December 2009

National Cable & Telecommunications Association President Kyle McSlarrow told the Media Institute that "Internet service providers do not threaten free speech." "[W]hen all the dire warnings of the net neutrality proponents are stripped away, there really are no signs of actual harm," he said, but countered there could be real harms from network neutrality rules that forced speech. Weighing in on what he conceded was the "seemingly endless" debate over network neutrality, he took aim at what he called "the strongest and loudest voices for net neutrality rules [who] often cloak their agenda as advancing the First Amendment or, just as frequently, First Amendment 'values.'" The FCC is currently considering expanding and codifying its existing open Internet guidelines, and McSlarrow wants it to think hard about whether those rules can be justified under First Amendment standards. "What is fascinating, and frankly disturbing, however, is how often in recent years that First Amendment principles have been turned upside down in an attempt to advance agendas that themselves threaten true First Amendment rights," he said. He said network neutrality rules could actually restrict speech in a number of ways.

[Commentary] It used to be that no one used their broadband connections much. Broadband providers counted on this minimal usage so they could oversubscribe their networks. They also offered unlimited service to gain another competitive edge over dialup Internet access. And this all worked fine so long as no one was consuming that much bandwidth. But over the last few years the demands on these networks have risen dramatically. This increase stems from the dual factors of power users having more ways to use more bandwidth than ever--like P2P video sharing, Hulu and YouTube, hosted applications, and the use of broadband to enable telecommuting--and more people finding reasons and ways to become power users. This growth in demand is straining traditional broadband business models, forcing operators to invest in increasing capacity without necessarily adding any new revenue to offset this cost. This reality is what's leading operators to explore options like metered bandwidth, so they can recapture their investments and drive additional profits from their heaviest users. This is also what's leading operators to use things like traffic shaping and application blocking.

A $10 levy on fixed phone lines to fund the roll-out of high-speed broadband networks was greenlit Wednesday by the UK government. The tax will be used to ensure that 90% of the population has access to next-generation broadband by 2017. Announcing the move, the government's Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling said, "We are modernizing the U.K.'s digital infrastructure and, in the process, creating thousands more skilled jobs." However, critics of the tax, announced in summer's "Digital Britain" report, said rolling out broadband to remote areas of Blighty should be left to the market and not subsidized by the public.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said Wednesday that given the dramatic changes that the Internet has undergone in the 10 years since the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development first released its e-commerce guidelines, government officials must re-evaluate how they think about policymaking. He spoke at an OECD conference at the FTC on consumer protection in the digital age which is the start of a process launched by the OECD to update the organization's 1999 guidelines to reflect the dramatic technological changes that have occurred in the last decade. In describing some of the changes in the last decade, Sec Locke noted that Google didn't begin providing keyword-based ads until 2000, now "hundreds of thousands of advertisers use Google's AdWords." He added that in 1999 only one company offered a "dedicated" Web service for cell phones, while in 2008 more than 160 million Internet-connected smart phones were sold.