Everybody’s a Critic on U.S. Broadband Policy at Silicon Valley Emerging Communications Event

On paper, the broadband plan is a “major step in the right direction,” but the FCC’s “impressive list of some 60 individual proceedings” following up on the recommendations is falling short of what’s needed “to meet the stated ambitions” of Chairman Julius Genachowski and the other commissioners, said Rick Whitt, Google managing counsel for telecom media policy. Some of the proceedings “are completely stalled out at the agency,” he said. And “we'll have to see” whether whatever comes out of the commission is “picked apart, proceeding by proceeding” in court challenges to its legal authority to act, Whitt said.

The “unbundling” and “open access” remedies implied by the plan’s findings on broadband competition were missing, Whitt said. It’s great to promise 500 MHz of additional spectrum by 2020 for high-speed access,” but where does it come from?” he asked. “The commission isn’t entirely clear about that.” And “we're not seeing enough strong support” from federal policymakers for making additional unlicensed spectrum available, Whitt said.

The elephant in the room is that “crushing monopolies” are acting as “effectively a bottleneck for the future of computing,” said Susan Crawford, a Cardozo Law School professor who was a White House technology-policy official after helping run the Obama FCC transition. The dominant service providers are “not evil,” simply “very powerful natural monopolies” resulting from the huge upfront capital spending needed for networks of significant size, she said. “Competition isn’t going to work” to produce pervasive broadband with no discrimination among online businesses, Crawford said. Title II regulation is “just appropriate,” in line with traditional U.S. policy for “basic communications that doesn’t pick winners and losers,” she said.

DSL and 4G can’t compete with higher-bandwidth cable, which is grabbing more than 90 percent of U.S. broadband subscription signups, Crawford said, previewing themes in a book to be published next year, The Big Squeeze. The financial incentives of AT&T and Verizon compel them to “cherry pick” wealthy neighborhoods and not to build out fiber, Crawford said. And those carriers’ wireless dominance is “not constrained by competition,” she said.

The resulting bandwidth limitations will constrain technologies such as real-time video and large-scale data distribution and visualization, Crawford said. The usage-based billing coming in wireless is “a tremendous threat to any over-the-top service,” she said. In sum, “the next Facebook, the next Google, will not come from the United States,” the way things are going, Crawford said. “They will come from Europe or Asia,” where she said government industrial policies are getting broadband developed in a way that isn’t happening in this country. “There is a role for government,” Crawford said. “Technology doesn’t just appear. You have to control the gatekeepers."

The push to treat the Internet like a utility has been pursued not in an express, overarching campaign but “consciously or unconsciously” in “individual fights,” said Larry Downes of TechFreedom: net neutrality and now search neutrality, takeovers like those of NBCUniversal and T-Mobile, “privacy panics,” data roaming and the broadband plan. Public utilities have considerable benefits, but they don’t suit the digital communications model -- driven by Moore’s and Metcalfe’s laws -- at all, he said. The black rotary phone was the “apex” of telecom as public utility, Downes said, and the sad fate of the promising technology of broadband over power lines is negative confirmation.