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March 14, 2008
An Under-the-Rader FCC Proceeding that Could have Profound Consequences on Internet Communications
I’m interrupting my drafting of Reply Comments for Feature Group IP’s petition to the FCC seeking to ensure that Internet communications may evolve and grow and experience the network effects that can only be achieved in no gatekeeper is allowed to preclude its users from easily and affordably participate in Internet communications. I’m taking this break in part to stretch my back and to clear my head, but also to get a reality check.
Maybe I’m delusional, but I’m starting to feel a little more optimistic that the FCC could take positive action in this proceeding to ensure that ILECs cannot use their stranglehold over the last-mile bottleneck to overcharge other carriers to reach narrowband customers. Perhaps it’s the power of righteousness. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve been cloistered writing these comments and I am out of touch with what’s going on in the World outside. Or, perhaps, it’s that I feel a new dawn at the FCC, and a newfound belief that it will take dispostive action to allow the Internet to transform the ways in which we communicate.
Frankly, I was particularly pleased and hopeful when the FCC opted to hold a Public En Banc Hearing in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Broadband Network Management Practices at Harvard Law School on February 25.
The testimony from several Internet entrepreneurs and innovators and noted academics were remarkably germane to the issues raised in the FeatureGroup IP Petition, particularly the comments of Professor Yochai Benkler and his recognition that “the Internet is overwhelmingly about users connecting to each other, not providers connecting to audiences.” As Professor Benkler stated:
“Once you stop looking through the blinders of people trained in 20th Century business models, the Internet is about people connecting to each other, to chat about the silly and the profound, to create together and to organize, to transact and to tell each other stories about who we are and how our lives might become. Organizations whose history and culture are based in content delivery to audiences or delivery of well-specified services to terminals are going to have a very hard time understanding that this is where the future lies. They will only do so under the pressure of genuine open competition, which will force them either to understand this change or get out of the way.”
While Professor Benkler pointed specifically to concerns over Comcast’s alleged degrading of access by end-users to peer-to-peer BitTorrent applications, his analysis could not be more apt than in consideration of the activities of the ILECs treatment of narrowband consumer access to voice-embedded Internet applications and consumers’ ability to participate in more robust, holistic communications and group forming networks. The self-help mechanisms used by the ILECs to extract the highest intercarrier compensation conceivable when an end-user relegated to the PSTN wants to participate in an Internet-based communication that may include a voice component do nothing to advance the Internet, communications, consumer welfare or the public good, beyond the short-term lining of the pockets of the ILECs and their shareholders.
The FCC has the opportunity, by granting the FeatureGroup IP Forbearance Petition, to ensure that the arbitrage game that the ILECs are perpetrating – extracting supra-competitive compensation from those providing Internet connectivity to the PSTN – do not stifle the growth and evolution of Internet-enabled communications. The FCC has the opportunity in this case to ensure that consumers may obtain maximum value derived from group forming networks and the network effects that may only be achieved when users of each network – including those relegated to the limited-functioning, narrowband off-ramp on the network of networks – are allowed to participate across networks without any intervening gatekeeper to use its excessive market power or control over an access facility to game the system and extract supra-competitive compensation from consumers or other providers.
Finally, I was encouraged to see organizations like the Open Internet Coalition and Google, and other policy thought-leaders for the Internet application innovators and entrepreneurs becoming actively engaged in the complex debates over the proper approach to pricing interconnection between telecommunications providers. Internet communications entrepreneurs and users have unfortunately become collateral damage in the wars over compensation that have waged for more than ten years between telecommunications carriers in efforts to extract as much inter-carrier revenue from one another as possible, often at the expense of the consumer and the greater economic and social good.
With help from these innovators, and a better understanding of an Internet-enabled future by the officials at the FCC, I think good things could happen.
I suspect this will be among the issues we discuss next week at Spring VON in San Jose. We still have a lot of work ahead of us to make sure the rules and policy are safe for the Internet to grow and evolve. The price of a free and open and robust Internet is eternal vigilance.
Tags: Internet Communications, Feature Group IP, VoIP, Jonathan Askin
Spring VON, FCC
Posted by jonathan.askin at March 14, 2008 02:15 PM