Earlier this year, some Stop the Cap! readers in North Carolina who attended the hearings on a pro-telecom (actually it was written by them) piece of legislation designed to stall statewide municipal broadband competition encountered strange protests from conservative groups arriving on buses.  They were there to stop “Obama’s government takeover of the Internet.”  The communities of Wilson and Salisbury, which have municipal broadband projects in progress, also encountered resistance from outside groups.  Salisbury residents even began receiving biased phone polls that turned out to be sponsored by a conservative political action group that was also involved in the conservative “tea party” movement.

"Critics say .... it appears that the group was a 'mouthpiece' for hire." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

These groups loaded mostly retirees, recruited from talk radio and websites, onto buses and sent them to the state capital with generic anti-government talking points and signs.

FreedomWorks, which is currently in the news for organizing protests at town hall meetings over what they call “Obamacare” health care reform, has also been busy adopting the industry-friendly position of opposing government involvement in broadband.  They oppose anything resembling regulation, any government involvement in the pricing or availability of broadband service, and recite industry talking points about the free market assuring Americans of the world’s best Internet service.  Unfortunately, these talking points come at the same time the United States slips further and further behind in international broadband rankings, and true competition in most markets is limited at best.

FreedomWorks’ position on broadband policy will sound eerily familiar:

The broadband market is dynamic and fast paced; new FCC regulations could hamper this growth and reduce the vital capital investments required to expand the nation’s broadband networks.  Rather than attempting to apply old monopoly based models to today’s competitive markets, the FCC should focus on removing barriers to competition, implementing competitive solutions to policy questions, and allowing the private sector to more effectively allocate scarce broadband resouurces [sic] to the most highly valued uses.  In addition, efforts to establish “net neutrality” should be avoided, because they threaten the ability to manage dynamic networks effectively.

That is paraphrased directly from the talking points the industry has presented about broadband policy for years.

Now many of these groups are attempting to recruit those who dislike the current administration to provide free shilling services for the broadband industry’s agenda, supporting positions that are directly opposite  consumers’ best interests.

FreedomWorks is hardly new at this.  Back in 2006, Fiona Morgan, writing for the Independent Weekly (North Carolina), covered another bandwagon of protesters who showed up at an arcane meeting of the North Carolina House Revenue Laws Study Committee, all wearing FreedomWorks t-shirts:

The details of telecom legislation like this are wonky, complicated and jargon-filled. But that hasn’t dampened the passions of citizens fed up with the de facto monopoly of TimeWarner, with its astronomical rates for “packages” of unwatched channels. Dozens of people from across the state showed up to a meeting in April of the House Revenue Laws Study Committee wearing T-shirts for FreedomWorks, a group clamoring for the proposed state franchises. FreedomWorks, which is connected with the anti-tax conservative group Citizens for a Sound Economy, is funded by telephone companies pushing for the bill–what you might call an Astroturf (phony grassroots) organization, but the passion of its members is very real.

With astroturfers like FreedomWorks, deregulatory principles that might garner legitimate debate and consideration are tainted when it turns out that advocacy is bought and paid for by directly connected business interests who have a dog in the fight.  That’s why FreedomWorks hardly represents the “grass roots.”  It’s an astroturfer that has a corporate-sponsored agenda, but hides behind good American conservative citizens who find themselves proverbially loaded onto buses and taken for a ride.

Those consumers had a right to be fed up with paying for unwatched cable channels, but their appearance at that meeting was the lowest form of manipulation, because the legislation under review had nothing to do with the issue those people were concerned with.

Instead, their presence was used by the telecommunications industry as illustrative of consumer discontent, and de facto support for their real agenda, which was removing oversight of the video service franchising process from local government and turning it over to an industry-friendly state body.  That would have created statewide cable and “telco TV” franchises that take away local control and oversight.

Chad Johnston of the People’s Channel, Chapel Hill’s public access station said all the passion around TV service is being used to mislead the bill’s supporters. “It’s funny, because many of the comments that the FreedomWorks folks brought up in this meeting were things that aren’t even included in this bill, like being able to chose your channel lineup–that’s a whole different issue,” Johnston says. “This notion that it’s going to bring us gobs of choices and lower prices it totally false, based on everything we know about deregulation and the telecom industry.”

Heartland Institute: "By not disclosing our donors, we keep the focus on the issue."

Now, another astroturf group that shares “researchers” with FreedomWorks, the so-called Heartland Institute, has an Op-Ed Tuesday in the conservative Philadelphia daily The Bulletin.  Of course, the Heartland Institute also has close ties not only to big telephone companies, but is a dependable friend of big cable as well.  Those close ties are, predictably, omitted from the article.

A typical horror story involves an ISP, at peak usage hours, gently slowing down a tiny number of bandwidth hogs so the vast majority of its customers can surf the Web and send emails at the speed they expect. Insisting such a policy is unfair is not only counterintuitive, it’s counterproductive to demand the government stop it.

The Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 is poorly named because it would do nothing to preserve freedom. HR 3458 would strip ISPs of the right to manage traffic on the networks they have spent billions to build, market and manage. In their place would emerge a cadre of detached government bureaucrats—hardly an improvement on the status quo.

The takeaway word from the first section is “story,” as in fiction, because that is what that talking point represents.  Once again, the Us vs. Them strategy reveals itself, with stories of some guy next door sucking the neighborhood Internet lines dry downloading.  The true horror is some providers continue to earn healthy profits on their broadband revenue, complain about the growth of traffic on their networks, and actively reduce investment to expand that network.  That, of course, helps build the case for “controls” when consumers notice the slowdowns created by those neglectful policies.

The Heartland Institute advocates the provider be given the enviable role of the fox guarding the hen house.  Providers manage profits quite effectively, and just as some try to tweak pricing models to extract extra revenue from consumers, you can count on those same providers creating new revenue streams from “premium” prioritization of Internet traffic, for a price, while leaving everyone else in the slow lane.  Their own products and services carried on those lines will enjoy beneficial priority for free while direct competitors find they can’t obtain that level of service at any price.

The so-called “cadre of government bureaucrats” is anything but.  The truth is, there will be one set of clearly defined standards that will protect the level playing field the Internet deserves.  The piece makes it sound like there will be a government court to render judgment on every policy and practice, which is false.  The only thing Net Neutrality protects IS the status quo, a free and open Internet.

Today, if a broadband customer does not approve of the way an ISP manages Web traffic, he can readily switch to a competitor more to his liking. ISPs have an enormous financial incentive to retain existing customers and attract new ones, so the free market encourages best practices.

Tell that to Canadians who are enduring not only Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps and consumption billing, but also throttled speeds that artificially reduce (by up to 99%) the advertised speed for certain applications, all for “good network management.”  Don’t like the throttle from Bell on your DSL line?  Switch to Rogers Cable and get more of exactly the same thing.  A free market cannot truly exist from the monopoly most rural residents face for broadband, and the duopoly most of the rest of us endure.  The current market doesn’t encourage “best practices;” it encourages informal collusion by providers who learn not to rock the boat, especially on competitive pricing.

ISPs have an enormous financial incentive to find ways to increase profits, which is precisely what Internet Overcharging is all about.

But under HR 3458, if a broadband customer is not satisfied, what near-instant recourse will he have? None after government forces every ISP to operate “equally” by replacing market-based incentives with bureaucratic mandates. This would ensure an inevitable slide to “equally” shoddy service.

One would assume a provider would want to make their service as robust and up to date as possible, yet in a world without codified Net Neutrality protections — the free market at work under today’s reality — we’re seeing continued evidence of price increases and a decline in investment in networks, and some providers continue to drag their feet on upgrades.  The only market based incentive at work here is the demand from Wall Street for greater revenue and return from providers, who face challenging times in their video and telephone businesses, but can always leverage the success of the broadband division.  Broadband continues to maintain customer loyalty, and the potential for greater return from price increases and forcing costs down by limiting service.

Net neutrality advocates want the government, not “the public,” to control the fate of the Internet. The ordered chaos of market forces may scare those who don’t understand it. But the market is efficient, quickly responsive to the needs and wants of consumers, and—in the proper sense of the word—free.

Actually, Net Neutrality advocates want the government to protect the “chaos” of the online world as it exists today.  Those who want to “organize” or “order” the online world aren’t Net Neutrality advocates, they are providers who don’t want people using “my pipes for free,” or cable interests who want to “organize” online video around a model they own and control, or who simply want to throw a Money Party by inventing new ways to charge people more money for exactly the same service they get today.

The claim that the market is “quickly responsive” to the needs and wants of consumers is demonstrably false for any consumer living in Wilson or Salisbury, North Carolina, where a duopoly of providers refused to provide the level of broadband service consumers and small business clamored for, so local municipalities finally threw up their hands and decided to build networks themselves.  Residents of Rochester, New York are threatened with a broadband backwater because the incumbent telephone company Frontier Communications has shown little interest in providing a fiber optic based 21st century broadband platform similar to one being constructed in virtually every other city of size in New York.  Customers even signed petitions begging Verizon to overbuild the Flower City to provide the service Frontier will not.

In April, Time Warner Cable “responded to the needs and wants of consumers” by attempting to ram an Internet Overcharging experiment down the throats of customers in four American cities, where not one consumer either needed or wanted such massive price increases.  Over a period of weeks, this provider did everything but respond to customer needs, until a wholesale consumer revolt erupted and Congress intervened.

The free market is working well for groups like FreedomWorks and The Heartland Institute, who enjoy healthy support from the telecommunications industry.  In return, finding where the telecommunications industry positions end and FreedomWorks’ positions begin is like staring into a mirror and trying to ascertain the differences between the reflection and yourself.

Mark Cuban

One would think Mark Cuban would have at least a small bit of resentment towards big cable companies like Time Warner Cable, who efficiently and swiftly deprived his HDNet and HDNet Movies networks from more than 8.7 million Time Warner Cable HD customers on May 31st over a channel fee spat.

But no.  He’s back plugging away with completely groundless predictions for the impending doom of the Internet if Net Neutrality has its way.  Opposed by big cable and telephone companies, Net Neutrality would provide a level playing field for all legal Internet content.  No provider could interfere with or prioritize traffic based on financial incentives, ownership interests, or for competitive reasons.

Cuban offers a bizarre rant about why that spells the death of online video, something he’s never been thrilled with anyway, on his blog:

If you run a TV network, broadcast or cable, you should be spending a lot of money to support Net Neutrality. You should have every lobbyist you own getting on the Net Neutrality train.  Why ? Because in a net neutrality environment no bits get priority over any other bits. All bits are equal.  In such an environment, all bits content with each other to ride the net.

When that happens, bits collide. When bits collide they slow down. Sometimes they dont reach their destination and need to be retransmitted. Often they dont make it at all.

When video bits dont arrive to their destination in a timely manner, internet video consumers get an experience that is worse than what traditional tv distribution options .

that is good for traditional TV.

Me personally. I don’t  support Net Neutrality. I think there will applications that require lots of bandwidth, that will change our lives. If the applications that could change our lives have to compete with your facebook page loads and twitter feeds among the zillion of other data elements carried across the net, IMHO, thats a bad thing.

But thats me.

If you believe that over the top video can impact the future of TV, and thats a bad thing for your business,  then you should be a big time supporter of Net Neutrality.  Its your best friend.

That’s proof that having millions of dollars to your name doesn’t buy an intelligent argument, or apparently a basic grammar checker.

I never realized the “series of tubes” Ted Stevens used to talk about corralled data bits into segregated clusters to protect them from “bit collision.”  Is there insurance for that?

Cuban should be spending more time worrying about getting his networks viewership on ANY television — “traditional,” “online,” or amongst his good friends in the cable industry that stabbed him in the back and threw his channels off lineups from coast to coast. If you’re tired of hearing issues like this, take some heat off by utilizing products such as shop vo chong 24H.

Karl Bode over at Broadband Reports has seen all this before, and has built quite a history on the antics of Mr. Cuban:

Of course bits don’t really “collide” on modern networks, and the bill exempts “reasonable network management” from neutrality provisions allowing for congestion control, but apparently no matter. This is the network neutrality debate, and as we’ve seen the last two go-rounds, truth, facts, and data are irrelevant — particularly to overly chatty millionaire TV tycoons worried about their wallets.

While the bill likely won’t survive a Congress that’s all but directly controlled by telecom lobbyists, that still won’t save us from several months of vigorous, fact-optional network neutrality debate. All the usual players are once again gathering, including Mark Cuban and his mouth, paid cable and phone industry sock puppets, stick figure cartoons, dancing men in green tights, and evil ISP flying saucers. Can we just skip to the part where consumer welfare gets ignored and be done with it?

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas)

Here’s a ‘shocking surprise’ for Texas readers.  Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) is basically for whatever Internet Service Providers want when it comes to administering and charging for broadband service.  In a letter to Stop the Cap! reader Milan that confuses “Internet Overcharging,” the practice of throwing usage caps/limits or imposing consumption based billing on customers, with “Net Neutrality,” which guarantees that all network traffic is treated equally, Hutchison signals her opposition to government intervention in any of it.

Bizarrely, Hutchison claims that “congressionally mandated treatment of data” would “stifle competition” and “decrease incentive for [upgrades].”  That’s a logic train wreck.  How exactly telling a provider that they must treat data across their network equally would suddenly signal a potential competitor to throw in the towel escapes me.  If a provider is given the power to discriminate against traffic he or she doesn’t own, control, or partner with, the incentive to upgrade will never benefit the independent traffic anyway.

Apparently allowing providers to manage congestion on their networks the way they see fit is the only way consumers will be protected from “reduced speeds” and “higher costs.”  Yet many consumers already are faced with slower speeds created by providers who are decreasing investment in their own networks, despite earning continued healthy profits from them.  Consumer costs are increasing with or without Net Neutrality, and as consumers who were to be subjected to Time Warner Cable’s “experiment” with consumption based billing discovered, a $50 monthly broadband bill would have increased to $150 a month for an equivalent level of service.

The one clear fact of life Senator Hutchison either doesn’t realize or chooses to ignore is that consumers are the victims of America’s special interest-serving telecommunications policy she and other members of Congress helped put into place, assuring most Americans of anything but healthy competition.  Most Americans face a duopoly – one cable and one telephone company for broadband access.  Often, services from those two providers are not equivalent in terms of speed and performance, much less availability.

Competition is to be applauded, but using the word in a sentence does not provide Americans with assurances of getting it.  Forward thinking telecommunications policy promotes a true open market, investigates providers that refuse to overbuild into each others’ territories, demands robust oversight and regulation when necessary, and guarantees that no provider has the power to discriminate against traffic carried over that network, particularly when that traffic represents a competitive threat.

We’ve seen the results of the highly uncompetitive broadband marketplace most consumers, particularly in rural areas, face. It originates from policies that always benefit the providers first and foremost, while allowing the United States to continue to fall behind in broadband rankings measuring availability of fast, affordable, reliable and open broadband service. Continuing with these policies only assures providers get ahead while leaving you and I behind.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison:

Dear Friend:

Thank you for contacting me regarding equal and unrestricted access to the Internet. I welcome your thoughts and comments on this issue.

The Internet is a valuable tool that facilitates business, education, and recreation for millions of Americans.

In 2008, an estimated 220 million Americans had access to the Internet at home or work. As Ranking Member of the Senate Commerce Committee, I am committed to ensuring that consumers benefit from competition in the telecommunications industry, resulting in lower prices, improved service, and access to 21st century technology.

Instrumental to the success of the Internet is the longstanding policy of keeping the Internet as free as possible from burdensome regulations. Increased investment in upgrading and expanding America’s Internet infrastructure, as well as innovative new broadband networks, will ensure that all Americans have access to affordable high-speed Internet. However, intensified regulation of the Internet, such as congressionally mandated treatment of data, would stifle competition and would decrease the incentive for network operators to invest in the Internet infrastructure.

It is my concern that mandates that prevent network providers from managing congestion on the Internet will reduce service speeds for many users, and eliminate a valuable tool for ensuring the most efficient use of network pipelines, resulting in increased costs to the consumer.

In a June 2007 report on the issue of “network neutrality”, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) stated that no “demonstrated consumer harm from conduct by broadband providers” had occurred due to network providers managing Internet traffic.

More recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a decision involving Comcast and certain network management practices. While this decision works its way through the courts, Congress may continue reviewing network practices and Internet congestion issues.

Should any legislation regarding Internet access come before the Senate Commerce Committee, you may be assured I will keep your views in mind. I appreciate hearing from you, and I hope that you will not hesitate to keep in touch on any issue of concern to you.

Sincerely,

Kay Bailey Hutchison
United States Senator
284 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
202-224-5922 (tel)
202-224-0776 (fax)

Om Malik managed a quick interview with the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski. In a wide-ranging interview about the competitive landscape of mobile broadband, which is to say there isn’t a whole lot at present, Malik managed a direct question about Internet Overcharging schemes:

Om: Phone companies and cable companies are trying to impose bandwidth caps on Internet access. By doing so, I feel (and many agree) that they’re actually limiting the scope of innovation. Maybe in that that case, we should think about the need to separate services (TV, video, etc.) from the pipe. What are your views on metered broadband?

Genachowski: It ties into an important policy decision the FCC will be confronting with how we drive a ubiquitous broadband infrastructure that’s open and robust and delivers on the promise of the Internet for all Americans. To tackle these questions we will be focusing on the real facts around what’s going on and what policies will best promote ubiquitous broadband and innovation. It’ll be an ongoing topic. It’s something that consumers of Internet services pay a lot of attention to and we’ve seen that in reactions to some of the events over the last year.

That’s about as non-committal an answer as ever out of the FCC.  The usual formula is there:

1. Express concern.
2. Define the issue in terms of the Commission’s general policy direction and goals.
3. Promise sober assessment of the issue.
4. Under no circumstances commit to anything specific that might get the attention of the press and/or Congress.

Consumers cannot enjoy open and robust broadband that delivers on innovation from providers that are rationing access and charging top dollar for it.  Internet Overcharging schemes represent the best way to run a bypass around Net Neutrality by simply limiting and/or overcharging for access, killing enthusiasm for high bandwidth services like video that challenge current cable television business models.

At least he notes consumers have been pounding the issue with elected officials and the Commission sufficient to warrant mention of it.

Phillip Dampier

Today is Stop the Cap!‘s first anniversary.  One year ago today, this website was launched with the news that Frontier Communications, the local telephone company in Rochester, New York and in dozens of mostly rural communities nationwide, had quietly changed its Acceptable Use Policy to define appropriate maximum usage of their DSL service at a measly 5GB per month.

The  boneheaded, out of touch decision was called out for what it was: a profiteering provider pilfering wallets of their broadband customers.

All the signs of a Money Party among cable and DSL providers at consumer expense were apparent last summer.  Time Warner Cable was experimenting with a consumption billing plan in Beaumont, Texas.  In Canada, rhetoric about “bit caps” was already being circulated, trying to convince Canadians that broadband service was somehow as difficult to provide there as it is in Australia and New Zealand, where such caps were already in place.

To bring limits, rationing quotas, and consumption based billing to the United States would require consumers to ignore massive profits broadband providers were harvesting quarter after quarter at existing prices.  But demands for big profits from Wall Street meant they had to come from somewhere, and for cable companies with eroding profits from their cable TV divisions, and telephone companies dealing with disconnect requests for wired telephone lines, broadband was their choice.

It seems that what was insanely profitable a decade ago, when cable modem and DSL service started to introduce Americans to broadband, would now simply be ‘piles of  cash stacked like cord wood’-profitable as traffic increased. As the broadband adoption rate increased, bandwidth costs plummeted, and several providers also proudly trumpeted their reduced investments in their networks as a hallmark of keeping “costs under control.”

Consumers began actually using their service for… broadband-specific services, at the encouragement of providers’ marketing departments, touting their “always on” connection at “blazing fast speeds” to download music, movies, play games, and more.  Network utilization increased, and providers want someone to pay for a “bandwidth crisis” that isn’t a crisis at all.  Responsible investment in network infrastructure should be a given, in recognition that at least a small portion of those growing profits must be spent on maintaining and improving service.

One year ago, I laid out what was before us:

Cable operators have been discussing implementing usage caps in several markets to control what they refer to as a “broadband crisis.” The industry has embarked on a lobbying campaign to convince Americans, with scant evidence and absolutely no independent analysis of their numbers, that the country is headed to a massive shortage in bandwidth in just a few short years, and that a tiny percentage of customers are hogging your bandwidth.

Frontier, ever the rascally competitor, has decided to one-up Time Warner’s Road Runner product by slapping on a usage cap now for DSL customers before Road Runner considers doing the same. And in a spectacularly stupid move competitively, they have implemented a draconian cap that even the cable industry wouldn’t try to implement.

Time Warner Cable “took one for the team,” according to industry-friendly Multichannel News, when it introduced a ludicrous Internet Overcharging experiment of its own announced this past April, which would have “saved” customers money by getting them to “pay for what they use.”  In fact, their plan proved my point last summer, following the same roadmap of “bandwidth crisis” to “heavy downloaders” to trying to squeeze customers for more money for upgrades they could easily have done with the enormous profits they already earn.

Their proposal would have made a deliciously profitable $50 a month Internet service now cost consumers $150 a month with absolutely zero improvement in service, speed, or performance.  But Wall Street would have been happy with the higher returns.

Some 400+ articles later, we’ve educated consumers across North America about the reality of Internet Overcharging.  Despite industry propaganda “education” efforts, astroturfing groups we’ve exposed as having direct connections with the telecommunications providers paying them to produce worthless studies, fear-mongering about Internet brownouts by equipment vendors with solutions to sell, and a hack-a-thon of formerly respectable broadband pioneers and ex-government officials who sold their credentials for a paycheck to lobby and spout industry propaganda, most consumers continue to reject overcharging for their broadband service.  Consumers instinctively know a cable company with a rate change always means a rate increase, and plans to “save people money” actually means they will “protect industry profits.”

We have achieved victory after victory in 2008-2009:

• Fought back against Frontier’s boneheaded plan, and convinced them that DSL can compete best on price and flexibility — no usage cap has ever been enforced at Frontier, and today they are using Time Warner Cable’s blundering profiteering experiment against them in their marketing materials.  For rural Frontier customers with no other broadband provider, that’s a major relief from being stuck with one broadband option that rations their usage to ludicrously low levels.
• Stopped Time Warner Cable’s experiment before it got off the ground in several “test cities.”  The people of Austin, San Antonio, Rochester, and the Triad region of North Carolina did Time Warner Cable customers nationwide a tremendous service in halting this experiment before it spread.  Our efforts even brought a United States Senator, Charles Schumer, to the front lawn of Time Warner Cable in Rochester to announce the nightmare was, at least for now, over.  We managed to even see an end to the overcharging of customers in Beaumont, Texas who lived through a summer, winter, and spring, overpaying for their broadband service.
• We raised hell in the North Carolina state legislature, coming to the aid of Wilson and other communities in the state trying to get municipal broadband projects off the ground.  Communities across the state faced anti-consumer corporate protectionist legislation written by the telecommunications industry, introduced by willing elected officials who took big telecom money, and sold out their constituents.  We killed two bills, forced a sponsor of one such measure to repudiate his own bill, and gave major headaches to legislators that thought they could just cash those big checks, vote against your interests, and you’d never know.  Those days are over.
• We helped bring legislation up in Congress to draw attention to the issue of Internet Overcharging, and have called out providers who want to use their marketing departments to lie to customers about their broadband costs and profits, while being considerably more honest with their shareholders in their quarterly financial reports.  Congressman Eric Massa’s legislation would demand companies show proof of the need to implement consumption based billing.  Indeed, as consumers find out how profitable broadband service is at today’s prices, they’ll never tolerate the profit padding providers seek with tomorrow’s caps/limits, penalties and fees, and unjustified tiers.

As you can see, Internet Overcharging is not a dead concept.  An educated consumer will recognize a swindle when they see one, and providers continue to test overcharging schemes in focus groups in different parts of the country.  They’ll use any analogy, from a buffet lunch to a toll road traveled by big trucks and little cars.  They’re looking for anything they can find to sucker you into believing paying more for your broadband service is fair.

Broadband service must be fast, affordable, and competitive.  In too many communities in Canada and the United States, a monopoly or duopoly marketplace has guaranteed none of those things.  In our second year, we must remain vigilant in our core mission to fight Internet Overcharging, but we also need to fight for more competition, regulation where competition does not exist, oversight over providers, and support for projects that will enhance broadband and make it more affordable than ever.  With your help, we can stand toe to toe with any provider, because the facts are on our side, not theirs, when it comes to Internet Overcharging schemes.

Welcome to Year Two!