Net neutrality bonanza for lawyers

Peter Huber has an article in Forbes about how net neutrality's primary beneficiaries will be lawyers like himself. The funny thing about our little two-word catch-phrase is that...

It will be a 2 million-word law by the time Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and the courts are done with it. Grand principles always end up as spaghetti in this industry, because they aim to regulate networks that are far more complicated than anything you have ever seen heaped up beside an amusing little glass of chianti.

As with everything in politics, it all comes back to constituencies, which is a noble-sounding word for special interest groups. It should not be surprising that the majority of those arguing for neutrality are on the political left -- specifically, Congressional Democrats, one of whose largest constituencies is the bar.

Importantly, Huber points out the companies who are arguing for "neutrality" are already using decidedly non-neutral means for making sure their traffic gets to you quickly:

The network that's lighting your screen today isn't neutral at all. Google, Amazon [...] Citicorp--all pay a privately negotiated price for better connections from their huge banks of servers to the Internet. What they get are fast connections from their premises--and for just their content--to one of the several dozen "network access points" that channel data into the Internet's sprawling, ultrahigh-speed backbone.

Then they buy still more speed--for their content and no one else's--from companies like Akamai. Akamai provides neutrality-busting service. The company has deployed a global array of servers that cache content supplied by its customers so that it's sitting out there when it's needed, much closer to the people who need it.

This is important to point this out, if one is prone to making pro-neutrality arguments on the basis of fairness. The companies arguing most loudly for net neutrality are those who can afford to supersede it. In essence, their argument for neutrality is a business proposition -- neutrality will hamstring potential competitors while the big guys like Google zoom right past.

Now, to be clear, I think these companies should use any and all means to make their products more attractive. Of course they should be able to buy faster delivery systems like Akamai. It benefits consumers, it drives novel technology, it makes the web better for those who use their services.

The problem is, these companies don't believe that others should enjoy such advantages.

(h/t Adam Thierer)

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Here is a bit more from Adam about how new laws turn into massive employment opportunities for lawyers. He studies the effect of our last big telecoms law, from 1996:

[...] let's take a quick tally of the paperwork burden the FCC managed to churn out in just three major "competition" rules it issued in an attempt to implement the Telecom Act [...]

1,575 pages and 6,770 footnotes worth of regulation in just three orders [...]

this was all implemented following the passage of a bill (The Telecom Act) that was supposed to be deregulatory in character [...]

Lawyers, in particular, did quite well thanks to the FCC's endless stream of litigation-prone rulemakings during the 1996-2003 period. Greg Sidak of Georgetown University Law School found that the number of telecom lawyers--as measured by membership in the Federal Communications Bar Association--grew by a stunning 73 percent in the late 1990s. That was largely driven by a 37 percent hike in FCC spending and a tripling of the number of pages of regulations in the FCC Record in the post-Telecom Act period. [emphasis in the original]

Now, imagine if we mobilized that sort of talent to, you know, build new networks. Read the whole thing.

Comments

[Jim Lippard]

"Now, imagine if we mobilized that sort of talent to, you know, build new networks."

Networks built by lawyers? Shudder...

[mark]

It's an outright lie by the the telecoms that abolishing net neutrality is necessary to improve the Internet. In countries like South Korea and Japan, they have much faster and better internet connections than we do (like 100 mbps and more), and they have net neutrality as well other measures to protect consumers and competition. In fact, the only reason we supposedly "need" net neutrality for things like video service is because the AT&T, Verizon,etc. don't want to actually upgrade their networks, which is why the whole thing's a scam.*

I notice people say, well it's their network, so can't they do whatever they want with it? The implication is that the phone companies built it all by themselves with their money. Well, it was started with tax-payer's dollars (darpanet), and the government gave the telcos a large amount of money (from us) to build it.* You could even say companies like AT&T are government-sponsored monopolies. So it's only logical the public has a say in this, it's not "their" network. The problem is Republicans want it both ways, they want to give their business buddies billions of dollars in taxpayer's money, but then they want them to be able to do whatever they want with no oversight.

Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, has studied this issue and strongly supports net neutrality. Of course he's more qualified than Bill Gates, who didn't invent the internet or (arguably) the "innovations" of Microsoft. The most these "experts" seem to say are more vague statements like "Well anything that hampers innovation is bad.. We need an open internet" (Well, of course). It almost leads one to believe either they weren't really talking about net neutrality, or it was mentioned to them and they just said that without looking into it, it was out of context.

*please see:
www.newnetworks.com
www.teletruth.org
These sites document many telco abuses, including how in the 90s they were given $200 billion from taxpayers on the condition they would roll our high-speed fiber optic networks with speeds of at least 45 mbps both ways. They then however kept the money and reneged on their promise. This is detailed in the book "The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal" but also on the sites above. The CEOs won while the rest of us lost.

[mark]

What Amazon.com is doing doesn't seem to be violating net neutrality at all. Under the present system you're free to pay extra for faster connections. I read Google (for all its T3 connections) pays about $2 billion for its access. Once the packets are out of Akambai's servers and onto private networks, they go the same as everyone else's. It would be violating net neutrality if Amazon.com paid AT&T to give its packets priority over others. Even if Amazon.com were, that would only make it a hypocrite, rather than make a case against net neutrality.

[MnZ]

"In countries like South Korea and Japan, they have much faster and better internet connections than we do (like 100 mbps and more), and they have net neutrality as well other measures to protect consumers and competition."

Mark, Mark, Mark, google: South Korea VoIP. You will discover that you are wrong.

"In fact, the only reason we supposedly "need" net neutrality for things like video service is because the AT&T, Verizon,etc. don't want to actually upgrade their networks, which is why the whole thing's a scam."

Mark, HDTV streams are about 20 Mbps. Now, suppose that you have a small city with 50,000 televisions. Now, multiply the two together.

In other words, a small city needs a 1 TERA bit per second connection to the outside world. Sorry, but the technology won't be there for a long, long time. No amount of investment by Verizon et al. will change that.