The usually business-friendly editorial page of the Wall Street Journal published a surprising editorial this morning which threatens to cause a tear in the very fabric of space.  Why AT&T Killed Google Voice: Telecom Operators Are Yesterday’s Business — It’s Time for a National Data Policy That Encourages Innovation, strikes at the heart of the telecommunications industry’s business models, and dismisses them as increasingly outdated, anti-innovation and anti-consumer.

Welcome to our world.

Using the example of AT&T’s blocking Google Voice from iPhone users, which would allow them to bypass their AT&T plan to make long distance calls, author Andy Kessler, a former hedge fund manager, believes this was the moment America wakened to the realization that telecommunications companies and government policies block innovation and limit competition.

To that, I have to wonder, where has Kessler been the last decade?

Perhaps the Google Voice debacle impacted him personally, and that got his fur in a ruffle.  What AT&T did represents business as usual for those of us who have seen it all before.

Telecommunications companies have influenced most of the government policies that govern them, using high priced lobbyists, astroturfing friends, and bait and switch promises of magical service at dirt cheap prices, if only their legislative agenda becomes law.

Supporting them are many of the subscribers of the Wall Street Journal, investors and the investment media that tut-tuts new competitors or game-changing innovation that shakes up the marketplace, and launches price wars that threaten shareholder value. Legislation that hampers industry profits or enacts consumer protection is called “government interference” in most WSJ editorials, while deregulation that strips away oversight and ignores the abusive practices common in highly concentrated markets is advocated as the one-size-fits-all “free market solution.”

Apple has an exclusive deal with AT&T in the U.S., stirring up rumors that AT&T was the one behind Apple rejecting Google Voice. How could AT&T not object? AT&T clings to the old business of charging for voice calls in minutes. It takes not much more than 10 kilobits per second of data to handle voice. In a world of megabit per-second connections, that’s nothing—hence Google’s proposal to offer voice calls for no cost and heap on features galore.

What this episode really uncovers is that AT&T is dying. AT&T is dragging down the rest of us by overcharging us for voice calls and stifling innovation in a mobile data market critical to the U.S. economy.

I wonder what Kessler will think if AT&T’s market trials in Beaumont and Reno suggest they can limit his Internet access and then charge overlimit fees per gigabyte thereafter?  AT&T may have a lot more “dragging” capability than he realizes.

Andy Kessler

Is AT&T dying?  In the traditional wired phone line market, there is evidence they are headed into a slow decline as consumers dump overpriced and overtaxed phone lines for Voice Over IP or mobile phone service.  They certainly aren’t hurting in their mobile phone business.  They’ve become quite comfortable, thank you very much, splitting the majority of mobile telephone customers in the United States with Verizon Wireless.  The companies in real trouble are the smaller players fighting for the scraps thrown from the table — a declining Sprint, T-Mobile, Cricket, MetroPCS, among many others.  They are being told to merge with each other or die by Wall Street.

Is AT&T stifling innovation by being run badly?  Of course not.  They are leveraging their market power to limit potential competition or innovation that forces them into costly upgrades they’d prefer not to do.  With their expensive “public policy” initiatives (read that “K” Street lobbying), they’ve also got a lot of elected officials and government agencies on their side as well.  A Congress that doesn’t demand greater competition, strong antitrust oversight, and a ban on anti-consumer practices, coupled with a bunch of “don’t ask, don’t tell” oversight agencies that only respond to the most egregious abuses (until the media spotlight is turned off), represents the real problem here.

The trick in any communications and media business is to own a pipe between you and your customers so you can charge what you like. Cellphone companies don’t have wired pipes, but by owning spectrum they do have a pipe and pricing power.

True, except Kessler ignores the fact AT&T and Verizon do own wired and wireless pipes, from coast to coast.  Both companies are highly vertically integrated, often serving customers with everything from their basic telephone service to television, broadband, and mobile phone needs.  Customers are heavily marketed to pick up additional product lines from both companies — products not available from the smaller guys like Sprint, T-Mobile, and others.

Kessler also suggests it’s the bidding war for wireless spectrum that results in high prices for consumers.  Even if true, his free market friends would suggest that is the marketplace at work.  Of course, the real reason for high pricing in mobile service is the lack of competition coupled with the convenience of “stable pricing.”  Namely, the current carriers are quite comfortable not rocking the boat too much with one another, which explains why virtually all of them charge comparable prices for wireless data, text messages, and voice plans.  What they will fight for is handset exclusivity, because it never threatens price and service models.  In fact, it allows them to charge even higher premium pricing for highly-sought handsets and the mandatory service plans that sometimes accompany them.  The iPhone is a perfect example of that at work.

Kessler has four prescriptions to cure the American telecommunications ailment:

• End phone exclusivity. Any device should work on any network. Data flows freely.

• Transition away from “owning” airwaves. As we’ve seen with license-free bandwidth via Wi-Fi networking, we can share the airwaves without interfering with each other. Let new carriers emerge based on quality of service rather than spectrum owned. Cellphone coverage from huge cell towers will naturally migrate seamlessly into offices and even homes via Wi-Fi networking. No more dropped calls in the bathroom.

• End municipal exclusivity deals for cable companies. TV channels are like voice pipes, part of an era that is about to pass. A little competition for cable will help the transition to paying for shows instead of overpaying for little-watched networks. Competition brings de facto network neutrality and open access (if you don’t like one service blocking apps, use another), thus one less set of artificial rules to be gamed.

• Encourage faster and faster data connections to our homes and phones. It should more than double every two years. To homes, five megabits today should be 10 megabits in 2011, 25 megabits in 2013 and 100 megabits in 2017. These data-connection speeds are technically doable today, with obsolete voice and video policy holding it back.

An end to phone exclusivity will require government regulation, something unlikely to gain much support from his free market friends.  An even better idea is to stop the cozy relationship between carriers and phone manufacturers by allowing phones to be sold independently, without customers being pressured into two year contracts to enjoy a phone subsidy.  Any phone, sold anywhere, with compatible technology (GSM, CDMA, etc.) should work on any network without a company trying to browbeat customers into contracts, even when bringing along their own phone.  That customer should also be allowed to reprogram their phone to work with another compatible carrier at any time.

Kessler is naive about “owning” airwaves.  Since the government decided it could profit from auctioning them off to the highest bidder, they’ve become monetized and highly valuable.  They are no longer truly licensed in the public interest — they’ve become private property, to be vigilantly protected from encroachment.  Be it satellite, wireless telephony, radio, television, or innovative new services not yet launched, the moment someone applies for a license to share spectrum with existing providers, a chorus of complaints about potential interference arrives at the FCC, with scare stories about potentially massive disruptions.  In reality, the grounds for these hissyfits are more frequently about the fear of competition.

It’s time to admit the concept of airwave auctions has been shortsighted.  While it may bring the government revenue, it will be recouped from consumers as part of provider pricing models.  The higher the bids, the higher the price providers will charge customers for that service.  Let’s consider granting licenses not based on who can bid highest, but rather who can provide the best possible service at reasonable prices to the public.  Those that fail to serve the public interest, or engage in bad behavior, have the very real opportunity of losing that license.  That’s quite an incentive to serve customers first.  It’s such a pro-consumer, novel idea, expect millions of dollars to be spent on lobbying to make sure it never happens.

Municipal exclusivity deals for cable companies ended in 1992 as part of the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act (the only bill President George H.W. Bush vetoed that was overridden by Congress).  I know because I was integrally involved in fighting for that legislation.  In the last 17 years, there hasn’t exactly been a rush to wire up communities with competing cable companies, now has there?

Let’s be honest here.  Less regulation will not compel cable competition, no matter how much the astroturfers and special interest lobbyists promise it.  Construction and capital costs to “overbuild” a cable provider in most American cities are high enough to discourage investment from the private sector, particularly when they fear a price war will result and reduce profits, and shareholder value.  Overbuilders like El Grande in Texas had to sell themselves to a more capital-rich company just to find financing to build out their network.

I’m afraid without incentives like tax credits or other benefits, the prevailing attitude is that all but the largest cities will make due with one wired phone company and one wired cable company at best.  Only one major provider has seen fit to rewire their service areas with the most robust technological advancement – fiber to the home.  Verizon has done so, with considerable resistance from investors, in their effort to avoid the obsolescence Kessler foresees in the telephone line business.  But Verizon is only wiring limited areas, primarily in urban areas, but almost never in smaller communities.  For customers of other phone companies, particularly smaller independent providers, too bad for you.  Their only hope may be a publicly financed, or public-private partnership, fiber optic wiring project that acts as a common carrier.  Any provider can deliver their service over it, allowing customers to choose.

Because of the duopoly/monopoly state of cable and broadband service in the United States, Net Neutrality will never be protected through competition.  In Canada, when Bell throttled and interfered with Internet service, most cable competitors simply joined the party and did the same.  When a few upstarts, resold un-throttled Bell wholesale broadband service and made that a selling point, Bell simply throttled them, too, without warning.  That put a stop to that pesky competition problem.  Canada foreshadows what will likely happen in the United States without strong Net Neutrality legislation.

Finally, Kessler’s vision of what is holding back broadband speed totally ignores provider complicity in the slow momentum forward.  While some providers have a progressive attitude about speed, seeing faster broadband’s revenue earning-potential, others see it as an unnecessary expense that most consumers don’t really need.  Time Warner Cable, the nation’s second largest cable company, remains on record as being in no hurry to upgrade to DOCSIS 3 technology, unless one of their competitors threatens to beat their speeds.  In fact, they’ve expressed repeated interest in cost controls by experimenting with ways to limit data consumption, protect their video business model, and extract more revenue from customers at current speeds.

If Kessler was looking to the phone companies for an alternative, most Americans can forget it.  Most phone companies, especially smaller independents, have maintained a death grip on old school DSL technology, which provides 1-3Mbps service in rural areas, and “up to 10Mbps” (if you are very, very lucky) in urban and suburban areas.  They are rapidly losing wired phone customers and are holding out for whatever revenue they can grab from yesterday’s broadband technology, usually doing best only where cable doesn’t compete at all.  Some even want to limit consumption at the slow speeds those networks operate at today.  They are in no hurry to upgrade their existing copper wire networks, much less agree to the “double speed” plan Kessler has.

I’m sorry to say Kessler’s marketplace-based hopes and dreams for a better telecommunications world tomorrow are not forthcoming.  Without radical changes in the current “whatever the providers want is okay with us” regulatory approach we have today, the only innovation Kessler should expect to see is providers finding new ways to charge more money for the same service we have today.

We need a complete review and reality check about the total failure of the deregulation-solves-everything approach we’ve lived under for more than a decade.  If Kessler wants faster speeds, more competition, lower prices, and less market abuse, he will never find it without government involvement.  Remember, in the absence of real competition from those that actually want to compete to win, not just share the healthy proceeds from the status quo, we need stronger arguments than “the free market solves everything” and “won’t you please do it out of the goodness of your heart and civic duty?”

The astroturfers remain hard at work trying to convince conservatives the best way to oppose Obama Administration telecommunications policies would be to adopt industry-friendly views opposing Net Neutrality.

The latest to buy in is The American Spectator, publishing a piece this morning titled, “The Great Regrouping.”  In it, The Prowler casts Net Neutrality as part of the Obama Administration’s plot to impose government controls on the Internet, representing a “grave threat … to free speech and conservatives’ ability to organize and mobilize politically.”

During the last day the House was in session before leaving for its August recess, Rep. Ed Markey’s staff introduced HR 3458, the so-called “Internet Freedom Preservation Act,” which would essentially enable government control of the Internet, treating the networks as a government-managed utility. (For more information about “net neutrality,” read this interview that one of the key “net neutrality” supporters gave to a Canadian socialist publication.) The Markey legislation is considered the last piece of what some conservatives consider to be Democrat and progressive attempts to control the Internet and limit citizens’ ability to use the networks to organize and oppose their agenda.

The bill was introduced the same week it was revealed that the Obama Commerce Department was demanding from the phone and cable companies highly detailed data about private citizens’ Internet and broadband connections as part of plans of “map” broadband networks across the country.

Stop the Cap! readers will recognize the source of the link The Prowler promotes — it’s from the very same Heartland Institute astroturfer we chased last week, who was arguing Net Neutrality was a tool to achieve “socialist utopia.”  I pulled a muscle just reading that overreach.

My direct response can be found below the fold.  Suffice to say, this is an example of classic astroturfing at work:

1. A company’s government affairs department recognizes a potential threat to their business model through government oversight or regulation, or sees a financial benefit from industry-favorable legislation or deregulation.  It considers a range of options, including direct lobbying, consumer outreach, and hiring experienced “inside the beltway” expertise.
2. The company approves a plan of action and frequently hires a Washington-based public relations firm.  That firm usually either has direct contact or close associations with astroturf organizations.  As part of the PR firm’s fee, they assure the company its message will be delivered in ways that help steer any public policy debate towards their corner, using astroturfers to reach both consumers and media suspicious of a direct industry appeal, but will listen to an “independent” group.
3. Suddenly, supposedly independent “public interest” groups start beating the drums.  Some speak directly to consumers raising doubts and fears about regulatory matters, others attempt to suggest the public needs to get behind industry-friendly positions for their own benefit.  Press releases and interview opportunities are made available to the media.  Astroturfers with a known political angle wrap industry positions in ideological shells, using them to illustrate a broader ideological point.
4. Most importantly, carefully avoid exposing the direct industry connection.  Industry executives don’t want to admit they are paying for these campaigns.  PR firms help shield the source of the industry money that flows into astroturf groups, and astroturfers work hard to avoid disclosing where the money is coming from.  Even elected officials who take an industry friendly view do not want to directly reference the companies writing big campaign contribution checks.  They’ll cite those supposedly independent “consulting” and “research” and “public interest” groups when reading the talking points.

Unfortunately for them, this convenient public interest shell game has been exposed.

In today’s case:

Industry opposed to Net Neutrality -> Astroturfer Groups -> Outreach to fuel opposition to Net Neutrality for “consumer” or “ideological” reasons.

… Continue Reading

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?

Phillip Dampier

While western New York was dealing with a rare bout of tornadoes, another storm began brewing online when AT&T customers discovered their access to a website devoted to the posting of images, 4chan, had been blocked.

The 4chan site has become notorious over the past year for its “anything goes” policies about content, particularly in its “random board” /b/. The site has generated a number of controversies, including staged pranks, swarming other websites, and unfortunately, occasional malicious activity by a minority of its users. Since the site permits anonymous posting, and has traditionally been more “self-regulating” than moderated, it’s a polar opposite of most corporate-run online communities.

When 4chan enthusiasts discovered their site was being blocked by AT&T, it represented the online equivalent of of course, you know this means war. AT&T was blasted in the blogosphere, called out by some tech-minded online culture websites, and made a virtual pawn in the Net Neutrality debate. A few angry 4chan enthusiasts even set up a “rioting/’war’/protest” site to launch counteraction against AT&T.

AT&T eventually admitted it was blocking the site for “security reasons” and issued two early statements:

CentralGadget:

AT&T has confirmed that they are “currently blocking portions of the internet site 4chan.org”, but states that they are “following the practices of their policy department.”

AT&T went on to say that they did contact (or, at least, attempted to contact, they wouldn’t clarify) the owners of 4chan. They say that they have specific reasons why they blocked these parts of the site, but they would not disclose them to CentralGadget.com. AT&T states that they have requested specific things and changes from 4chan’s owners, and that 4chan has not complied.

Regardless, without a clear explanation of specific rationale for blocking 4chan… both 4chan and CentralGadget.com encourage you to continue calling AT&T technical support, and filing your complaints there (escalate as high as possible, we have heard reports that Tier 1 support agents are being told to incorrectly state that AT&T doesn’t block any web site).

Broadband Reports:

Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org. To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers. This action was in no way related to the content at img.4chan.org; our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious traffic.

Overnight Sunday, after we determined the denial-of-service threat no longer existed, AT&T removed the block on the IP addresses in question. We will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious traffic to protect our customers.

Since the end of the weekend, access to 4chan has been restored by AT&T, but the site is performing slowly as it presumably gets attention from a large number of visitors who learned of the site from the controversy, but never heard of it before Sunday.

AT&T’s clumsy explanation fired up a new chapter in the Net Neutrality debate, with various groups and 4chan enthusiasts, and even the DailyKos website, calling this an example of a violation of Net Neutrality — providers denying equal access to all website traffic regardless of its source.

Unfortunately, this is much more an instance of jumping the gun.  Indeed, there is credible evidence 4chan, in addition to its free-wheeling atmosphere, also attracts quite a few malicious attacks, presumably from disgruntled members of the site.  “Denial of service attacks” which throw limitless requests at a web server to slow it down until it essentially crashes under the jamming traffic load, are not uncommon on 4chan.

AT&T’s technical team claims it placed blocks on the impacted IP address(es) to keep the traffic from impacting their own network, and the issue blew up only when AT&T’s non technical customer support staff did a poor job of explaining what was going on to customers.  There are also an open question whether AT&T needed to block -all- traffic on its network to 4chan, or whether blocking just the offending portion would have been sufficient.

Assuming the facts are in AT&T’s favor, and other ISPs have confirmed the attack as being authentic, this is less a case of Net Neutrality abuse, but rather standard procedure at most web hosting companies and service providers to contend with denial of service attacks and other malicious activity.  The hosting providers that provide service to Stop the Cap! engage in the same practices.  One of the hosting companies we use once shut off access to a group of websites it hosted to deal with an attack on just one website.  Once the targeted site was isolated and traffic blocks placed, service resumed for everyone else.  When the attacks were stopped or blocked by other providers down the line, service for the targeted site resumed as well.

But AT&T is not blameless.  A major national ISP like AT&T should have had a rapid and clear response ready for inquiring customers about the 4chan matter.  It was the absence of information initially, and the poorly phrased statements later that created the feeding frenzy of online speculation.

There is a thin line between “network management” policies that deal with malicious traffic and its impact on customers on one side and disingenuously labeling high bandwidth uses of its network (peer to peer, etc.) as requiring “network management” of its own (throttles, etc.).  Historically network technicians have always been given latitude to protect their employer’s network from purposely malicious traffic like “botnets,” “spam servers,” and “denial of service attacks.” They should continue to have that latitude until such time they are shown to be abusing it.

4chan’s own internal policies, and their unwillingness to control some user excesses, also make it very difficult to rush to their defense, particularly when the site owner acknowledges many of those excesses.

There are many legitimate battles to be fought for Net Neutrality.  An ISP dealing with a denial of service attack, barring any new evidence that credibly challenges AT&T’s response, should not be one of them.