6 ms·

Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Sink as the FCC Goes ’Nuclear’

36 points by px 16y ago

jfager 16y ago
the agency plans to impose more regulations on Web-access providers after a court stripped the agency of its powers last month. What does that mean? Which powers were stripped? How can they impose more regulations if they have less power?
- showerst 16y ago
  If I'm reading it right, basically the courts said that the FCC doesn't have the right to regulate internet providers like they do common carriers (like phone networks), so they're just going to reclassify them as common carriers, then regulate them. IMHO this is probably huge for net neutrality, but I wonder where their (generally accepted) efforts at traffic shaping will end up in all of this? I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little.
  - swombat 16y ago
    I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little. Why would your 24MBit/s work slower for bit-torrent than other uses? The whole point of this net neutrality debate is that ISPs have no business deciding which traffic they prefer, much like your phone company has no business deciding which one of your friends you're allowed to call.
    - tedunangst 16y ago
      If my neighbor is downloading a torrent for 3 hours, it hardly matters whether it arrives in 3:04 or 3:05. But if I'm browsing HN or email, the difference between 0.1 seconds and 1.0 seconds is quite perceptible.
      - gte910h 16y ago
        They don't throttle those guys a little. They throttle them a lot.
    - gte910h 16y ago
      The issue is that network advertisers don't have the bandwidth they say they do. So they really can't give everyone 24 sustained, only burst.
      - lukev 16y ago
        God forbid they actually advertise their real and burst rates instead of picking a completely unrealistic, sky-high number.
      - randallsquared 16y ago
        And the reason most heavy users do not complain very loudly about this false advertising is that we are benefactors, since our heavy internet usage is subsidized by those that only browse the web a bit and get email, but still want 25 Mbps because it's "more" than 2 Mbps.
  - westbywest 16y ago
    I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little. I comment in agreement with the need to maintain QoS for reasons of network health, especially if you need to maintain minimum guaranteed bandwidth in the presence of misbehaving clients (e.g. botnets, ping floods, not just abusive torrenters). However, the carriers in questions have often not been using QoS for reasons of improving service, but rather to penalize the percentage of broadband users who actually use a large portion of the bandwidth they're paying for. For example, say you buy 1.5Mbit DSL and then carefully set up your torrent client to use a consistent 1.0Mbit during nighttime. A month later you get a disconnect notice from your ISP claiming that you were hogging bandwidth, probably leaving you SOL since that's the only viable ISP in your area. This is the sort of business practice the FCC is trying to address.
    - fnid2 16y ago
      You aren't SOL, you can stop using so much bandwidth. You can be a conscientious user of shared resources. Using a constant stream like that is almost always a bit lacking in legitimacy. It usually means you are using the service in ways that your service plan wasn't designed to be used, either you're downloading and/or sharing large, perhaps copyrighted videos, music, or software, or you are running a server for gaming or something like that. Those 1.5Mbit DSL is "maximum capacity." Not what you should try to consume. Ultimately, all the customers go through one pipe, or a shared few pipes, so those hogging the lines negatively affect others. In my opinion, it's the users of the bandwidth that are greedy. Do they really need 1,000 movies on their hard drives? Many bit torrenters have more content than they could ever watch in their entire lives...
      - lutorm 16y ago
        Strawman argument. If I break the law, charge me. Otherwise you have no business second-guessing what I transfer over the line I pay for. If they don't want people to use the bandwith they pay to get, they should say so by advertising their monthly cap or whatever. The idea that I can only transfer the particular types of bits across the wire that my ISP thinks I should is exactly the point of net neutrality rules. If that's not an infringement of free speech, I don't know what is.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  The agency gets to classify new technology in different buckets. They put the ISPs in the data provider bucket. So the providers started screwing people over depending on what kind of bits they wanted to get over the net -- the beginning of some god-awful 74-thousand tiered pricing structure. Lots of fuss about that. FCC tries to step in. Court says nope, in that bucket you don't have the authority to act. So the FCC puts them in new bucket. Huge part of the economy now regulated and nobody had to elect anybody, there was no bill, no debate, no nothing (And I support this, but damn it's a freaking Faustian bargain if I ever saw one)
  - francoisdevlin 16y ago
    Eh, it's not as bad as you think. We (congress) gave the FCC the authority to do this. Granted, we didn't quite understand the implications when we did, but it is still a democratic process.
    - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
      LOL. Yes, I understand how the regulatory process works. Apologies if I seemed to mislead anyone. There is nothing unconstitutional going on. But that doesn't take away from the fact that the regulatory agencies have immense power in our society -- granted to them by Congress. For instance, the DEA can classify new drugs as dangerous, including setting what the jail time will be for possession -- and Congress has virtually no role[1]. Used to be it took an entire constitutional amendment to outlaw alcohol, but now a commission does the same work and there's little publicity. [1] Ok, so they have "oversight", but as somebody who has seen oversight behind the scenes, and watched a lot of it on C-SPAN, color me unimpressed. EDIT: Another good one is the EPA classifying CO2 -- the air we breathe -- as being under it's regulatory guidance. Now they made provision so that it only covers large producers of CO2, but that was their decision as an agency. There was no public debate or vote in Congress. Just a bunch of guys sitting around a conference table. Once again, I support the outcome in this case. I'm not trying to argue that it's a bad outcome. Just not crazy about the way we got here, or the implications for broadband 20 years from now.
- btilly 16y ago
  The decision last month was that the FCC did not have authority from Congress to regulate internet traffic. So now the FCC is attempting to reclassify cable providers in the same bucket as telephone providers. If courts accept this then the FCC has a very clear grant of authority from Congress to regulate as they wish. The open question is whether the courts will accept this reclassification. This question will likely take several years to wind its way through the courts, but no matter how it turns out it will be a huge headache for the cable providers. The fundamental issue here is whether net neutrality can be imposed on the cable providers. The standard meme is that net neutrality is a basic right. I am one of the few people who actually don't want net neutrality. Not because I trust ISPs to behave in a reasonable fashion, but because I think that the only real solution to bot nets is to make ISPs liable for the traffic that they let onto the Internet, and any such rule would be incompatible with net neutrality.
  - swombat 16y ago
    Bot nets are a small but annoying problem for a small percentage of people in the world. A pay-as-you-go, "we'll charge you extra for downloading 1MB from youtube rather than some other site" internet such as the one ISPs would like to aim towards would be a huge problem for everyone. Have a sense of proportions...
    - btilly 16y ago
      Small but annoying? Try saying that to someone who runs a website that has been forced to pay extortion fees as the price of staying up. And truth be told, if the public had any idea how often bot nets are responsible for their computers running slowly and their personal financial details getting stolen, there would be a lot of justified outrage about that as well. Just because people aren't aware of how big a problem it is doesn't mean that it isn't a big problem.
- px 16y ago
  The FCC may have to rely on legislative action by Congress or a more favorable federal court opinion. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/06/AR2010040600742_2.html?sub=AR http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04... The real issue question is whether or not enforcing net neutrality would introduce a new level of federal regulation that would scare off investment.
CamperBob 16y ago
This move by the government certainly throws a wet blanket on any deal speculations and hampers all cable and telco stock multiples,” said Chris Marangi, an analyst with Gabelli & Co in Rye, New York. “It’s going to be years-long litigation and the cable guys can’t give an inch. Time Warner Cable sank $2.51, or 4.6 percent, to $52.48 at 10:35 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Earlier the shares dropped as much as 6.4 percent. Cablevision plunged $1.14 to $25.67, after earlier falling as much as 5.2 percent. And all they had to do to avoid this was not act like greedy assholes. I guess it was a matter of asking a leopard to change its spots.
- fnid2 16y ago
  Corporate leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to act like greedy assholes. We have to understand that. It's required by the SEC and the law. Corporations must grow. They must increase their share price. They must continue to do more and more and more to get more money or they die. If you aren't growing you are dead. That's the problem with our system. But this system violates the laws of nature. Organisms in nature don't continue to grow forever. Those that don't stop growing eventually collapse under their own weight. That's exactly what is happening to our corporations -- and our society. We have to create a new system, whereby corporations -- organizations -- are rewarded for their stability, for their consistency. For their remaining the same for a long time. Small businesses can do this. At some point, the small business owner can say, "I have enough." But corporate leaders cannot say, "Our corporation is big enough." If they say that, they are fired. If you go public, you have to grow forever until your corporation collapses -- or is broken up by regulators. There is only one destination for public companies -- destruction, either through collapse or regulatory fragmentation.
  - CamperBob 16y ago
    Corporations must grow. They must increase their share price. They must continue to do more and more and more to get more money or they die. If you aren't growing you are dead. True, although do they have to do that by trying to decrease service at every opportunity, and by trying to enter markets outside their core competencies? There's nothing wrong with being a big dumb pipe. For a cable carrier or telco, trying to do anything else will either divide the company against itself, or pit the company against its own customers. It could be argued that by trying to grow into inappropriate areas, the carriers are contravening their fiduciary duty.
clammer 16y ago
I like being right about things, but it's a shame to be right when the Internet has to go completely wrong in order to prove a point. NN was always a bad idea and this step by the FCC was obvious to anyone who saw through the NN BS. I'll never understand why people still think the government can "help" them by solving problems that don't even exist. Say hello you're new Internet nanny, the FCC.
- clammer 16y ago
  Yeah, keep voting this down, that will make the Internet being controlled by the FCC better...somehow.
  - pieceofpeace 16y ago
    Do you prefer large corporations over FCC to "control the Internet"?
    - jonallanharper 16y ago
      Absolutely.
  - hga 16y ago
    I think your problem might in part be from your claim that no problem exists. I disagree with that while agreeing that a good outcome from this move is extremely unlikely. (Is you faith in the government that strong? In a political body who's partisan nature shifts from administration to administration? And that was before I read the theory that this would freeze a lot of stuff while it gets fought out in the courts for the next few years.
  - jonallanharper 16y ago
    clammer, would you mind emailing me sometime? I was just reading some of your other comments on HN, and I really enjoy hearing your thoughts. My email is jon at atlaswebdev dot com. Thanks!
  - anigbrowl 16y ago
illumin8 16y ago
This is a great move. It is simply tragic that we live in the country that invented the Internet, and yet the bandwidth available to the average citizen is very low compared to the rest of the first world countries. The free market has failed the Internet. For some things, like utilities, government regulation works best. I think we all can agree that network access is a utility and should be treated as such.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- ewjordan 16y ago
  It is simply tragic that we live in the country that invented the Internet, and yet the bandwidth available to the average citizen is very low compared to the rest of the first world countries. To some extent that is a result of the fact that we had it early. A lot of money was put into the early infrastructure, and it now needs to be upgraded, but there's little incentive to do so as long as it's working well enough. Whereas latecomers to the party can get equipment three generations better than what we started with, and install it for a lot less money than we had to sink into our old stuff. This is not too uncommon in business, either, where (especially in fields where patents don't ensure a monopoly for the innovator), the innovator spends a lot of resources in development, setting up the supply chain, and driving consumer demand. The "me, too!" business then comes along and benefits from all of this without having to pay a dime, and can skip right past many unprofitable months and challenge the innovator to a game of catch-up very quickly.
  - fnid2 16y ago
    It's called "leap-frogging." Preventing it is the goal of patents, but many here argue against those as well. It's like they want things to be better, but they don't want to allow the creators of those better things to benefit from the betterment themselves. When you limit the innovators' ability to profit from their innovations, they'll stop innovating...
    - lutorm 16y ago
grellas 16y ago
The FCC had a choice here (after losing in court on the question whether it had so-called "ancillary jurisdiction" to impose net neutrality rules on carriers). It could have gone back to Congress to get clearer statutory authority for its mandate to regulate the web. If successful, that effort would have led to a solution in the form of a new statutory provision that carefully defined what the FCC could or couldn't do in regulating the internet. While that would have been an ideal solution, it would have meant having to get support for the agency's net neutrality goals in Congress, and that support was doubtful. The other choice was to do what it did here, and that is to take its existing authority over common carriers in the telephone market and attempt to extend it to the internet. The problem with this is that such authority is very broad-based and includes (among other things) the power to regulate pricing through a complex system of tariffs. The FCC is claiming to do a "hybrid," however, by saying that, yes, we are going treat internet access providers like phone companies but we don't intend to regulate their pricing or exercise any of the other broad regulatory powers we might otherwise exercise once we use this this approach. In effect, the agency is saying, "we plan to come in with a scalpel and do only what is needed to implement our narrow regulatory plan that is focused primarily on net neutrality rules - so, don't worry about the rest, trust us that we will not overreach." Of course, nothing is in place under the FCC's chosen approach to stop overreaching by the agency except its own discretion. By invoking existing statutes designed for another purpose altogether, instead of seeking to get a new statute from Congress aimed at solving the immediate issue of net neutrality only, the FCC is exerting government power in a way that may not have been contemplated by the original statutes and in a way that will most certainly be challenged in the courts. Maybe this approach will work for proponents of net neutrality but it comes at a price of the government staking out a pretty broad claim to regulate the internet without any particular checks on that power beyond the FCC's own judgment as to what it should or shouldn't do in the future. Thus, this is basically an agency power grab - perhaps supportable, perhaps not - but almost certain to have unpredictable and potentially unpleasant side effects as always happens when there are insufficient checks on government power.
- nlwhittemore 16y ago
  If the trade is the limits on regulation at the discretion instead of limits on speed and access at the discretion of comcast, I'm pretty fine with it.

36 points by px 16y ago

the agency plans to impose more regulations on Web-access providers after a court stripped the agency of its powers last month. What does that mean? Which powers were stripped? How can they impose more regulations if they have less power?

showerst 16y ago
If I'm reading it right, basically the courts said that the FCC doesn't have the right to regulate internet providers like they do common carriers (like phone networks), so they're just going to reclassify them as common carriers, then regulate them. IMHO this is probably huge for net neutrality, but I wonder where their (generally accepted) efforts at traffic shaping will end up in all of this? I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little.
- swombat 16y ago
  I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little. Why would your 24MBit/s work slower for bit-torrent than other uses? The whole point of this net neutrality debate is that ISPs have no business deciding which traffic they prefer, much like your phone company has no business deciding which one of your friends you're allowed to call.
  - tedunangst 16y ago
    If my neighbor is downloading a torrent for 3 hours, it hardly matters whether it arrives in 3:04 or 3:05. But if I'm browsing HN or email, the difference between 0.1 seconds and 1.0 seconds is quite perceptible.
    - gte910h 16y ago
      They don't throttle those guys a little. They throttle them a lot.
  - gte910h 16y ago
    The issue is that network advertisers don't have the bandwidth they say they do. So they really can't give everyone 24 sustained, only burst.
    - lukev 16y ago
      God forbid they actually advertise their real and burst rates instead of picking a completely unrealistic, sky-high number.
    - randallsquared 16y ago
      And the reason most heavy users do not complain very loudly about this false advertising is that we are benefactors, since our heavy internet usage is subsidized by those that only browse the web a bit and get email, but still want 25 Mbps because it's "more" than 2 Mbps.
- westbywest 16y ago
  I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little. I comment in agreement with the need to maintain QoS for reasons of network health, especially if you need to maintain minimum guaranteed bandwidth in the presence of misbehaving clients (e.g. botnets, ping floods, not just abusive torrenters). However, the carriers in questions have often not been using QoS for reasons of improving service, but rather to penalize the percentage of broadband users who actually use a large portion of the bandwidth they're paying for. For example, say you buy 1.5Mbit DSL and then carefully set up your torrent client to use a consistent 1.0Mbit during nighttime. A month later you get a disconnect notice from your ISP claiming that you were hogging bandwidth, probably leaving you SOL since that's the only viable ISP in your area. This is the sort of business practice the FCC is trying to address.
  - fnid2 16y ago
    You aren't SOL, you can stop using so much bandwidth. You can be a conscientious user of shared resources. Using a constant stream like that is almost always a bit lacking in legitimacy. It usually means you are using the service in ways that your service plan wasn't designed to be used, either you're downloading and/or sharing large, perhaps copyrighted videos, music, or software, or you are running a server for gaming or something like that. Those 1.5Mbit DSL is "maximum capacity." Not what you should try to consume. Ultimately, all the customers go through one pipe, or a shared few pipes, so those hogging the lines negatively affect others. In my opinion, it's the users of the bandwidth that are greedy. Do they really need 1,000 movies on their hard drives? Many bit torrenters have more content than they could ever watch in their entire lives...
    - lutorm 16y ago
      Strawman argument. If I break the law, charge me. Otherwise you have no business second-guessing what I transfer over the line I pay for. If they don't want people to use the bandwith they pay to get, they should say so by advertising their monthly cap or whatever. The idea that I can only transfer the particular types of bits across the wire that my ISP thinks I should is exactly the point of net neutrality rules. If that's not an infringement of free speech, I don't know what is.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
The agency gets to classify new technology in different buckets. They put the ISPs in the data provider bucket. So the providers started screwing people over depending on what kind of bits they wanted to get over the net -- the beginning of some god-awful 74-thousand tiered pricing structure. Lots of fuss about that. FCC tries to step in. Court says nope, in that bucket you don't have the authority to act. So the FCC puts them in new bucket. Huge part of the economy now regulated and nobody had to elect anybody, there was no bill, no debate, no nothing (And I support this, but damn it's a freaking Faustian bargain if I ever saw one)
- francoisdevlin 16y ago
  Eh, it's not as bad as you think. We (congress) gave the FCC the authority to do this. Granted, we didn't quite understand the implications when we did, but it is still a democratic process.
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    LOL. Yes, I understand how the regulatory process works. Apologies if I seemed to mislead anyone. There is nothing unconstitutional going on. But that doesn't take away from the fact that the regulatory agencies have immense power in our society -- granted to them by Congress. For instance, the DEA can classify new drugs as dangerous, including setting what the jail time will be for possession -- and Congress has virtually no role[1]. Used to be it took an entire constitutional amendment to outlaw alcohol, but now a commission does the same work and there's little publicity. [1] Ok, so they have "oversight", but as somebody who has seen oversight behind the scenes, and watched a lot of it on C-SPAN, color me unimpressed. EDIT: Another good one is the EPA classifying CO2 -- the air we breathe -- as being under it's regulatory guidance. Now they made provision so that it only covers large producers of CO2, but that was their decision as an agency. There was no public debate or vote in Congress. Just a bunch of guys sitting around a conference table. Once again, I support the outcome in this case. I'm not trying to argue that it's a bad outcome. Just not crazy about the way we got here, or the implications for broadband 20 years from now.
btilly 16y ago
The decision last month was that the FCC did not have authority from Congress to regulate internet traffic. So now the FCC is attempting to reclassify cable providers in the same bucket as telephone providers. If courts accept this then the FCC has a very clear grant of authority from Congress to regulate as they wish. The open question is whether the courts will accept this reclassification. This question will likely take several years to wind its way through the courts, but no matter how it turns out it will be a huge headache for the cable providers. The fundamental issue here is whether net neutrality can be imposed on the cable providers. The standard meme is that net neutrality is a basic right. I am one of the few people who actually don't want net neutrality. Not because I trust ISPs to behave in a reasonable fashion, but because I think that the only real solution to bot nets is to make ISPs liable for the traffic that they let onto the Internet, and any such rule would be incompatible with net neutrality.
- swombat 16y ago
  Bot nets are a small but annoying problem for a small percentage of people in the world. A pay-as-you-go, "we'll charge you extra for downloading 1MB from youtube rather than some other site" internet such as the one ISPs would like to aim towards would be a huge problem for everyone. Have a sense of proportions...
  - btilly 16y ago
    Small but annoying? Try saying that to someone who runs a website that has been forced to pay extortion fees as the price of staying up. And truth be told, if the public had any idea how often bot nets are responsible for their computers running slowly and their personal financial details getting stolen, there would be a lot of justified outrage about that as well. Just because people aren't aware of how big a problem it is doesn't mean that it isn't a big problem.
px 16y ago
The FCC may have to rely on legislative action by Congress or a more favorable federal court opinion. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/06/AR2010040600742_2.html?sub=AR http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04... The real issue question is whether or not enforcing net neutrality would introduce a new level of federal regulation that would scare off investment.

CamperBob 16y ago

This move by the government certainly throws a wet blanket on any deal speculations and hampers all cable and telco stock multiples,” said Chris Marangi, an analyst with Gabelli & Co in Rye, New York. “It’s going to be years-long litigation and the cable guys can’t give an inch. Time Warner Cable sank $2.51, or 4.6 percent, to $52.48 at 10:35 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Earlier the shares dropped as much as 6.4 percent. Cablevision plunged $1.14 to $25.67, after earlier falling as much as 5.2 percent. And all they had to do to avoid this was not act like greedy assholes. I guess it was a matter of asking a leopard to change its spots.

fnid2 16y ago
Corporate leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to act like greedy assholes. We have to understand that. It's required by the SEC and the law. Corporations must grow. They must increase their share price. They must continue to do more and more and more to get more money or they die. If you aren't growing you are dead. That's the problem with our system. But this system violates the laws of nature. Organisms in nature don't continue to grow forever. Those that don't stop growing eventually collapse under their own weight. That's exactly what is happening to our corporations -- and our society. We have to create a new system, whereby corporations -- organizations -- are rewarded for their stability, for their consistency. For their remaining the same for a long time. Small businesses can do this. At some point, the small business owner can say, "I have enough." But corporate leaders cannot say, "Our corporation is big enough." If they say that, they are fired. If you go public, you have to grow forever until your corporation collapses -- or is broken up by regulators. There is only one destination for public companies -- destruction, either through collapse or regulatory fragmentation.
- CamperBob 16y ago
  Corporations must grow. They must increase their share price. They must continue to do more and more and more to get more money or they die. If you aren't growing you are dead. True, although do they have to do that by trying to decrease service at every opportunity, and by trying to enter markets outside their core competencies? There's nothing wrong with being a big dumb pipe. For a cable carrier or telco, trying to do anything else will either divide the company against itself, or pit the company against its own customers. It could be argued that by trying to grow into inappropriate areas, the carriers are contravening their fiduciary duty.

clammer 16y ago

I like being right about things, but it's a shame to be right when the Internet has to go completely wrong in order to prove a point. NN was always a bad idea and this step by the FCC was obvious to anyone who saw through the NN BS. I'll never understand why people still think the government can "help" them by solving problems that don't even exist. Say hello you're new Internet nanny, the FCC.

clammer 16y ago
Yeah, keep voting this down, that will make the Internet being controlled by the FCC better...somehow.
- pieceofpeace 16y ago
  Do you prefer large corporations over FCC to "control the Internet"?
  - jonallanharper 16y ago
    Absolutely.
- hga 16y ago
  I think your problem might in part be from your claim that no problem exists. I disagree with that while agreeing that a good outcome from this move is extremely unlikely. (Is you faith in the government that strong? In a political body who's partisan nature shifts from administration to administration? And that was before I read the theory that this would freeze a lot of stuff while it gets fought out in the courts for the next few years.
- jonallanharper 16y ago
  clammer, would you mind emailing me sometime? I was just reading some of your other comments on HN, and I really enjoy hearing your thoughts. My email is jon at atlaswebdev dot com. Thanks!
- anigbrowl 16y ago

illumin8 16y ago

This is a great move. It is simply tragic that we live in the country that invented the Internet, and yet the bandwidth available to the average citizen is very low compared to the rest of the first world countries. The free market has failed the Internet. For some things, like utilities, government regulation works best. I think we all can agree that network access is a utility and should be treated as such.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ewjordan 16y ago
It is simply tragic that we live in the country that invented the Internet, and yet the bandwidth available to the average citizen is very low compared to the rest of the first world countries. To some extent that is a result of the fact that we had it early. A lot of money was put into the early infrastructure, and it now needs to be upgraded, but there's little incentive to do so as long as it's working well enough. Whereas latecomers to the party can get equipment three generations better than what we started with, and install it for a lot less money than we had to sink into our old stuff. This is not too uncommon in business, either, where (especially in fields where patents don't ensure a monopoly for the innovator), the innovator spends a lot of resources in development, setting up the supply chain, and driving consumer demand. The "me, too!" business then comes along and benefits from all of this without having to pay a dime, and can skip right past many unprofitable months and challenge the innovator to a game of catch-up very quickly.
- fnid2 16y ago
  It's called "leap-frogging." Preventing it is the goal of patents, but many here argue against those as well. It's like they want things to be better, but they don't want to allow the creators of those better things to benefit from the betterment themselves. When you limit the innovators' ability to profit from their innovations, they'll stop innovating...
  - lutorm 16y ago

grellas 16y ago

The FCC had a choice here (after losing in court on the question whether it had so-called "ancillary jurisdiction" to impose net neutrality rules on carriers). It could have gone back to Congress to get clearer statutory authority for its mandate to regulate the web. If successful, that effort would have led to a solution in the form of a new statutory provision that carefully defined what the FCC could or couldn't do in regulating the internet. While that would have been an ideal solution, it would have meant having to get support for the agency's net neutrality goals in Congress, and that support was doubtful. The other choice was to do what it did here, and that is to take its existing authority over common carriers in the telephone market and attempt to extend it to the internet. The problem with this is that such authority is very broad-based and includes (among other things) the power to regulate pricing through a complex system of tariffs. The FCC is claiming to do a "hybrid," however, by saying that, yes, we are going treat internet access providers like phone companies but we don't intend to regulate their pricing or exercise any of the other broad regulatory powers we might otherwise exercise once we use this this approach. In effect, the agency is saying, "we plan to come in with a scalpel and do only what is needed to implement our narrow regulatory plan that is focused primarily on net neutrality rules - so, don't worry about the rest, trust us that we will not overreach." Of course, nothing is in place under the FCC's chosen approach to stop overreaching by the agency except its own discretion. By invoking existing statutes designed for another purpose altogether, instead of seeking to get a new statute from Congress aimed at solving the immediate issue of net neutrality only, the FCC is exerting government power in a way that may not have been contemplated by the original statutes and in a way that will most certainly be challenged in the courts. Maybe this approach will work for proponents of net neutrality but it comes at a price of the government staking out a pretty broad claim to regulate the internet without any particular checks on that power beyond the FCC's own judgment as to what it should or shouldn't do in the future. Thus, this is basically an agency power grab - perhaps supportable, perhaps not - but almost certain to have unpredictable and potentially unpleasant side effects as always happens when there are insufficient checks on government power.

nlwhittemore 16y ago
If the trade is the limits on regulation at the discretion instead of limits on speed and access at the discretion of comcast, I'm pretty fine with it.