, we should treat D.S.L. provided by telephone companies the same as we treat similar cable modem services provided by cable,” Mr. Martin said in an e-mail interview.
Such a rule could have a significant effect on Internet providers, especially EarthLink, which has 1.5 million broadband subscribers, mainly through phone companies.
The United States lags behind the world in broadband deployment both in terms of price and speed. We were 13th in February. Meanwhile we’re protecting the cable and phone monopolies.
Some cities have tried to take action. Philadelphia has an ambitious WiFi initiative. In February, in Why Your Broadband Sucks, Lawrence Lessig told the story of Governor Ed Rendell of PA signing into law a bill prohibiting municipalities from offering free Wi-Fi. A former Philadelphia mayor, he grandfathered the city’s program in.
Today Lessig tells of a more hopeful story:
There’s a fascinating and important battle going on in Lafayette, LA. Citizens are pushing a referendum to permit the Lafayette Utility System to sell bonds to fund a project to “expand its existing fiber-optic network in Lafayette to everyone in the city.” The move is being fought by the telcos—who would rather bring much more expensive DSL and cable to everyone in the city. John St. Julien and Mike Stagg have been blogging the fight. There’s a great website explaining it. And today they’ve announced the winners in the ”Fiber Film Festival,” a film contest run to explain the benefits of fiber.
The fight is a tough one. The communications lobbyists will not rest. This week Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican in the US House (and former SBC exec) proposed a bill that would ban cities from running communications networks that compete against private-sector telecom companies.
These companies have a comfortable definition of competition that pits cable company against phone company, mano y mano, and keeps all others out. That’s not competition; it’s a duopoly.
