I Can Name That Tune In Five Notes

Matt Stoller spends a little too much time kvetching about Mike McCurry and not enough time responding to the lame asshattery coming from the anti-Internet telecom companies. Eventually, he gets around to saying what needs to be said:

Now, in their ad campaigns, the telecoms are portraying something very different. They are trying to pretend that they don't want government regulating the internet. In fact, they just want to make sure that the rules that have worked for thirty years are stripped away so they can control it.

This was on full display at a lobbyist sponsored event I attended yesterday put on for community groups. They asked me not to record it so I don't have verbatim transcripts, but let's just say it was a bunch of bad faith in fancy suits. Company flacks scaremongered about telemedicine and how it can't be reliably delivered unless you get rid of network neutrality and allow phone companies to control the innards of the internet. They talked about how the government will somehow destroy the internet (even though the government did, you know, build the internet). They implied that there will be no parental controls if Congress doesn't get rid of net neutrality. They said if they don't get their way 'internet freedom will vanish forever'. They said that the government doesn't regulate the internet yet you shouldn't worry because under their plan the FCC has authority to protect consumers from abusive behavior by telecoms on the internet, as if that's not a regulation.

The part of this that incenses me, of course, is the ongoing bullshit about how telemedicine supposedly can't be reliably delivered unless you get rid of "net neutrality" (or as I would prefer we called it, common carrier regulations). That is complete, unutterably noxious bullshit.

We took great pains to design a differentiated services architecture for the Internet over ten years ago, explicitly for the purpose of enabling services like telemedicine and distance learning. The equipment vendors that make the all the gear these companies buy have implemented differentiated services in their routers and other switching gear. The telecom companies use differentiated services within their own networks routinely, so I don't want to hear any more bullshit about it being unproven tech. They've been intentionally refusing to make differentiated services available at retail, and now they want you to believe they can't do it unless you release them from common carrier regulations.

This all reminds me of the great California energy deregulation debate. You remember that, right? You remember how the campaign for Proposition 9, which would have forced the bad deregulation system back into the legislature, was opposed by a vast array of astroturf groups that tried very hard to make it sound like it would have done the exact opposite? It went down in flames, and two years later we were suffering from rolling blackouts as a direct result. The energy industry in California is still a disaster for consumers, and we could have avoided it all if we had just listened to the experts and regulated the industry sensibly. We could have had a highly competitive market in energy distribution, but we succumbed to coordinated propaganda campaign and we believed a pack of lies about what we were doing, which was sold to us by greedy tools who never had to bear any responsibilty or consequences for it.

It's happening all over again with telecommunication.