Rep. Ed Markey’s prepared statement on net neutrality:
Good Afternoon. Tomorrow the Committee will take a historic vote. At stake, is the fate of the Internet as we know it.
Tomorrow, I will be offering a “Network Neutrality” amendment, cosponsored by Mr. Boucher, Ms. Eshoo, and Mr. Inslee, to preserve the Internet and its open, non-discriminatory nature. Since the Subcommittee vote, dozens of web blogs have started talking about this issue. A broad coalition has launched web campaigns, such as www.savetheinternet.com, and www.dontmesswiththenet.com. These coalitions are diverse and growing hourly. They include leading Internet companies such as Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon, as well as entrepreneurs, small businesses, consumer groups, Common Cause, Gun Owners of America, the National Religious Broadcasters, moveon.org, the ACLU, and thousands of concerned citizens. I welcome the support of the Internet community in our legislative efforts.
The reason for the heightened interest is that tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of thousands of American businesses use and rely upon the Internet every day. In addition to its vital economic role, the Internet is also an unparalleled vehicle for open communications by non-commercial users, for religious speech, for civic involvement, and our First Amendment freedoms.
Yet the Internet is at endangered because of the misguided provisions of the bill before us, which put at grave risk the Internet as an engine of innovation, job creation, and economic growth. The bill permits the imposition of new fees, or “broadband bottleneck taxes” for Internet sites to access high-bandwidth consumers. This will stifle openness, endanger our global competitiveness, and warp the web into a tiered Internet of bandwidth haves and have-nots. It is the introduction of creeping Internet protectionism into the free and open World Wide Web.
Tomorrow’s network neutrality debate will present members with a choice. It is a choice between favoring the broadband designs of a small handful of very large companies or safeguarding the dreams of thousands of inventors, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. Tomorrow we will either vote to preserve the Internet as we know it, or instead, vote to fundamentally and detrimentally alter it.
The underlying bill also departs from the historic principle of non-discrimination and competition in the context of national cable franchises. The proposed bill permits a national franchise for cable service, grants multi-billion dollar companies access to public rights-of-way, yet has no service area requirement for providing cable service. By failing to include a build-out provision to ensure service area parity between a Bell company entering a franchise area and the incumbent cable operator, it allows a national franchisee to use public rights-of-way in a community but serve only select neighborhoods within the community.
Now, getting access to a community’s public rights-of-way without any obligation to serve the whole community is a sweetheart deal for phone companies. But it is a raw deal for the neighborhoods that will be skipped over or ignored.
Moreover, the bill compounds the consumer risk when the omission of a service area requirement is considered in the context of an incumbent cable operator qualifying for a national franchise. Under the Barton bill, an incumbent cable operator may seek a national franchise after the phone company arrives in a franchise area, even if the phone company is serving just one household in the franchise area. The lack of a service area requirement at the national level then means that the incumbent cable operator no longer has to serve the entire franchise either. In other words, the operator is free to skimp on service upgrades or withdraw service from any part of their historic service area within the affected community. The incumbent may also raise rates in areas of the community the phone company is not serving in order to cross-subsidize its offering in the part of town the phone company has chosen to serve.
The prospect of cable service withdrawal, poorer service quality, and rate hikes represents a serious consumer protection flaw in the bill and only a provision ensuring service area parity can effectively remedy this flaw.
Thank you and I look forward to the debate and the votes tomorrow.
Commutes can be brutal sometimes, even just playing a game of hearts or checking my e-mail would be a great way to pass the time. It’s forward thinking ideas like this that continue to fuel my support for Mayor Murray.
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I know that working on expanding the commuter rail has been one of the Mayor’s main goals, one which he intends to continue working on if he is elected. Young people are more likely to live in areas with affordable housing (anything in MA is cheaper than Boston) next to public transportation so that they can commute to jobs in the city. I have heard the Mayor speak about also increasing MA’s involvement with the bio-tech industry to create more jobs for young people who are just graduating from some of MA’s great public & private universities. Mayor Murray has continually presented proposals that show that he wants improve Massachusetts by promoting progress and moving into the future. Murray has original ideas, something I haven’t seen from the other candidates.
Cross-posted from MassChange.
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During a commercial break in the Sox game, I click over to NECN and who do I see but Andrea Silbert and she says that she’s announcing her Jobs Plan tomorrow. It should be interesting to see what she comes up with, given that it’s what she’s been hammering away on in her campaign appearances. When I saw her a couple months ago, she was also talking about investing in rail with more Federal dollars that she’d lobby for. She mentioned that again today on NECN.
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Interestingly, Tim Murray put out his rail proposal today. You can get there by clicking here.
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There are two competing proposals emerging here on the rail front, both valid, both require faith by the voters that their chosen candidate can pull it off.
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On the one hand, you have Silbert arguing for her ability to lobby for more federal dollars. On the other hand, you have Murray advocating for a new post in the transportation department to coordinate rail efforts.
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I have NO idea which is more realistic, but I’ll say this, one of them seems more ripe for Republican attack and that’s Murray’s. Here’s Hillman’s argument: more Democratic bureaucracy, more government waste, yet another “government-as-solution” plan.
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Silbert’s has its weaknesses too: how can we expect a Democrat from MA to win more Federal transportation dollars? (By convincing Mike Capuano who sits on the transport committee, that’s how. But that’s another story…)
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Interestingly, reading through Murray’s White Paper, it contains a heckuva lot of job creation wording, which is interesting. He must have heard something about the jobs message if he’s moving towards it.
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Good on both of them for these ideas, and let’s see who comes out ahead.
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Side note: it’s very apparent that Silbert and Murray are pulling farther and farther ahead on the substantive policy end of things in this LG race. Nary a peep from Goldberg recently on anything, and Kelley’s a one-man band on health care these days as usual…
I hope you’re thinking of some good questions to submit for the Lowell LG Forum on May 21 at 2:00 PM at the Lowell Senior Center. đŸ™‚ All the candidates will be there.
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</end diary pimping>
For this comment:
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This doesn’t have to be a government handout either.
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Are roads a government handout? How about spending money to make sure every American, no matter how rural, can get a telephone connection. Are sewers a government handout? Money spent on airports? Street signs and lights?
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No. This is called [b]public infrastructure[/b]. There’s aboslutely no reason to charge for Wi-Fi. “Include it” in the ticket price, and offer it as a service to keep the commuter rail competitive.
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People riding the rail is good. They consume less fuel, emit fewer pollutants, and result in less traffic. You’ve got to make it worth their while — either reduce the mean & variance of the travel time, make it more comfortable, or make it cheaper. Any time you improve on any of these three categories, commuting by rail becomes more attractive — and attracts more riders. If you provide wi-fi, you make riding by rail more comfortable.
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Most of the cost of this project is a fixed cost; there’s no reason to charge people $8/day to use the Wi-Fi. There’s no reason to be tracking someone’s IP address to their name either.
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He’s got the right idea on the project, but that “throwaway line” shows me he has absolutely the wrong idea on government.
Actually, what you meant was: “David’s a jerk.”
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That stuff about paying for it? That was me. I don’t think Murray said anything about it either way, though I haven’t gone back and read his plan in detail yet.
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Anyway, needless to say, I disagree with you. But it’s me you’ve got a beef with, not Murray.
And I read through the proposal, Murray does not use that comment. The credit all goes to David, who by the way made a decent point. While it would be great for WiFi to be free to anyone using the railways, keep in mind that in the long run it will cost money to implement it on moving trains & in train stations (read the NY Times Article attached to Murray’s proposal). In addition, MA isn’t in the best shape financially, and a new source of income that could possibly be put towards improving the railway further or help fund other state projects, or education isn’t such a bad idea. If a station is wireless anyone could pick up on that signal even if they weren’t even planning on riding the train. I think it would make perfect sense to charge a small fee to use, or there could be passwords on all the tickets so that people who ride the rail could access it for free, but others who want to use it would need to pay.
In any system that requires people to pay for wireless service, or to tell the riders from the non-riders, one of the biggest costs and headaches will be the billing infrastructure. That would possibly outstrip the other ongoing costs of maintaining the service once it’s up and running.
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Companies that do this for-profit use a split model. They try to attract a core set of regulars who pay a monthly fee, and they charge a much higher rate (like $8/day or even $4/hour) for “spot users”, because dealing with a large number of transients is more cumbersome and expensive. With the T, though, we’d want a system that’s cheap and affordable for frequent spot users, to reduce barriers to entry. The goal isn’t to make a profit, but we’d have to charge “profitable” rates just to pay for the billing infrastructure. I think the whole thing would be a colossal waste. The service would cost a lot less if it were just plain free, and it would draw more riders that way.
Billing is a bit part of the cost, and would be avoided entirely were it free. Additionally, the added service could help convince folks to take the train, on productivity grounds.
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Making the rail more attractive is good for the budget. It means you can put off road improvements, you have less pollution (and hence less strain on hospitals), fewer auto accidents (again, less strain on the medical and emergency folks), and all of these result in the savings of very real dollars.
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So, I don’t think that it will cost very much, and I suspect that the (difficult to calculate, but very real) savings elsewhere might exceed the cost of implementation.
jerk.
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đŸ™‚
look at your examples. Electricity. Sewers. Telephone. None of those things are free – you want to use them, you pay for them. Admittedly, roads usually operate differently – the gov’t builds them, and then people use them for free. But to me, wi-fi looks a lot more like electricity or water or telephone service than it does like a road, which once it’s built just sits there.
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As for including it in the ticket price, why force riders who don’t want to use the service to subsidize those who do?
Why force those who don’t use the roads to subsidize those who do?
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The answers are complex, but this is an issue that comes up with every form of public infrastructure. I haven’t used a court for years, but I still subsidize the court system (well, not this year, my income was too low – but I put in a few hundred thousand just a few years ago). I haven’t been a crime victim recently but I subsidize detectives and prosecutors. etc.
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Even if you rarely venture outside your neighborhood, and never drive a car, making minimal use of local streets and no use of highways at all, you still benefit from a road system that lets people come visit you, lets products come to your local grocery store, and make the economy around you possible.
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And there’s the eternal burning question of local politics: Why should people without kids subsidize public schools with their property taxes?
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When it comes to wi-fi on the trains, why are you focusing on riders who don’t use the wi-fi compared to those who do? How about the subsidy all taxpayers in MBTA cities give whether they ride the T or not? The answer is that we all benefit from increased T ridership, whether we personally use it or not. That’s the point of public infrastructure.
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Some infrastructure has user fees, some doesn’t. The user fees rarely cover the full cost of the infrastructure, and often, they act as a sort of regressive tax. In many cases, I think we’d be better off without the user fees. Wi-fi on trains is one of them.
don’t make much sense to me. Of course, any neighborhood benefits from decent roads, a strong police dep’t, functioning courts to handle bad guys, etc. Schools can also go into that category (though some would disagree). But wi-fi strikes me as something that benefits the individual far more than the community. I’m not really sure how my commuting experience is enhanced by the fact that the guy sitting next to me is able to do his email for the private company he works for while riding into town.
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User fees will never pay for the whole thing. But I don’t see why wi-fi shouldn’t work more or less like electricity or water. Nor am I persuaded that the “billing infrastructure” is much of a problem. It’s not that hard to set up an online billing system.
I’m not really sure how my commuting experience is enhanced by the fact that the guy sitting next to me is able to do his email for the private company he works for while riding into town.
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Here’s how:
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1. That free wi-fi may be contributing to the fact that he’s riding. That’s contributing to the revenues of the train, which help keep it in operation (and help keep the prices low).
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2. That free wi-fi may be contributing the the increase in riders, which results in more train runs per day. More runs means a finer grained schedule, which allows you to tune your commute more closely with the rest of your life.
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But I don’t see why wi-fi shouldn’t work more or less like electricity or water.
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Because with electricity, the bulk of the cost is marginal. With wi-fi, most of the cost is initial; it costs little to operate the system once its installed. Water source is a bit trickier, but water treatment works the same way. The more water you use, the more it costs to treat. Wi-fi doesn’t work that way.
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And there’s another reason. Supplying water and electricity consume physical resources, and result in pollution, eminent domain, etc. Overuse is overbad. Wi-fi overuse isn’t a problem, and doesn’t shift those problems on to the rest of society. Again, the really important difference is marginal vs. fixed cost, both in real dollars and in externalities.
Nor am I persuaded that the “billing infrastructure” is much of a problem. It’s not that hard to set up an online billing system.
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Have you ever operated a public network, or been involved in operating one? The key isn’t how hard it is to “set up a billing system”. Once you have your network set up, the ongoing cost of maintaining user accounts, billing, customer service for account related problems, and so on, is likely to be the largest component of the ongoing cost of maintaining the whole network. It can cost more than everything else it takes to keep such a network up and running.
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Once you have a network set up, the marginal cost of another user is pretty much zero… unless you’re trying to maintain user accounts and billing for them all. The only other resource they’re using is network traffic, which is incredibly cheap and plentiful. And the network can be engineered for a reasonable capacity such that if “too many” people are using it, it slows down a little bit for all of them, but doesn’t cost the network owners any more. Unless we get into the lucky situation where it draws so many people onto the T, that their capacity estimates are overrun and they have to expand the network’s capacity. Even then, the marginal cost per user is probably still much less than it would be for accounts+billing+service.
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Unlike water or electricity, the network owner wouldn’t have to supply the users with more data every time. The data comes from Google and Yahoo and their employer and their friends and family and even, perhaps, from us here at Blue Mass Group đŸ™‚ We’re creating the equivalent of the “water” those users would use. And we want them to use it.
Now that’s informative AND entertaining! Hahahaa…
As someone who is in the process of getting municipal WiFi going out here in North Adams, I say Huzzah! to this proposal.
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – expansion of broadband (wireless or otherwise) will be to the 21st century what rural electrification was to the 20th. And like rural electrification, this is far too important to be left to the private sector.
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WF
I am very excited about Murrays proposal for having commuter rails provide wireless internet. It is something that commuters that are going to work need. I think it will definitely attract more commuters to using the train to get to work, which will increase demand for more rail lines. This increase in rail lines will in turn provide new jobs for train conducters and engineers. Its possible though that they may need to have more outlets placed on the train for when people’s laptop battery power runs out.
The progressive blogs are absolutely smoking with content on Net Neutrality. Crooked Timber, Ed Felten, Majickthise…all of them have good points to make.
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Markey will be getting my vote for as long as he wants it because of his leadership on this matter.
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Some of the Save The Internet positions claim its about censorship…well not directly but makeing free speech cost more for your enemies is still going to unlevel the playing field. Will the .org’s that John Dean was able to use so effectively be hit? Will the free blogging services like blogger ( where I am ) be forced to charge for hosting when Verizon and ATT charge the big servers for traffic?
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Some claim its about monopoly and it certainly is…the pay-to-connect model has funded huge expansion of internet…why would these greedy carriers want more? [a]that is the nature of for-profit companies that have few competitors and can collude. [5] now is the time: if they wait until next year when the republicans don’t hold a majority in congress, their lobbying money won’t buy them the party line voting that they are getting now. So monopoly it is but even if that only means the new costs are passed on to average users [it ALWAYS MEANS THAT,have you noticed who actually pays for the high oil prices yet?] raising instead of tipping the playing field still gets the students and the poorest stratta of society off the net…which should suit the Repbublicans just fine.
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Keep fighting for this one, all of you.
Commutes can be brutal sometimes, even just playing a game of hearts or checking my e-mail would be a great way to pass the time. It’s forward thinking ideas like this that continue to fuel my support for Mayor Murray.
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I know that working on expanding the commuter rail has been one of the Mayor’s main goals, one which he intends to continue working on if he is elected. Young people are more likely to live in areas with affordable housing (anything in MA is cheaper than Boston) next to public transportation so that they can commute to jobs in the city. I have heard the Mayor speak about also increasing MA’s involvement with the bio-tech industry to create more jobs for young people who are just graduating from some of MA’s great public & private universities. Mayor Murray has continually presented proposals that show that he wants improve Massachusetts by promoting progress and moving into the future. Murray has original ideas, something I haven’t seen from the other candidates.