[ale] Misleading Editorial needs Rebuttal

[aaron]

The editorial below showed up in the AJC this morning.

It appears to me to basically be a preparatory apology from an
FCC member for failing to do his job (yet again).  In general
it is yet another promotion of the corporate welfare state and
the myth of commercial "self regulation".

As I understand the Commiecast throttling situation, the editorial
also severely misrepresents the realities of the situation; the
crime was that Commiecast was denying customers contracted
and payed for bandwidth based on the way were using it! The
arguments also bury the fact that the goals of the not-for-profit
government, educational and independent engineering groups
that built the internet and solve its problems were to improve
the technology, while the only goals of any commercial corporate
interest are greed, greed and greed.

I suggest that we need to provide an informed rebuttal.
Any thoughts??

peace
aaron

============================
Don't throttle Internet with regulation

By Robert M. McDowell
For the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/30/08

The Internet was in crisis. Its electronic "pipes" were clogged with
new bandwidth-hogging software. Engineers faced a choice: Allow the
Net to succumb to fatal gridlock or find a solution.

The year was 1987. About 35,000 people, mainly academics and some
government employees, used the Internet.

This story, of course, had a happy ending. The loosely knit Internet
engineering community rallied to improve an automated data "traffic
cop" that prioritized applications and content needing "real time"
delivery over those that would not suffer from delay. Their efforts
unclogged the Internet and laid the foundation for what has become the
greatest deregulatory success story of all time.

The Internet has since weathered several such crises. Each time,
engineers, academics, software developers, Web infrastructure builders
and others have worked together to fix the problems. Over the years,
some groups have become more formalized —- such as the Internet
Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet
Architecture Board. They have remained largely self-governing,
self-funded and nonprofit, with volunteers acting on their own and not
on behalf of their employers. No government owns or regulates them.

The Internet has flourished because it has operated under the
principle that engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve
engineering problems.

'LAST-MILE' CLOGS

Today, a new challenge is upon us. Pipes are filling rapidly with
"peer-to-peer" ("P2P") file-sharing applications that crowd out other
content and slow speeds for millions. Just as Napster produced an
explosion of shared (largely pirated) music files in 1999, today's P2P
applications allow consumers to share movies. When consumers download
these videos, they call on thousands of computers across the Web to
upload each of their small pieces. As a result, some consumers'
"last-mile" connections, especially connections over cable and
wireless networks, get clogged.

At peak times, 5 percent of Internet consumers are using 90 percent of
the available bandwidth because of the P2P explosion. This flood of
data has created a tyranny by a minority. Slower speeds degrade the
quality of the service that consumers have paid for, and ultimately
diminish America's competitiveness globally.

While we at the Federal Communications Commission are trying to spur
more competitive build-out of vital "last mile" facilities, especially
fiber and wireless platforms, this congestion will not be resolved
merely by building fatter and faster pipes.

Last summer, a new nongovernmental organization, the P4P Working
Group, was formed to find a solution. The group has already
field-tested dramatically increased delivery speeds of P2P content
over cable networks and other networks. It is working with industry
and consumers to create a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities."

Such dynamic work is progressing without a government mandate or
regulatory framework. Soon, however, that could change.

Since the fall, the FCC has been considering allegations filed by
public interest groups that cable operator Comcast violated FCC rules
by "managing" or "interfering with" the upstream flow of certain P2P
video applications, namely those of a company called BitTorrent. The
allegations boil down to a suspicion that Comcast was motivated not by
a need to manage its network but by a desire to discriminate against
BitTorrent for anticompetitive reasons. Comcast maintains that any
interference was imperceptible to consumers, occurred in minuscule
amounts of time, and was limited to peak congestion periods and areas.
Comcast and BitTorrent settled their dispute in March; in fact, they
issued a statement saying in part that "these technical issues can be
worked out through private business discussions without the need for
government intervention."

A COMMON GOAL

Despite this settlement, some are calling for the FCC to rule that
Comcast's actions were illegal and should be punished. Others contend
that the FCC has no enforceable rules that apply to such situations
and that the issue should be addressed through a rule-making
proceeding, with an opportunity for public comment, or through
congressional legislation. We have examined the arguments on both
sides and are poised to decide the matter this week.

Our Internet economy is the strongest in the world. It got that way
not by government fiat but because interested parties worked together
toward a common goal. As a worldwide network of networks, the Internet
is the ultimate "wiki" environment —- one that we all share, build,
pay for and shape. If we choose regulation over collaboration, we will
be setting a precedent by thrusting politicians and bureaucrats into
engineering decisions.

A better model would allow collaborative groups to continue to do what
they have done for years. If they can't reach an agreement —- which
has never happened —- then government could examine the situation and
act accordingly. Before venturing into the unknown, we should remember
something President Clinton said in 1997: "Governments should
encourage industry self-regulation wherever appropriate and support
the efforts of private-sector organizations to ... facilitate the
successful operation of the Internet."

Let's stick with what works and encourage collaboration over regulation.

> Robert M. McDowell has served on the Federal Communications Commission since 2006.