Screaming Penguin

Brodsky@TPMCafe: A couple of days ago, I wrote about an amendment in the House Commerce Committee that will go a long way to determining the future of the Internet. The vote is over, and the amendment from Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and others to protect the Internet and preserve openness and innovation lost. The vote was 22-34. That's the bad news. The good news is that, considering the lobbying power of the combined cable and telephone industry lobbying, losing by this little is a good sign. It's better than we did at subcommittee. There is some recognition that the grass roots efforts that started relatively late in the game, combined with some lobbying by e-commerce companies, is starting to have an effect. We've probably got a couple of weeks before the full telecom bill goes to the House floor. (As I write this, the final vote hasn't happened yet, but there's no doubt the Committee will approve the bill.) This turned, unfortunately, into a partisan fight. Only one courageous Republican, Heather Wilson of New Mexico, voted in favor of the amendment. These Democrats left the reservation: Ed Towns of New York, Bobby Rush of Illinois, Al Wynn of Maryland, Gene Green of Texas and Charlie Gonzales of Texas. There are other developments. The House Judiciary Committee's special Telecom Task Force had a hearing on the issue the other day, and was deeply concerned about the issue. And there is legislation in the Senate that could also get serious consideration. Update: The bill passed 42-12, but not before AT&T got off its final counterattack, just before passage around 7 p.m. In the empty room, right before final passage, Gonzales, from the home town of AT&T, San Antonio, offered an amendment to require the FCC to make a study "competition in the Internet world," particularly what he called "special arrangements" between Web sites and other companies. It would be similar, he said, to the type of tie-in arrangements that proponents of Net Neutrality said will exist with telephone companies favoring content. Such arrangements between Web sites and others, Gonzales says, would make it hard for a "garage-bases startup" to make a go of it. Citing an article from Southwest Airlines' magazine, he noted that Google gets revenue from ads tied to searches and that Yahoo is "fighting for deals." Democrats were flabbergasted. Eshoo, who represents Silicon Valley, said she was "baffled by the amendment, because Gonzales, who earlier said he was opposed to regulating the Internet. This, she said, "is about regulating search engines." Markey said he was preparing an amendment to expand the study to include the top five telephone companies and top five cable operators, but didn't get to offer it. The Gonzales amendment was defeated 11-43, but Google, and Yahoo! and the others should be on notice. This isn't over. They are squarely in the gunsights.

Kevin Drum has been trying to wrap his head around this issue, and I admit that it is confusing and not entirely clear what the problem here is. I am also kind of regretful that I have not posted more on this issue, so let me lay out exactly what is going on here. 1. How the Internet works. ISPs each have their own network. These networks have different capacities over different areas. In order for ISPs to talk to each other, they get together at places like MAE East and establish peering agreements. These provide for traffic to move from one network to another, and sometimes for one network to carry anothers traffic if one ISP has a slow or no link from one point to another, while another ISP has a good link over that area. In this way, somewhere in the background, there already is "tiered" internet service. If you are on Earthlink, it is entirely possible that Earthlink only has a 45mb connection to the UUNet network, while they have a 100mb connection to the Level3 network, so it is possible that traffic could be worse. Moreover, no one is going to talk badly about content providers establishing peering or hosting agreements with ISPs. If News Corp wants to do video on demand, the cheapest was to get that bandwidth to Comcast subscribers would be to colocate a datastore on the Comcast network, rather than work through the peering system. 2. How the Internet DOESN'T work. There is no traffic throttling at these peering points. Moreover, there is no throttling on last-mile connections. You get a 3mb cable modem or a 6mb DSL line and you get 3mb or 6mb unregulated access to the network. If your ISP has a 45mb link to another network and 50 people trying to download from it, each of those people will only get 150kb download. However, nobody ever imposes at the last mile connection that "You can download at 3mb from our "approved" (read: they pay us) providers, but you will NEVER get more than 150k from our "non-approved" providers. That 3mb is yours to use however you will at whatever the network topology will support. This is, not unlike the DMCA and other bad laws, in effect about your right to do what you want with something you paid for. If it is your PSP or Lexmark Printer or Dell Laptop in the DMCA cases, it is your internet connection and bandwidth services here. Larry Lessig says "Code is Law"; Mitch Kapor says "Architecture is Politics"; this is the politics of our network architecture. The Internet was built by a bunch of free-wheeling hippies and its architecture reflects that political sense. If we want the net to remain what it is, we need to project that political sense into the the national political realm. Now.