Network management

AT&T is reportedly abandoning its attempt to stop a Louisville (KY) ordinance that helped draw Google Fiber into the city. In February 2016, AT&T sued the local government in Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky to stop an ordinance that gives Google Fiber and other ISPs faster access to utility poles.

[Commentary] Here are just a few ways internet service providers (ISPs) have throttled or blocked content in the past:
Packet forgery: In 2007 Comcast was caught interfering with their customers’ use of BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer file sharing
Discriminatory traffic shaping that prioritizes some protocols over others: a Canadian ISP slowed down all encrypted file transfers for five years
Prohibitions on tethering: the Federal Communications Commission fined Verizon for charging consumers for using their phone as a mobile hotspot
Overreaching clauses in ISP terms of service, such as prohibitions on sharing your home Wi-Fi network
Hindering innovation with "fast lane" discrimination that allows wireless customers without data plans to access certain sites but not the whole Internet
Hijacking and interference with DNS, search engines, HTTP transmission, and other basic Internet functionality to inject ads and raise revenue from affiliate marketing schemes, from companies like Paxfire, FairEagle, and others
Individually and collectively, these practices pose a dire threat to this purely democratic engine of innovation that has allowed hackers, startups, and kids in their college dorm rooms to create the free Internet that we know and love today.

[John Ottman is Chairman and co-founder of Minds, Inc. a social media network.]

Sens Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) have introduced the “Streamlining Permitting to Enable Efficient Deployment of Broadband Infrastructure Act of 2017” (SPEED Act) (S 1988). Specifically, the SPEED Act would streamline federal permitting processes that impede the quick and efficient deployment of next-generation broadband technologies, including 5G.

Currently, new and replacement telecommunications infrastructure is subject to numerous, sometimes duplicative federal approvals, including environmental and historical reviews. These duplicative approvals extend to areas that have already been established as a public right-of-way (ROW), and where telecommunications infrastructure already exists. The SPEED Act would not preempt the authority of a State or local government to apply and enforce all applicable zoning and other land use regulations on communications providers.

Cable Internet with download and upload speeds of 10Gbps may eventually come to American homes thanks to a new specification for higher-speed, symmetrical data transmissions. The industry's R&D consortium, CableLabs, announced that it has completed the Full Duplex Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, an update to DOCSIS 3.1.

The completion of the 10Gbps full duplex spec comes 18 months after the project was unveiled. The completion of the spec doesn't mean you'll suddenly be getting multi-gigabit uploads and downloads, as commercial deployments may be at least a couple of years away and may not initially provide the maximum speeds allowed by the spec. The initial version of DOCSIS 3.1 was announced in 2013 and allowed 10Gbps downloads and 1Gbps uploads, but the first modems weren't certified until early 2016, and real-world implementations are still catching up. Comcast last year began offering gigabit download speeds over cable using DOCSIS 3.1, but the service limited uploads to 35Mbps. Comcast's only symmetrical gigabit service uses fiber-to-the-home instead of cable, as fiber technologies have supported symmetrical transmissions at gigabit speeds for years.

Public Knowledge, Consumer Federation of America, and New Networks Institute filed an amicus brief in the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit requesting the Court to overturn and remand the Federal Communications Commission’s recent Business Data Services deregulation Order. Public Knowledge argues that the agency’s competition analysis, which found that duopoly competition -- real or potential -- is “sufficient” to discipline market power and high prices in the BDS market, is ludicrous. The Commission’s analysis is inconsistent with competition law and unsupported by the record, and the Order will lead to higher prices in the BDS market, which consumers will ultimately pay.

In his ongoing push to get rid of network neutrality rules, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai claimed in Sept that the rules caused capital investment in wireless networks to drop in 2016. But in doing so, Chairman Pai hasn't addressed data from earlier years that doesn't fit his anti-net neutrality narrative.

Chairman Pai beat the drum again this week in the FCC's annual report on wireless competition, which emphasizes the investment drop in 2016. The current net neutrality rules were voted in by the FCC in February 2015 and took effect in June 2015. But investment also dropped between 2013 and 2015, before the current rules were in place, Democratic FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn pointed out. "The discussion of investment in the mobile wireless services industry is fundamentally flawed. By highlighting a decrease in investment between 2015 and 2016, this section was clearly written to support the false narrative that the 2015 Open Internet Order deterred wireless carriers from investing in their networks," Commissioner Clyburn said.

Longtime Comcast customer Drew Weaver was surprised in mid-May of 2017 when he got an automated call notifying him that he’d gone over his 1TB monthly data cap. First of all, Comcast alleged that he'd exceeded the data cap two months in a row, and Weaver says he never got a notification about the first overage. Moreover, Weaver just didn't believe that he'd used more than 1TB of data. But after a weeks-long, tedious process of troubleshooting with Comcast, the company insisted that its data meter was accurate. Comcast agents also repeatedly urged Weaver to pay an extra $50 a month to upgrade to an unlimited data plan or risk paying a $10 overage fee for each additional 50GB, up to a maximum of $200 in extra fees each month.

According to Comcast, Weaver had used up his "courtesy months" in which a customer is allowed to exceed the data cap without penalty and would have to pay overage charges going forward unless he limited his usage or bought unlimited data. Weaver could afford the additional payments—but out of principle, he decided not to give Comcast the extra money. And so he ended his nearly 14 years of being a Comcast customer.

Proponents and opponents of data caps make conflicting claims about the effect of data caps on prices, network capacity and speeds, subscription, congestion, and consumer surplus. In this paper, we survey the academic literature on data caps and analyze the relationship between the characteristics of each paper's model or data and the paper's results.

We find that model or data assumptions about service differentiation, purpose of the data cap, and amount of competition strongly influence each paper's results. Consequently, conclusions about the effect of data caps are often limited to certain types of service providers (fixed or mobile) and/or to certain types of data caps (heavy-users or profit-maximizing). We find that most proponents' claims about data caps in fixed broadband service are incorrect, and that most proponents' claims about data caps in mobile broadband service are likely to be correct if and only if data caps increase competition. We also discuss how data caps may be evaluated under the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order. We find that heavy-users caps on mobile broadband service are likely to satisfy the Order's rules, that profit-maximizing caps on mobile broadband service may or may not satisfy the rules, and that caps on fixed broadband service are unlikely to satisfy the rules.

[Scott Jordan is associated with the University of California, Irvine]

Because whether and how to regulate various parts of the Internet supply chain (or, if you prefer, ecosystem), I will try to explain below why common carriage obligations, such as network neutrality, are different from public utility regulation (even though most utility providers are common carriers), which is different from natural monopoly regulated rate of return/tariffing/price regulation. I will briefly explore some of the arguments in favor of applying some sort of public forum doctrine or common carrier obligation to social media platforms, and — because this invariably comes up in telecom space — why platform or other infrastructure providers are not and should not be covered by Title II or the Federal Communications Commission, even if we agree they should have some sort of public forum or even public utility obligations.

Despite assertions by Title II fans that the common carrier regulation regime has not adversely affected broadband investment, the Free State Foundation begs to differ and says it has the data to back that up. That came in reply comments—due Aug. 30—on Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's proposal to roll back Title II and reconsider the rules against blocking, throttling and paid prioritization.

Free State pointed to research by its own Michael Horney that indicated Title II had depressed broadband capital investment by $5.6 billion in 2015 and 2016. The Title II reclassification went into effect June 12, 2015. But Free State says that is of more than scholarly interest and that that foregone investment has hurt the economy and job creation. He says the other side has little evidence to back their dismissals of the economic impact argument.