Vox

When someone leaked a copy of a New York Times report on innovation (that was shockingly good), it clearly identified the major problems facing the newspaper in an increasingly digital world, and it made some smart recommendations for transforming the Times into a "digital first" publication.

If the Times were to follow them, it would have a large and positive impact on the paper.

Nevertheless, translating the report's recommendations into action will be very difficult. As Ezra points out, the report includes an excellent summary of Clay Christensen's concept of disruption. The report correctly observes that publications like Buzzfeed are posing exactly the kind of disruptive threat Christensen wrote about.

But what the report doesn't mention is the sobering conclusion of Christensen's research: companies faced with disruptive threats almost never manage to handle them gracefully. And the reality is that most businesses threatened by disruptive innovation don't survive. So even if the senior leadership of the Times accepts the findings of the Times innovation report, they're going to find it a huge challenge to make the kind of dramatic changes that will be required for the Times to master the web.

[Commentary] Concurrent to the dramatic firing of top editor Jill Abramson, the New York Times has been in the news thanks to the leaking of a 96-page Innovation Report that offers a scathing internal assessment of the paper's digital strategy.

It is the most thorough look at the insides of the most important newspaper in the country that we have ever seen. What's more, in keeping with the high standards of the New York Times it's simply an excellent piece of reporting and analysis.

Managing disruptive technological change is really hard. Not only -- or even mostly or even partially -- because the people in charge don't "get it."

As the Innovation Report notes, the Times currently derives 75 percent of its revenue from its print operation. Under the circumstances, shifting to a digital-first mentality is genuinely difficult.

The good news for the Times is that in addition to its extraordinarily strong brand and currently profitable business it has an extremely clear-eyed look at the nature of that challenge.

[Commentary] The debate surrounding the net neutrality vote at the Federal Communications Commission has been all about "fast lanes." Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler says his proposal would prohibit them.

Critics on his left say that stronger rules are needed to prevent them. The FCC's Republican commissioners say that the specter of fast lanes is largely imaginary, and that net neutrality rules are a solution in search of a problem.

They're all wrong. Fast lanes are real. They exist now. And none of the rules the FCC proposed are going to prevent them.

So why is the FCC focusing on hypothetical fast lanes while ignoring the ones that already exist? One factor is inertia. Comcast's current business strategy, in which it charges almost everyone to deliver traffic to its own customers, only dates to about 2010. This kind of dispute wasn't even on the radar of policymakers when the term network neutrality was coined a decade ago.

So a lot of network neutrality advocates are still fighting the last war, not noticing that the open internet is coming under attack on a new front. The other reason is that regulating the terms of interconnection on the internet is even more complex than regulating classic network neutrality. It's relatively straightforward to say that a network provider can't prioritize one type of traffic over another on its network.

But writing rules to govern when two networks must connect with each other and how much they can charge is really difficult. So FCC policymakers may have decided to tackle the easier problem first.

Not everyone thinks this stronger network neutrality rules and broadband reclassification are a good idea. Incumbent telecom companies, free-market advocates, and a number of members of Congress have all urged the Federal Communications Commission to retain the low-regulation "information service" category.

Here are the three biggest problems that, opponents claim, could be created by reclassification.

Gus Hurwitz, a legal scholar at the University of Nebraska College of Law, says that reclassifying could give the FCC the power to regulate broadband prices, connection and disconnection of service, and interconnection with other Internet companies.

Reclassification opponents say broadband providers will be less willing to open their wallets when there's a lot of uncertainty about when and how they'll be allowed to profit from their networks.

Also, if the FCC reclassifies, that decision is almost certain to trigger a lawsuit.

"If we do see reclassification, we're probably looking at another 2 to 4 years of just litigating questions of the commission's basic authority," Hurwitz says.

And politically, there are two ways opponents of reclassification could make life difficult for Chairman Tom Wheeler if he reclassifies. First, members of Congress can haul Chairman Wheeler before Congress to grill him about his policies. And second, telecom companies could mount more legal challenges to FCC decisions, forcing the agency to spend more time defending itself in court, leaving it with less time to pursue other initiatives.

The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering "reclassification," a legal maneuver that would allow the agency to enact stronger network neutrality regulations.

A favorite talking point of reclassification opponents is that the last time the FCC considered this option, in 2010, 74 Congressional Democrats signed a letter urging FCC chairman Julius Genachowski not to do it. Genachowski listened, choosing an alternative legal strategy that wound up being rejected by the courts in January.

Now history is repeating. Genachowski's successor, Tom Wheeler, is considering how to respond to that court ruling, and he is under pressure from network neutrality advocates to reclassify. And once again, telecommunications industry allies have circulated a letter among House Democrats opposing reclassification.

The letter was written by Rep Gene Green (D-TX), the same member of Congress who wrote the 2010 letter. And it warns the FCC not to "open the door to subjecting broadband service to a wide array of regulatory burdens and restrictions." A former member of Congress who is now a cable lobbyist has been emailing his former colleagues urging them to sign on. But this time, only 20 of the 199 Democrats in the House signed on.

[Commentary] Allowing Comcast or Time Warner Cable to build fast lanes on the internet means that they'll have enormous incentives to push everyone towards them -- and almost no incentive to improve the miserable standard experience in the slow lanes, which will remain expensive and congested.

Want Netflix to work better? Just pay Comcast a little more. You're a social networking startup that wants to take on Facebook? Better factor in the ISP tax to make sure your content loads as fast as Zuckerberg's. This is basically free money for broadband providers; Comcast throttled Netflix traffic for years, but when the company finally broke down and paid, speeds shot up 65 percent.

This is lawyer-money, not engineer-money. Everyone involved should feel dirty. Let's call the opposite of net neutrality broadband theater: the cable industry will claim it's spending a lot of money on innovation to make us feel better, but absent any competition or oversight, the rest of us will end up standing around like most of us do in airport security, with no shoes on, wondering where our dignity went.

[Commentary] The broadband industry does not like the idea of government regulations that would make it less profitable. In search of a more persuasive argument than that, Tom Downey, a lobbyist for the National Cable Telecommunications Association, is circulating a letter to members of congress arguing that "in the years that broadband service has been subjected to relatively little regulation, investment and deployment have flourished and broadband competition has increased, all to the benefit of consumers and the American economy." So is broadband investment flourishing? Not according to the NCTA's own data which shows investment booming in the years before the Great Recession and declining more recently. They looked at cumulative gross investment so that literally any possible state of the world will show an upward slope. Even if all the broadband industry did was repair lines that were downed in storms, cumulative investment would go up over time. But they threw in a bonus trick of using four-year periods (1996, 2000, 2004, 2008) and then switching to a five-year period for the last one.

[Commentary] In response to my post on the cable industry trade association's misleading broadband infrastructure investment chart, National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) came out with some new data that they say will correct the record left by the broadband industry.

Obviously the facts about declining investment aren't enough on their own to prove anything about Internet competition or the appropriate level of regulation. But the fact is that this is a profitable industry operating in a low interest rate environment that is choosing not to make the kind of capital investments that it made in years past.

Free Press says that Rep Gene Green (D-TX) is asking colleagues to sign onto a letter urging Federal Communications Commission Chairman Wheeler not to reclassify broadband.

"In the years that broadband service has been subjected to relatively little regulation, investment and deployment have flourished and broadband competition has increased," the letter argues. The letter warns that reclassification could open the door to a "wide array of regulatory burdens and restrictions" that could halt progress toward improved broadband service.

"I respectfully urge you to consider the effect that regressing to a Title II approach might have on private companies’ ability to attract capital," it concludes. Free Press also says that Tom Downey, a former member of Congress and current cable lobbyist, is contacting members of Congress and urging them to sign on.

Brian Dietz of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association declined to comment on that report, but he didn't deny that the group was "making our views known as widely as possible.”

A lot of members of Congress were caught off guard in 2012 when the Internet exploded in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act. Lobbyists for the motion picture and recording industries had assured them that the proposal, which involved creating a government-sponsored blacklist and forcing ISPs to block sites on it, wouldn't be too disruptive to the Internet ecosystem.

But the people who actually run the Internet were barely consulted. It would be nice if Congress had some technical experts on staff to analyze proposed legislation and advise members about its technical implications.

And in fact, Congress did have an agency like that, called the Office of Technology Assessment, until Newt Gingrich zeroed out its funding in 1995. Rep Rush Holt (D-NJ), one of the few members of Congress with scientific training, wants to change that. He recently introduced an amendment that would have allocated funds to re-start the agency. But it was defeated in a 164-248 vote.