Telecom Archives - Page 12 of 22 - Progressive Policy Institute

The Wall Street Journal: How the FCC Will Wreck the Internet

Posted on May 28, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Federal Communications Commission injected a considerable amount of uncertainty into the high-tech sector in February when it reclassified Internet service providers (ISPs) as public utilities. If it is upheld by the courts, the Open Internet Order—which inserts the government directly into private dealings between ISPs and firms that generate or aggregate Internet content—will drag down investments in new networks and infrastructure and slow down innovation.

In a new paper for the Progressive Policy Institute, I estimate that ISP capital expenditures will fall between 5% and 12% per year relative to 2014 levels—based on experience in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the last time telecommunications companies were subject to public-utility rules.

This may not sound like much, but ISPs invested nearly $77 billion in 2014. A 5% drop means billions in network upgrades forgone. Thousands of jobs would also be lost—20 jobs for every million dollars of fiber investment, according to a paper I co-wrote with Jeffrey West in 2010. The losses won’t be limited to ISPs. Investment in new networks propels innovation everywhere, thanks to faster connections and greater capabilities.

From the late 1990s to 2005, telecommunications firms were required to offer a component of their DSL Internet service on a common-carrier basis. During that period their broadband investments grew at a significantly slower rate than those of cable competitors who were not subject to the utility regulations.

Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal.

Three Ways The FCC’s Open Internet Order Will Harm Innovation

Posted on May 19, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Federal Communication Commission’s 2015 Open Internet order threatens innovation in three distinct ways. First, by barring paid priority arrangements, the order undermines innovation in the nascent market for real-time applications like telemedicine and HD voice. Second, because sponsored-data plans (including zero-rating plans) may run afoul of its “general conduct” standard, the order could discourage procompetitive offerings that would subsidize Internet access for low income Americans. Third, by reclassifying Internet service providers (“ISPs”) as telecommunications providers under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act, the order will likely slow the flow of investment dollars by ISPs, which will adversely affect innovation.

This Policy Brief examines the potential harm to innovation in qualitative terms, and where possible, in quantitative terms. The major findings are as follows:

The nascent markets for certain real-time applications, including telemedicine, virtual reality, and HD voice, are expected to develop into billion dollar industries in the coming years. Although no application needs priority to function per se, there is a class of applications that need a certain level of quality of service that is not always consistently available on networks, especially across wireless networks that are subject to congestion. The ban on payments for priority arrangements could undermine certain collaborations among ISPs and websites/application providers (“content providers”), and thereby thwart a non-trivial portion of these applications from taking root, potentially costing the U.S. economy hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
By discouraging ISPs and content providers from pursuing different ways to subsidize Internet access for consumers—another form of collaboration—the order could deny the poorest Americans hundreds of millions in benefits annually. There are millions of Americans for whom broadband is just out of reach and who would otherwise be eligible for a subsidy in the form of a sponsored-data plan.
Subjecting telecommunications companies to Title II in the early 2000s caused their capital expenditures to decline by between five and thirteen percent under conservative assumptions. Exposing ISPs to the same regulatory risk could undermine core investment to the same degree. Based on U.S. Telecom’s estimated $76 billion in aggregate capex among U.S. ISPs in 2014, such a reduction would amount to between a $4 and $10 billion decline in investment at the core of the network.

Download “2015.05-Singer_Three-Ways-the-FCCs-Open-Internet-Order-Will-Harm-Innovation”

The Blame Game: Multinational Taxation in an Era of Knowledge

Posted on May 18, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

U.S.-based companies such as Google, McDonalds, Starbucks, Apple, and Mi-crosoft are being attacked by European politicians for not paying their fair share of taxes. For example, in March 2014 Google was hit by a French tax assessment of perhaps as much as a billion euros according to press reports at the time. In November 2014, U.K. lawmakers accused Google, Amazon, and Starbucks of us-ing convoluted accounting methods to reduce their tax liabilities.

Indeed, the feeling that U.S. multinationals—especially digital giants—are ‘getting away with something’ has fueled a concerted effort by developed countries to re-write the global tax system. This so-called BEPS project (for Base Erosion and Profit Shifting), organized by the OECD, is in the process of issuing a series of guidelines for how countries can revamp their tax codes to best capture “stateless income.”

However, these accusations of tax avoidance are, in reality, not as clear-cut as they seem. Certainly some companies are taking advantage of legal but blatant loopholes that make no economic sense. Eliminating such loopholes is an im-portant part of the BEPS project that we support.

Download “2015.05-Mandel-Weinstein-OByrne_The-Blame-Game-Multinational-Taxation-in-an-Era-of-Knowledge”

Tech Opportunity for Minorities and Women: A Good News, Bad News Story

Posted on April 30, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Can tech jobs be a source of economic opportunity and upward mobility for an increasingly diverse American population?

Yes—consider two key facts about the labor market recovery, both of which show the potential for tech jobs to empower communities and bring shared prosperity.

First, since the recovery began in 2009, tech has created almost as many jobs for college graduates as healthcare. Tech jobs, here defined as all computer and mathematical occupations across industries, include computer systems analysts, network architects, and statisticians. Over 2009-2014, these tech jobs added about 730,000 college-educated workers. By comparison, healthcare occupations—which include everything from doctors and nurses to lab technicians and therapists—added 787,000 workers with a college degree.

This near parity in tech and healthcare job creation is significant given healthcare has long been regarded as the most dependable force for job creation. A growing and aging U.S. population, alongside rising medical costs, are widely seen as keeping healthcare jobs in high demand.

Second, we find that college-educated blacks and Hispanics have benefited enormously from the tech jobs boom. From 2009 to 2014, blacks with a college degree gained slightly more tech jobs than healthcare jobs—employment rose by 79,000 in computer and mathematical occupations (a 58% increase), compared to 76,000 gain in healthcare occupations (an 18% increase). The number of Hispanics with a bachelor’s degree increased by 104,000 in the healthcare occupations (a 40% increase), not so far ahead of the 81,000 gain in computer and mathematical occupations (an impressive 103% increase).

Indeed, the opportunity tech jobs are creating for non-Asian minorities defies conventional stereotypes. That’s because the tech/info jobs boom is much broader than in Silicon Valley. Tech jobs are increasingly found across all industries and the country. Tech jobs are in finance, education, and government, and urban tech clusters are forming in U.S. cities such as New Orleans, New York, and Denver.

Download “2015.04_Mandel-Carew_Tech-Opportunity-for-Minorities-and-Women_A-Good-News-Bad-News-Story/”

London Shines in Tech/Info Employment; The Rest of the UK Struggles

Posted on April 23, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Approximately one year ago, I undertook a study of the London tech/info economy, together with Dr. Jonathan Liebenau of the London School of Economics. In that study, titled “London: Digital City On The Rise,” we showed that London’s tech/info performance compared favorably with the other two major global tech hubs, New York and San Francisco/Silicon Valley.^{^[i]} Our analysis ran through 2013.

In this brief note, I update some of the earlier results to include 2014. As before, I focus on what I call the tech/info economy, rather than the conventional tech sector. The tech/info economy has three legs—Internet, telecom, and content. The first leg, Internet, includes companies such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other search, social media, and cloud companies. The second leg, telecom, includes household names such as BT and Verizon, as well as global companies such as Level 3 Communications and Akamai. The third leg, content, includes television, movies, music, games, and publishing companies, as well as new giants such as Netflix.

The reason for combining the three legs into one group is that their boundaries have become increasingly permeable. Internet companies provide more and more telecom-like services directly, as well as hosting and creating content. Many telecom companies are content producers as well. Meanwhile, content companies have seen more and more of their content be delivered by the Internet, leading them to often be major employers of tech workers. (The exact definition of the tech/info sector is found in the 2014 paper.)

Here are some of the key results of the update:

Since 2010, when David Cameron took office, London tech/info employment has risen by 23%. That compares favorably to New York City’s 16% tech/info gain for the same period. However, tech/info employment in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley region rose by 31% over the same period.^{^[ii]}
The top three regions for tech/info employment in the United Kingdom are London, the South East (including Oxford) and the East (including Cambridge). Together the combined London-East-South East regions employ more tech/info workers than California (808,000 tech/info workers versus 721,000 tech/info workers in California as of 2014). Since 2010, tech/info employment in the combined London-East-South East regions grew by 21%, compared to 15% for California. ^{^[iii]}
Outside of the combined London-East-South East regions, tech/info employment has grown by only 2% since 2010 (see chart below). Tech/info employment in the United Kingdom has become increasingly concentrated since 2010.

Endnotes

^{^[i]} Michael Mandel and Jonathan Liebenau, “London: Digital City on the Rise,” South Mountain Economics LLC, 2014. https://southmountaineconomics.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/london-digital-city-on-the-rise.pdf

^{^[ii]} For this comparison, I am comparing London with New York City and the combined San Francisco/San Jose metropolitan statistical areas. My analysis does not include the computer and electronic product manufacturing industry, which employs a substantial number of people in California but is not growing.

^{^[iii]} As previously noted, these figures do not include the computer and electronics products manufacturing industry in California. Add in this industry would increase the size of employment, but lower the growth rate.

Download “2015.04-Mandel_London-Shines-in-Tech-Info-Employment.pdf”

Don’t Ban Zero-Rating in India

Posted on April 23, 2015September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Zero-rating – a practice where mobile operators provide select Internet content for free – is coming under heavy fire in India. Indeed the Indian government is likely to ban the practice as early as next month. But given that zero-rating could enable tremendous social and economic opportunity to developing countries like India, banning it now would be a mistake.

Widespread media attention has put India’s approach to Internet regulation and “net neutrality” into the global spotlight. It started with a report issued last month from their telecommunications regulator (TRAI) asking for public comments on how to regulate “over-the-top” content offering from mobile providers. A large public outpouring of information (and misinformation) ensued, leading one Indian Member of Parliament to write, “TRAI cannot control the internet by charging separately for services that are created by the very people who believe in the idea of free access to information and knowledge.”

Already several companies providing content through zero-rating programs have backed out over the backlash, lest they be charged with enabling Internet discrimination. Adding more fuel to the fire, this week a group of Indian tech entrepreneurs sent a letter to India’s Prime Minister arguing that zero-rating could stunt economic growth as Internet start-ups are unable to compete with free content. “These practices, if allowed, will exclude promising startups from the Internet and end our dream of seeing them flourish,” they said.

It’s unlikely, however, that zero rating will crush anyone’s dreams. In fact, as we’ve recently argued in our paper “Zero-Rating: Kick-Starting Internet Ecosystems in Developing Countries,” zero-rating could be a powerful vehicle for economic growth and prosperity in countries like India, where large segments of the population aren’t online.

In the developing world, zero-rating has the potential to jumpstart local Internet ecosystems. Consumers that have previously used up their monthly data allotments on sites like Google, Twitter, and Facebook could now use them instead to surf local content. Moreover, people who are currently not connected to the Internet may have a stronger incentive to sign up for a monthly data plan, seeing a higher value in accessing the Internet. The larger customer base for local content would then provide a greater incentive for tech entrepreneurs to invest in turning their ideas into the latest online site or service. As more local content becomes available, a resulting boost in local demand will follow in a virtuous economic feedback loop.

Consider, for example, a local business collecting agricultural prices across a poor country that would like to post them online. Such data could be extremely valuable for the country’s farmers, who stand to benefit greatly from access to better information. Yet if there are too few farmers or other consumers of this data online, no one has an incentive to collect the data and create an online platform. Yet if offerings such as zero-rating encouraged more farmers to get connected, this business could get off the ground – and more could follow – enabling locally-driven economic growth.

Although many zero-rating programs are relatively new, early results are promising. Countries across the globe, from the Philippines to Egypt, and in sub-Saharan Africa, have seen large increases in connectivity alongside zero-rating offerings. And perhaps most importantly, there is no evidence that zero-rating has caused any economic damage in underserved areas with low connectivity.

India’s politicians and regulators would be well-served to see zero-rating as an opportunity to increase local business potential, not as a threat to it. Local businesses could even use Twitter, Google, and Facebook to advertise their services, as part of the local Internet ecosystem.

Our report instead proposes guiding principles for zero-rating. For example, such offerings should be non-exclusive, to guard against anti-competitive behavior across mobile operators, and zero-rating programs should be regularly evaluated. These principles would promote transparency and accountability, and most importantly, increase public trust.

Of course, zero-rating is not a silver bullet for dispelling inequality or eradicating poverty. But it is an important part of a pro-growth strategy that will boost local economies. It could make the difference between a would-be Internet entrepreneur creating new apps for local services and data or going to another country with higher connectivity.

That’s why banning zero-rating in India now would be a mistake. The best path forward for India’s Internet economy is to promote policies that enable its citizens and businesses to fully participate in the data-driven economy. That means keeping every pathway to future global growth, opportunity, and prosperity open, including zero-rating.

PPI Returns from 2015 Digital Trade Mission to Europe

Posted on April 15, 2015September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Dear Friend,

We’re just back from Europe, where last week PPI led a bipartisan delegation of Congressional staff on a four-day swing through three capitals: London, Brussels and Berlin. Our goal was twofold: 1) to learn more about the European Union’s ambitious plan to create a “digital single market” and, 2) to press PPI’s case for moving digital trade from the periphery to the center of the transatlantic agenda.

Why is this so important? Consider these facts:

The free movement of data raises the productivity of businesses and reduces trade costs, creating jobs and growth on both sides of the Atlantic.
US/EU cross-border data flows are by far the highest in the world, 50 percent more than between the United States and Asia.
America runs a large trade surplus in services, of which 61 percent are delivered digitally.
The Internet is becoming a powerful export platform for small enterprises, connecting them to global customers at low cost.

As PPI has documented in a series of groundbreaking reports, digital innovation and commerce are increasingly driving economic investment and growth in America and Europe. We believe the transatlantic partners share a common interest in ensuring that digital trade enjoys the same legal protections as trade in physical goods and services. Instead of joining forces to extend free trade principles to digital commerce, however, Europe and America are embroiled in a raft of disputes that threaten to erect barriers to cross-border data flows.

Such disputes, for example, involve calls for data localization, for national or European clouds, for taxing data flows and for imposing stringent privacy or data protection rules on businesses. Right now, the European Court of Justice is considering a challenge to the “safe harbor” rules that have allowed US tech companies to operate in Europe. In addition, new tensions have arisen around issues of copyright protection, “platform competition,” tax avoidance and many core provisions of the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP).

As you probably know, PPI has long been a catalyst for transatlantic dialogue, going back to the Clinton-Blair “Third Way” conversations we helped to launch in the 1990s. Over the last four years, our work in Europe has focused on reviving transatlantic economic cooperation, with a particular emphasis on the rise of data-driven innovation and growth. At a time when authoritarian countries seek to limit the free flow of information, we think it’s crucial that the Western democracies work together to prevent the balkanization of the Internet and defend free digital trade.

That’s why we organized this second “Digital Trade Study Group”—a bipartisan group of 12 senior House and Senate staffers, whose bosses have oversight of issues related to trade, digital commerce, copyright, intellectual property, privacy, cyber security, and communications and technology. (We took the first such group to Europe in April 2014). Last week’s trip featured a productive round of high-level talks with prominent political, business, policy and media leaders.

Here are the highlights:

In London, our traveling party met with Daniel Korski, Special Advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron, and Guy Levin, formerly special advisor to Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, to discuss UK technology policy. As Michael Mandel, PPI’s chief economic strategist, has documented, London has emerged as one of the world’s premier centers for tech entrepreneurship.
Vanessa Houlder, who covers economics for the Financial Times, briefed our group on the Cameron government’s controversial new “diverted profits tax.” Aimed ostensibly at discouraging tax avoidance, it slaps a 25 percent tax on the local profits of U.S. and other foreign companies operating in the UK, and has been dubbed the “Google tax” by detractors.
Also in London, PPI released a new policy brief by Mandel, Taxing Intangibles: The Law of Unintended Consequences. It notes that digitized information differs from physical goods and services in that it can be duplicated at negligible cost and used by different consumers at once. As such, Mandel argues, it makes little sense to tax this intangible knowledge as one would a car or the provision of a unique service. In fact, new proposals for taxing intangibles will undermine global growth and thus be self-defeating, the report argues.
In Brussels, two officials of the European Commission’s DG Connect unit, Eric Peters, Deputy Head of the Single Market Unit and Tamas Kenessey, Legal Officer, briefed the group. The Digital Single Market, they stressed, is the EU’s top priority. It would enable tech companies that start in one of the Union’s 28 countries to grow to continental scale, and speed the onset of what we call the “Internet of Things.”
Over dinner, the Digital Trade Study Group heard from Ken Propp, Legal Counsel with the US Mission to the EU, and Paul Hofheinz, President of the Lisbon Council, PPI’s think tank partner in Brussels. The discussion centered on the headwinds T-TIP has encountered and political differences within the EU on digital policy.
Then it was on to Berlin, for lunch with two leading Green Party officials, Konstantin von Notz, a Member of the German Bundestag, and Dieter Janacek, the party’s spokesman on economic issues. The Greens are strong backers of Europe’s Data Protection Regulation, which our speakers noted reflects Germany’s unhappy experience with secret police agencies of the past. Joining us for dinner was Torsten Riecke, an international correspondent for Handelsblatt, who gave our group an insider’s perspective of German domestic politics, as well as its increasingly central role in European politics. The next morning, we drilled deeper into German concerns about data protection and privacy with Marcus Loning of the Stiftung Neue Verantwortung and former Free Democratic Party Member of the German Bundestag.
Our group received an insightful briefing on Industrie 4.0—Germany’s equivalent of the “Internet of Things.” As explained by Boris Petschulat, Deputy Director General at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs & Energy, Industrie 4.0 seeks to digitize production without disrupting its finely honed industrial export machine.
We paid a visit to the Federal Association of German Newspaper and Magazine Publishers, which has been battling tech companies, especially Google, over copyrightand content issues. A lively debate ensued with Managing Director Christoph Fiedler and Christoph Keese, Vice President of the Axel Springer publishing empire. For more on this important subject, check out another just-released policy brief by Mandel, Copyright in the Digital Age: Key Economic Issues.
Thomas Jarzombek, a member of the German Bundestag, who sits on the committee responsible for the digital agenda, elaborated on the German government’s efforts to build a digital infrastructure and nurture a more entrepreneurial, start-up culture.
We finished our mission at the US Embassy in Berlin, where Ambassador John Emerson, a longtime PPI friend, offered a wide-ranging and insightful perspective on US-German relations.

PPI’s Digital Trade Study Group excursions to Europe serve two important purposes. First, they enable key Congressional staff from both parties to get a better understanding of European views on innovation policy, T-TIP, digital trade, privacy, copyright and other interests of mutual concern and transmit that knowledge to Members of Congress. Second, they underscore to our European friends the importance Congress attaches to transatlantic commerce in general and to data trade specifically.

This year’s mission advanced both of these goals. And it added important new dimensions to the extensive network of European political leaders, industry professionals, and policy analysts that PPI has built over the years. As always, I welcome any feedback you may have.

Sincerely,

Will Marshall
PPI President

Washington Post: Setting the record straight on a net neutrality fact check

Posted on March 25, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Washington Post today set the record straight regarding a fact check it made in January involving a PPI policy report. Since the fact check was published, it has been widely misused by net neutrality proponents to discredit the report, which found that reclassification of the Internet as a public utility under Title II would pass millions of dollars in taxes and fees on to consumers.

The Fact Checker awarded Three Pinocchios to widely-cited claims that the FCC reclassification would cost $15 billion a year in new taxes and fees. The figure originated from a December 2014 report by the left-leaning Progressive Policy Institute, which calculated the worst-case scenario of all possible local and state telecommunications fees and taxes that could be levied on Internet services. After the report was published, Congress renewed the Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA), which prohibits state and local governments from levying new taxes on Internet access. So researchers published an update with state and local telecom fees, and modified the figure to $11 billion. It was noted in a footnote of a follow-up an article and was not readily available to average readers not following the debate.

Since the fact check published, some net neutrality proponents misquoted it on social media, either attributing the Pinocchios to PPI or to the $11 billion figure.

Read the article in its entirety at the Washington Post.

Press Release: PPI Statement On FCC Open Internet Order Release

Posted on March 12, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI Statement On FCC Open Internet Order Release

Time for Congress to Act

WASHINGTON—Dr. Michael Mandel, Chief Economic Strategist of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), today released the following statement after the FCC published the Open Internet order:

“Today, the FCC released the 400 page text of its Open Internet order. From the economic perspective, it’s distressing that the Commission has decided to impose this many new regulations on a technologically dynamic and innovative sector that has been propelling growth. From the political perspective, it’s equally distressing that Americans are only seeing this order after the Commission approved it, showing a lack of transparency. And from the common sense perspective, the FCC’s promise to forbear from rate regulation is total nonsense, given all the other rules the Commission has pledged to enforce in its order.

“We all believe that having an open internet is important, but the FCC has picked the wrong approach. We urge Congress to pass a set of open internet rules that don’t take us back in time.”

###

Read PPI’s previous work on this issue:

The Truth Behind The FCC’s “Fact Sheet” by Hal Singer
The Best Path Forward on Net Neutrality by Hal Singer and Bob Litan
Outdated Regulations Will Make Consumers Pay More for Broadband by Hal Singer and Bob Litan
One last chance to save the Internet by Ev Ehrlich
The Wrong Way to Enact The Wrong Policy — The FCC’s No Good, Very Bad Day by Ev Ehrlich

PPI Statement On FCC Net Neutrality Vote: FCC Shouldn’t Have the Last Word

Posted on February 27, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Will Marshall, President of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), today released the following statement after the FCC voted in favor of Chairman Wheeler’s Open Internet rules to reclassify the Internet as a public utility:

“The FCC’s decision today to impose outmoded telephone regulation on the Internet is a bad call, substantively and politically.

“In the first instance, there is no evidence of systemic misconduct that would justify dramatically expanding the FCC’s power to regulate the Internet. In a classic case of fixing something that ain’t broke, the FCC has reached for the biggest possible hammer to deal with abuses that have yet to happen.

“In embracing preemptive regulation, the FCC also reverses the ‘light touch’ approach to Internet oversight the Clinton administration pioneered two decades ago. Such regulatory humility enabled the Internet’s exponential growth as a platform for digital innovation and competition. As PPI has documented, the communications boom is a prime catalyst of U.S. growth and has made America the world’s leader in digital innovation and trade.

“There is nothing ‘progressive’ about the FCC’s backsliding to common carrier rules dating back to the 1930s. Also troubling is its lack of transparency — the 317-page rule it approved has not yet been made public. Decisions this important to U.S. jobs, growth, and competitiveness ought to be made by Congress, following open democratic deliberation and debate.

“PPI therefore urges lawmakers from both parties to collaborate in crafting legislation that would do what the FCC has failed to do: Assure a free and open Internet without resorting to heavy-handed regulation that could inhibit investment and innovation in a fiercely competitive digital sector.”

Ehrlich: The Wrong Way to Enact The Wrong Policy — The FCC’s No Good, Very Bad Day

Posted on February 27, 2015September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

“This is no more a plan to regulate the Internet than the First Amendment is a plan to regulate free speech,” said Federal Communications Commission Chair Tom Wheeler, whereupon he cast the deciding vote for the most far-reaching plan ever developed to regulate the Internet. Let’s hope he isn’t in charge of the First Amendment, too.

As a veteran of the Clinton Administration, whose policy of light regulation set the stage for today’s burgeoning Internet, Wheeler’s decision is a disappointment, to say the least. This Administration – an administration that in almost every other aspect I support – is shackling the Internet in a regulatory straitjacket designed for the monopoly phone system eight decades ago in order to implement “net neutrality.” It isn’t going to be a very good fit.

Neutrality is the idea doctrine that everything on the Internet should travel at the same speed, whether it’s a high-definition concert or video game, a signal from a remote heart monitor, an email to Aunt Tilly, or a video of a cat playing the xylophone. Advocates prefer this “one size fits all” approach to letting the market decide how price and quality should be lined up, much the same way Sears does when it offers the consumer “good,” “better,” and “best.”

But advocates – often paid by the big Internet sites who like the Internet just like it is, thanks – have conflated this issue and used language as surreal as Wheeler’s, claiming this market-based process is equivalent to letting service providers throttle or impede the traffic they don’t like, or asserting that “priority” service will kill the innovative Internet, as if first class travel killed air travel or Priority Mail ended daily delivery to the home.

But it’s one thing to implement a mistaken policy. It’s even worse to do so in a mistaken way. Right now, as we speak, there is a bipartisan effort underway in the Congress that would enact the core protections of “neutrality,” but would do so by statute, period, full stop, as opposed to the long and tortuous road today’s decision will find itself on when it is challenged (and probably overturned) in the Courts.

The difference is important. Aside from eliminating the possibility of legal challenge, The Congressional route would eliminate the regulatory baggage that today’s “reclassification” potentially allows. For example, the FCC can force a provider of a phone-like service to offer their infrastructure to competitors at government-reviewed prices, and can even regulate prices generally. Chairman Wheeler says the FCC will “forebear” these extreme regulatory prerogatives, but if he’s serious about that, then why not embrace a Congressional law that makes that clear?

What I fear, and fear greatly, that the advocates for “reclassifying” the Internet as a phone-like service really want more than “net neutrality” – they want the Internet to be a public utility for all purposes. After all, they might argue – and some have, calling on us to emulate failed public-sector Internets in places like Australia – the Internet is just so damned important that it needs to be under public control.

Yes, the Internet is important. So is food, but we let farmers grow it. And the Internet is not at all like public utilities we’ve known, like electricity and the old phone system. The Internet is not a series of “dumb pipes” that blindly carry content the way the phone system was a “dumb system” that just closed circuits or “dumb wires” carried electricity. It’s a complex system that requires management and that doesn’t tolerate “busy signals” or “brown outs” if there’s overload.

But more importantly, unlike electricity or phones, there are many ways to provide broadband connectivity in the market today. Virtually every household in America now can receive broadband from three or four sources – from cable systems, from fiber or, when fiber isn’t there, from ever-improving DSL over the old phone lines, from mobile sources (in which we are the world’s leader), or from satellite, often the last alternative, but usually an acceptable one.

What the “public utility” view really argues is that the government should pick one of these, or some combination of these, to meet our broadband needs rather than letting this competition play itself out, which is something like deciding the winner of a ballgame in the middle of the second inning. It’s this very “platform competition” that has allowed the U.S. to vault past most of our industrialized competitors, certainly those that don’t crowd their populations into cramped apartment blocks that are cheap to wire. Is that what we, as Democrats, really want?

There’s still time to adopt a legislative compromise, achieve the “neutrality” objective, and put the issue to bed for good. And if the making of sound policy doesn’t move my Democratic friends, consider this: A future Republican President is elected and announces that the FCC will change course and go back to the framework first laid out by President Clinton. Without a statute in place, there is nothing to prevent President Jeb, Rand, Ben, or whomever from putting net neutrality on the shelf and leaving the Internet without even the most basic consumer protections most would agree are necessary.

And during the debates leading up to that election, President Rick or Rick or Carly will look over at Secretary Clinton and ask if the Clinton Administration made a mistake when it championed the 1996 Telecommunications Act and brought over a trillion dollars of investment in to build the Internet.

If good policy doesn’t move you to accept the legislative solution, perhaps that unfortunate political outcome will.

The Obama Trade Agenda: Five Things for Progressives to Like

Posted on February 26, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama went all in on international trade.

The Administration has already been aggressively pursuing the most ambitious set of trade agreements in decades—including potentially groundbreaking deals with 11 Asian-Pacific countries (the Trans Pacific Partnership, or TPP), and the European Union (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or T-TIP), as well as agreements in key sectors like services, information technology, and environmental products.

Now, to set the stage for eventual Congressional approval for these deals, the President has launched an Administration-wide effort to obtain Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) from Congress. Under TPA, Congress sets detailed priorities and extensive consultation requirements for U.S. trade negotiators, and agrees to follow special expedited procedures for agreements that meet these rules.

Congressional Republicans largely support TPA and the Administration’s trade agenda. There is less support, however, among Congressional Democrats, many of whom have doubts about new trade deals. And, because trade has long been a difficult political issue, it’s quite tempting for these trade skeptics to readily side with those who have consistently opposed trade agreements.

Download “2015.02-Gerwin_The-Obama-Free-Trade-Agenda”

Reuters: One last chance to save the Internet – from the FCC

Posted on February 25, 2015 by The Progressive Policy Institute

As the Federal Communications Commission readies new net-neutrality rules this week, congressional Democrats face a choice: Should they work with the Republicans who control Congress to help pass new rules, or should they stay on the sidelines and leave the matter to a volatile regulatory process, subject to possible undoing in the courts?

I disagree with neutrality — the idea that everything on the Internet should travel at the same speed, whether it’s the remote monitoring of a cardiac device or a video of a cat. But both critics and advocates of neutrality would likely agree that a new law is the best way to set new policy — not regulatory decrees.

Let’s start with some history. The Communications Act of 1934 says phone companies are like public utilities and should be strongly regulated. But the 1996 Telecommunications Act, championed by President Bill Clinton, labeled the Internet as an “information service” that should be lightly regulated. That seems like a good decision: The Internet has grown spectacularly in this unregulated format.

But last month, Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, proposed treating the Internet like a public utility, run for the public good. He said that the Web should be regulated much like the Ma Bell telephone companies of generations ago. Why this sudden turnaround?

Continue reading at Reuters.

The Hill: A bipartisan bill is the best way to net neutrality

Posted on February 25, 2015September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

In a letter to the editor of The Hill today, PPI Executive Director Lindsay Lewis argues for Congress to address net neutrality:

Why not simply bypass the FCC process, which seems sadly divided on partisan lines in any event, and pass stronger bipartisan net neutrality rules through the ordinary legislative process? That would eliminate any concerns about a “tainted process” and bring other benefits as well.

Read the piece in its entirety on The Hill.