Lessig Blog Archives

Former FCC Chairman William Kennard published an op-ed in the New York Times Saturday. The main point of the piece is to lament the truly awful state of broadband access for the poor in the United States. One statistic (not mentioned by Kennard) says it all: As the OECD reported, the United States has the 4th highest level of students (by 15 years old) who have never used a computer — worse than Greece, Poland, Portugal, and the Czech Republic.

What I found extraordinary about the piece, however, was its slam of “network neutrality” legislation. As he wrote:

Unfortunately, the current debate in Washington is over “net neutrality” — that is, should network providers be able to charge some companies special fees for faster bandwidth. This is essentially a battle between the extremely wealthy (Google, Amazon and other high-tech giants, which oppose such a move) and the merely rich (the telephone and cable industries). In the past year, collectively they have spent $50 million on lobbying and advertising, effectively preventing Congress and the public from dealing with more pressing issues.

So let’s get this straight:

After 8 years of deregulating broadband in America (begun by Kennard, completed by Martin), both DSL and cable are free of any real obligation to protect the original neutrality of the Internet. Once some rules imposed in merger agreements expire, last-mile broadband providers will be free to pick and choose the content and applications they want the network to carry. They will use this power, as at&t Chairman Ed Whitacre explained, to tax the most successful content and application providers on the net. That tax, as I and many have argued, will effectively block the next generation greats.

Over these same 8 years, following this policy of deregulation, we’ve gone from 1st in the world to rivaling, as Kennard puts it, Slovenia. Broadband on average is slower in the US, and more expensive. In France, a triple play “Internet, Telephone, and TV” package is $32. Comcast offers less for $150.

At some point, you might think some would begin to worry about whether the US strategy makes sense. (compare: State of Denial). Forget the theory, forget the hand-waiving by academics and ideologues: Just ask one simple question — is the policy working as well as the (different) policies of our competitors?

I. and many, have concluded it is not. I take it, that is the view of the more than a million who have written to policy-makers arguing for network neutrality legislation. These people want policy that will finally push broadband providers to provide at least the quality and price of broadband in France. The online campaign to get Congress to do something here has been amazing, rivaling only the campaign to stop the FCC from passing rules that would permit even more concentration in media ownership.

But now comes Kennard to belittle this extraordinary online movement. It’s not a battle, he tells us, about whether competition in applications and content, ultimately driving penetration, will continue. It is instead a battle about whether the “extremely rich” will prevail over the “merely rich.” Nothing important in that battle, he tells us (except perhaps to these various flavors of the rich); Congress should therefore move on from this agenda for billionaires, and take up the real challenge of serving the poor.

It’s funny, I hadn’t realized I was a Google tool. I had thought we were pushing to reverse a failed policy because we wanted to enable the next Google (that was my point about YouTube). I thought we were angry because the “merely rich” had yet to provide broadband as broadly as in other comparable nations. And I thought we were fighting the efforts of the “merely rich” to further reduce competition, either by buying up spectrum that would enable real wireless competition, or by getting state laws passed to make muni-competition illegal. I had thought these were important issues for the new economy — keeping the platform as competitive as possible, to keep prices and quality moving in the direction they move in the rest of the developed world.

Now that Kennard has set us straight, however, I’m relieved to know we can finally move onto other, more important issues. Global warming is at the top of my list. Maybe you have other priorities.

But before we move on, let’s not forget:

Even if America’s broadband strategy doesn’t make sense for America, it makes lots of sense for certain companies. Kennard knows this well, because he sits on the board of many of those who benefit most from this deregulation. His op-ed acknowledges his work with the Carlyle Group. He is also on the board of Sprint Nextel Corporation, Hawaiian Telcom and Insight Communications (a cable provider). These companies will benefit directly if Kennard succeeds in getting Congress to forget Network Neutrality. They will become “merely richer” at the expense, I believe, not of Google or eBay, but of the next gang of kids with the next great idea that Google, and eBay (and Comcast and at&t) just don’t get.

I don’t know Kennard personally. People who do tell me he’s an extremely bright, ethical man. I’m sure that’s right. But there’s something unseemly to me when an FCC Chairman moves to the boards of the companies he used to regulate, and then uses the op-ed page of a paper on whose board he now sits, to argue for the poor by pushing the agenda of the “merely rich.” (How can a paper that obsesses to pretend its most brilliant writers have no opinion of their own not wonder about the weirdness here?)

They say Washington has to be like this. You could never get great people into government if they couldn’t cash-out once they left. But I bet if the next President demanded of nominees to the FCC that they promise not to take jobs in the industries they regulated for some “limited time” (let’s say, the life of a copyright), the President would find lots of qualified nominees. Maybe then it would be easier to hear the pleas for the poor, without the echo of the interests of the “merely rich” confusing the message.

BrianWill has a nice post about the electricity analogy in the Network Neutrality debate. The meme: “what the telecoms are threatening to do is to charge a premium for how the utility is used, not for how much of it is used.”

HOTI points to Scott Cleland of the respected “The Precursor Blog” who has posted a reply to my FT article. My “thin rule,” Cleland says, is just “thin gruel” (by which I take it he means he doesn’t like my rule; I personally find the best gruel to be thin gruel, and in fact, in the increasingly cold Berlin mornings, I think gruel is a very good start to the day. I wish people would stop picking on gruel, thin or fat.)

The thrust of Cleland’s one pager is that I’ve been “loose with the facts.” Let’s review the charges: (Cleland’s words are bolded below):

Loose Fact #1:

Lessig asserts: “In the U.S. at least, broadband competition is dying.”
Anybody who cares to check, will find that broadband prices are falling, broadband speeds are increasing, consumer choices are increasing steadily, broadband investment and deployment are strong, and innovation is vibrant.

This is Dick Cheney on the war. (Indeed, let’s give it a name: to Chenify): Put the prices issue aside till the next sentence: Are you kidding, Scott? Relative to every nation who should be considered to be competitive to us in this, we are worse off today than we were four years ago. When Bush said “10th is 10 spots too low” he was right (well, sort of. It’s actually 9 spots too low), and yet now the US is 16th in broadband deployment. The worse things go, the more a certain set simply denies reality.

Why can’t an anti-neutrality advocate begin with what everyone knows is true: US broadband sucks — it is too slow, it is too expensive, and it is too unavailable. The only question is what we are going to do about it.

For those who care to go more in depth on this subject, I have produced two useful one pagers to prove this point: “Debunking the Broadband Market Failure Myth” and “Debunking the Broadband Competition Can’t Work Myth.”

So here’s where I was worried. Though this is an issue I’ve been studying “in depth,” I hadn’t read Cleland’s “one-pagers” before. (I hate the word “debunking”. Sounds way too Marxist for my taste). So I took a deep breath and clicked on the one pagers, expecting to find a refutation of the data upon which I had based my understanding that in fact, prices have not fallen.

That data, again summarized well in Broadband Reality Check, suggests that first, cable prices have increased slightly, and second, while NOMINAL DSL prices have fallen, the $/MB has gone up, since the speed of the offering for the cheapy deals is significantly slower.

Here’s Cleland’s “debunking”:

Real DSL prices have fallen ~50% as speeds have roughly doubled over the last 2 years; introductory DSL prices have fallen ~70%in ~3 years; average monthly DSL prices fell ~15% from 2004-2005.

Every fact stated here could be consistent with the conclusion that the $/MB has gone up. (Well, almost: You’d have to be a bit charitable in interpreting “as speeds have roughly doubled over the last 2 years” — that’s plainly not true, as the “introductory” packages he points to offer less than 1 MB speeds). So where’s the beef, Scott? Where is the data to debunk “Broadband Reality Check”? I’d be happy (in the academic sense of that term) to be proven wrong about relying upon the data I relied upon. I’d be even really happy to learn that average $/MB prices for DSL have gone down. But notice the critical fact Cleland didn’t try to “debunk”: That prices in the US range from 6x (France) to 12x (Japan) the $/MB of the US. But don’t worry, every-thing’s great. The war’s great. Broadband in the US is great. The deficit is great. It’s just the best of all possible worlds…

For those who want to get the FCC’s analysis of broadband competition click here; or for the FCC’s analysis of Wireless competition click here.

I love the way anti-regulation types hate everything the government does, except data that supports their argument. Talk about “debunking”: The FCC’s analysis has been the subject of extensive criticism, including by the GAO. The problem is the FCC’s method for counting penetration with in a zip-code: They conclude that if 1 person within the zipcode has a broadband choice, the whole zip-code has broadband choice. As the GAO concluded about this obvious fudge: “the number of providers reported in the ZIP code overstates the level of competition to individual households.”

For those who don’t want to be bothered with facts and analysis, but just want anti-business assertions about what imminent peril our way of life faces from continued free and open competition on the Internet click here for SavetheInternet.com, of which Professor Lessig is a Charter Member.

This is the part of this debate that drives me nuts: As if this is a battle between “anti-business” sorts, and pro-business sorts. I understand how it’s easy to believe that if you spend your life thinking about other things, and spend 30 seconds thinking about this issue. But for anyone inside this debate, this claim is the most bogus sort of rhetoric there is.

This is not a pro vs. anti-business debate at all. The whole point of the Network Neutrality argument I’ve advanced (for almost 8 years now) is about what conditions produce the greatest growth in applications and content. The aim is to maximize wealth for the economy as a whole, and not just for the network owners. The whole argument is that a neutral network incentivizes more competition in applications and content than a network controlled by network owners. Think the cell phone network vs the Internet: This is not a battle between pro and anti-business sorts, it is a battle between cell-heads and net-heads.

There are those who continue to function normally in the world who believe, all facts to the contrary, that this is a debate about regulation vs. no regulation. I’ve spilled too many bits over that canard to believe wasting more space here makes any sense. But I wish those anti-regulation sorts would spend some of their effort getting the FCC out of the business of regulating (through property) spectrum.

Loose Fact #2

Professor Lessig asserts: “There are fewer competitors offering broadband connectivity today than there were just six years ago. The median consumer has a choice between just two broadband providers. Four companies account for a majority of all consumer broadband; 10 companies account for 83 percent of the market.”
What Professor Lessig fails to explain was that six years ago we basically had NO broadband competition, because we had a de facto monopoly for wholesale Internet access called dialup, which had lots of resellers of the underlying monopoly service, which Mr. Lessig likes to call competitors.

Yea, I’m old enough to remember those days. Many many businesses would try to get me to switch to their service by offering me lower prices and higher quality. I confess, I call that competition. But whatever you call it, we need more of it today.

Over the last six plus years, the free and open Internet that has been unfettered by regulation has created a steady increase in real inter-modal broadband competitors/choices for consumers.
What Mr. Lessig really laments is the decrease in the faux/artificial regulatory-favored Internet Access resellers that basically competed on brand; and the increase in REAL inter-modal competitors that can truly compete on price, speed, innovative features, and mobility among other differentiators that consumers value about competition.

What I “lament” is that the speed of broadband sucks in the US, and the prices are too high. Again, if the policies of the last 6 years had really produced the kind of prices and quality that other competitive nations around the world have, I’d be the first to admit I was wrong. But if you turn off the Cheney channel, and looks at the sorry (and increasingly sorry) state of broadband in the US, at some point someone has got to ask whether this policy is a mistake? Call me a cut-and-runner, Scott. Because I definitely want to cut-and-run from the FCC’s policy.

What Mr. Lessig conveniently omits from his assertion that “broadband competition is dying” is the pesky little truth that real broadband prices have fallen by over half over the last three years and that competitive supply is vibrantly increasing.

But then again, there’s the problem of those “pesky” data necessary to support the ultimate claim that needs to be made: That the DSL $/MB have fallen “by 50%.” Show me the data, Scott, not the made-for-TV-soundbites.

Maybe Professor Lessig should take some more classes in economics and antitrust to bone up on the fact that competitiveness of markets are truly measured by effective pricing, by the trend of competitive entry and by the amount of innovation. Only undergrad courses covering antitrust would consider it sufficient to count the number of competitors in a market and then declare a market not competitive. Responsible scholars of competition understand that the competitive facts can vary widely in various markets, and that the number of competitors alone is insufficient data to determine the competiveness of a market. I am sure there are any number of attorneys with “real world” experience in analyzing competition at the DOJ Antitrust Division or at the FTC who would be happy to give Professor Lessig a little tutorial on this before he opines on this topic again on the world stage.

This is no doubt true. A submission to the FCC or to a court about market power with the substance of an 800 word op-ed would be absurd. And indeed, to show fully whether competition is improving or getting worse, you would need to go much more “in depth” than even Cleland’s nippy one-pagers. But really, Scott. This is an op-ed. They don’t allow footnotes.

Loose Fact #3:

Lessig said: “Network owners now want to change this by charging companies different rates to get access to a ‘premium Internet.'” [bold added for emphasis]
This is the way the Internet has operated since it was commercialized in 1995. There have long been been three Internet backbone tiers of service. And companies have long paid for a “premium” Internet since they upgraded from dialup to broadband!

So at a debate with George Gilder, Peter Huber made this same move. Look, no one is arguing about the backbone. No one is arguing for regulation of the backbone. This is a debate about last mile broadband, and the effect certain business models for the last mile will have on competition.

What planet has Mr. Lessig been on that he didn’t notice that companies pay for a “premium” Internet every day? Has he ever heard of the Akamai “premium” service which has been used by most all the biggest online companies to get “premium” Internet service?

And of course this is exactly the criticism I was trying to preempt by my original post on this matter. Obviously, companies do whatever they can to make their content on the net run well as it can. Google must spend millions around the world on caching servers. Everyone spends what they can to get the fastest servers they can.

But again, this is exactly the sort of competition we should celebrate — businesses spending money to add real capacity and functionality to the network, by going to a (relatively) competitive market to add that capacity.

My complaint is not against that. My complaint is about (relatively) uncompetitive markets, and about the consequence of them exercising power over the next YouTubes of the world. No doubt, as they extract rents from these businesses, they make Wall Street happier about them. But as my focus is not the net wealth of a handful of companies, but instead, the wealth of the economy as a whole, what’s good for them is not the end of the matter.

Indeed, this is exactly why my position on Network Neutrality is not as extreme as some. As I testified, for example, I’m all for “consumer tiering” by network providers — where network providers offer higher quality to consumers for more money. That again is the sort of business model that creates an incentive to increase capacity.

“Access tiering” doesn’t. Or at least, I’m looking for the economic analysis to show it does. What I’ve seen so far is that in an relative uncompetitive market, “access tiering” creates an obvious (and perverse) incentive: with relatively limited competition, if you can charge a premium for a “fast internet,” you don’t have much incentive to make the rest of the Internet very fast at all.

I wrote this piece for the FT, arguing the phenomenal success of YouTube is yet another argument for Network Neutrality. The data in the piece comes from this great report, Broadband Reality Check.

One point the compactness of 800 words didn’t let me make fully: Obviously, everyone spends tons of money to make their content flow more quickly than the competitor. But the question is whether the market in which they spend that money is, in a word, healthy. If there’s lots of competition, then that expenditure is efficient. If there’s not, then it is a barrier. Or that, at least, is the argument.