October 2009

AT&T's top lobbyist, Jim Cicconi, sent a letter to all of the telecom giant's 300,000 employees on Sunday, urging them to express their concerns over a Network Neutrality proposal under consideration by the Federal Communications Commission. The letter was the latest move in a lobbying frenzy days before the FCC votes on a proposal to create new net neutrality regulations. High-tech giants wrote to the agency to support the rules, while dozens of lawmakers from both parties have protested the rules as potentially dangerous to economic growth. "We encourage you, your family and friends to join the voices telling the FCC not to regulate the Internet," Cicconi wrote in his letter.

In the letter, he offered these talking points:

1) America's wireless consumers enjoy the broadest range of innovative services and devices, lowest prices, highest usage levels, and most choices in the world. Why disrupt a market that's working so well?

2) There is fierce competition for wireless and broadband customers. Competition drives innovation and encourages companies to develop products, services and applications that consumers want. There's been more innovation in this market than in any since the World Wide Web was introduced. The market is working for consumers. Don't burden it with unnecessarily harmful regulations.

3) Network companies have to be able to manage their networks to ensure the most economical and efficient use of bandwidth, and provide affordable broadband services for all users. Network management is essential for consumers to enjoy the benefits of new quality-sensitive applications and services. The FCC rules should not stop the promise of life-changing, cost-saving services such as telemedicine that depend on a managed network.

4) The "net neutrality" rules as reported will jeopardize the very goals supported by the Obama administration that every American have access to high-speed Internet services no matter where they live or their economic circumstance. That goal can't be met with rules that halt private investment in broadband infrastructure. And the jobs associated with that investment will be lost at a time when the country can least afford it.

5) The FCC shouldn't burden an industry that is bringing jobs and investment to the country, but if it is going to regulate the Internet it should do so fairly. The goal of the FCC should be to maintain a level playing field by treating all competitors the same. Any new rules should apply equally to network providers, search engines and other information services providers.

Advocates of Network Neutrality took the battle for control of the Internet into the wireless space in 2007 with the publication of Tim Wu's "Wireless Carterfone" paper on barriers to wireless application development. 100,000 applications later, the FCC and Congress are once again besieged with demands for free access to wireless data networks by all kinds of devices. Is the battle to put all devices on all networks beneficial (not to mention practical)? The use of diverse cellular technologies in the United States suggests that it's not, and the large trend in the wireless space from simple phones to smart, software-intensive platforms like the iPhone and the Palm Pre suggests that it's yesterday's war. Bennett analyzes trends in mobile technology and finds current regulations more than sufficient to promote continued innovation.

In an amazingly short time, Twitter -- the messaging service which does little more than circulate bursts of text limited to 140 characters to a list of people who have chosen to receive them -- has established itself as a staple of social networking, commerce, electioneering, celebrity culture, public relations, media, and political protest. According to internal documents leaked earlier this year, the company expects to have 25 million active users by the end of 2009 and 100 million by the end of 2010. In 2013, it hopes to become the first Internet service to sign up 1 billion users. Can something as elementary as Twitter become an enduring pillar of the Internet? Perhaps. Twitter rocketed into the mainstream without really knowing what its service was. Its users defined it. It was those users who made Twitter into a throbbing global sensing organism that delivers instant opinion and eyewitness reporting on everything from presidential debates to football injuries. Though the company held a discussion earlier this year called "What Do We Want to Be When We Grow Up?" the mission statement is still a work in progress. "If there are three sentences I'd use to describe Twitter, one of them would be 'I don't know.'"