For the third year in a row, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski used his speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to push for more wireless spectrum. He wants Congress to pass the incentive auction law that would unleash hundreds of megahertz of spectrum to new and higher uses. Most of Congress agrees: we need lots more wireless capacity and spectrum auctions are a good way to get there.

Genachowski, however, wants overarching control of the new spectrum and, by extension, the mobile broadband ecosystem. The FCC wants the authority to micromanage the newly available radio waves — who can buy it, how much they can buy, how they can use it, what content flows over it, what business models can be employed with it. But this is an arena that is growing wildly fast, where new technologies appear every day, and where experimentation is paramount to see which business models work. Auctions are supposed to be a way to get more spectrum into the marketplace, where lots of companies and entrepreneurs can find the best ways to use it to deliver new communications services. ”Any restrictions” by Congress on the FCC “would be a real mistake,” said Genachowski. In other words, he doesn’t want Congress to restrict his ability to restrict the mobile business. It seems the liberty of regulators to act without restraint is a higher virtue than the liberty of private actors.

At the end of 2011, the FCC and Justice Department vetoed AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile, a deal that would have immediately expanded 3G mobile capacity across the nation and accelerated AT&T’s next generation 4G rollout by several years. That deal was all about a more effective use of spectrum, more cell towers, more capacity to better serve insatiable smart-phone and tablet equipped consumers. Now the FCC is holding hostage the spectrum auction bill with its my-way-or-the-highway approach. And one has to ask: Is the FCC really serious about spectrum, mobile capacity, and a healthy broadband Internet?

— Bret Swanson

America is in desperate need of economic growth. But as the U.S. economy limps along, with unemployment stuck at 9%, the Federal Communications Commission is playing procedural tiddlywinks with the nation’s largest infrastructure investor, in the sector of the economy that offers the most promise for innovation and 21st century jobs. In normal times, we might chalk this up to clever Beltway maneuvering. But do we really have the time or money to indulge bureaucratic gamesmanship?

On Thanksgiving Eve, the FCC surprised everyone. It hadn’t yet completed its investigation into the proposed AT&T-T-Mobile wireless merger, and the parties had not had a chance to discuss or rebut the agency’s initial findings. Yet the FCC preempted the normal process by announcing it would send the case to an administrative law judge — essentially a vote of no-confidence in the deal. I say “vote,” but  the FCC commissioners hadn’t actually voted on the order.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called AT&T CEO Randall Stevenson, who, on Thanksgiving Day, had to tell investors he was setting aside $4 billion in case Washington blocked the deal.

The deal is already being scrutinized by the Department of Justice, which sued to block the merger last summer. The fact that telecom mergers and acquisitions must negotiate two levels of federal scrutiny, at DoJ and FCC, is already an extra burden on the Internet industry. But when one agency on this dual-track games the system by trying to influence the other track — maybe because the FCC felt AT&T had a good chance of winning its antitrust case — the obstacles to promising economic activity multiply.

After the FCC’s surprise move, AT&T and T-Mobile withdrew their merger application at the FCC. No sense in preparing for an additional hearing before an administrative law judge when they are already deep in preparation for the antitrust trial early next year. Moreover, the terms of the merger agreement are likely to have changed after the companies (perhaps) negotiate conditions with the DoJ. They’d have to refile an updated application anyway. Not so fast, said the FCC. We’re not going to allow AT&T and T-Mobile to withdraw their application. Or we if we do allow it, we will do so “with prejudice,” meaning the parties can’t refile a revised application at a later date. On Tuesday the FCC relented — the law is clear: an applicant has the right to withdraw an application without consent from the FCC. But the very fact the FCC initially sought to deny the withdrawal is itself highly unusual. Again, more procedural gamesmanship.

If that weren’t enough, the FCC then said it would release its “findings” in the case — another highly unusual (maybe unprecedented) action. The agency hadn’t completed its process, and there had been no vote on the matter. So the FCC instead released what it calls a “staff report” — a highly critical internal opinion that hadn’t been reviewed by the parties nor approved by the commissioners. We’re eager to analyze the substance of this “staff report,” but the fact the FCC felt the need to shove it out the door was itself remarkable.

It appears the FCC is twisting legal procedure any which way to fit its desired outcome, rather than letting the normal merger process play out. Indeed, “twisting legal procedure” may be too kind. It has now thrown law and procedure out the window and is in full public relations mode. These extralegal PR games tilt the playing field against the companies, against investment and innovation, and against the health of the U.S. economy.

— Bret Swanson

The OECD published its annual Communications Outlook last week, and the 390 pages offer a wealth of information on all-things-Internet — fixed line, mobile, data traffic, price comparisons, etc. Among other remarkable findings, OECD notes that:

In 1960, only three countries — Canada, Sweden and the United States — had more than one phone for every four inhabitants. For most of what would become OECD countries a year later, the figure was less than 1 for every 10 inhabitants, and less than 1 in 100 in a couple of cases. At that time, the 84 million telephones in OECD countries represented 93% of the global total. Half a century later there are 1.7 billion telephones in OECD countries and a further 4.1 billion around the world. More than two in every three people on Earth now have a mobile phone.

Very useful stuff. But in recent times the report has also served as a chance for some to misrepresent the relative health of international broadband markets. The common refrain the past several years was that the U.S. had fallen way behind many European and Asian nations in broadband. The mantra that the U.S. is “15th in the world in broadband” — or 16th, 21st, 24th, take your pick — became a sort of common lament. Except it wasn’t true.

As we showed here, the second half of the two-thousand-aughts saw an American broadband boom. The Phoenix Center and others showed that the most cited stat in those previous OECD reports — broadband connections per 100 inhabitants — actually told you more about household size than broadband. And we developed metrics to better capture the overall health of a nation’s Internet market — IP traffic per Internet user and per capita.

Below you’ll see an update of the IP traffic per Internet user chart, built upon Cisco’s most recent (June 1, 2011) Visual Networking Index report. The numbers, as they did last year, show the U.S. leads every region of the world in the amount of IP traffic we generate and consume both in per user and per capita terms. Among nations, only South Korea tops the U.S., and only Canada matches the U.S.

Although Asia contains broadband stalwarts like Korea, Japan, and Singapore, it also has many laggards. If we compare the U.S. to the most uniformly advanced region, Western Europe, we find the U.S. generates 62% more traffic per user. (These figures are based on Cisco’s 2010 traffic estimates and the ITU’s 2010 Internet user numbers.)

As we noted last year, it’s not possible for the U.S. to both lead the world by a large margin in Internet usage and lag so far behind in broadband. We think these traffic per user and per capita figures show that our residential, mobile, and business broadband networks are among the world’s most advanced and ubiquitous.

Lots of other quantitative and qualitative evidence — from our smart-phone adoption rates to the breakthrough products and services of world-leading device (Apple), software (Google, Apple), and content companies (Netflix) — reaffirms the fairly obvious fact that the U.S. Internet ecosystem is in fact healthy, vibrant, and growing. Far from lagging, it leads the world in most of the important digital innovation indicators.

— Bret Swanson

The generally light-touch regulatory approach to America’s Internet industry has been a big success story. Broadband, wireless, digital devices, Internet content and apps — these technology sectors have exploded over the last half-dozen years, even through the Great Recession.

So why are Washington regulators gradually encroaching on the Net’s every nook and cranny? Perhaps the explanation is a paraphrased line about Washington’s upside-down ways: If it fails, subsidize it. If it succeeds, tax it. And if it succeeds wildly, regulate it.

Whatever the reason, we should watch out and speak up, lest D.C. do-gooders slow the growth of our most dynamic economic engine.

Last December, the FCC imposed a watered down version of Net Neutrality. A few weeks ago the FCC asserted authority to regulate prices and terms in the data roaming market for mobile phones. There are endless Washington proposals to regulate digital advertising markets and impose strict new rules to (supposedly) protect consumer privacy. The latest new idea (but surely not the last) is to regulate prices and terms of “special access,” or Internet connectivity in the middle of the network.

Special access refers to high-speed links that connect, say, cell phone towers to the larger network, or an office building to a metro fiber ring. Another common name for these network links is “backhaul.” Washington lobbyists have for years been trying to get the FCC to dictate terms in this market, without success. But now, as part of the proposed AT&T-T-Mobile merger, they are pushing harder than ever to incorporate regulation of these high-speed Internet lines into the government’s prospective approval of  the acquisition.

As the chief opponent of the merger, Sprint especially is lobbying for the new regulations. Sprint claims that just a few companies control most the available backhaul links to its cell phone towers and wants the FCC to set rates and terms for its backhaul leases. But from the available information, it’s clear that many companies — not just Verizon and AT&T — provide these Special Access backhaul services. It’s not clear why an AT&T-T-Mobile combination should have a big effect on the market, nor why the FCC should use the event to regulate a well-functioning market.

Sprint is a majority owner and major partner of 4G mobile network Clearwire, which uses its own microwave wireless links for 90% of its backhaul capacity. Sprint used Clearwire backhaul for its Xohm Wi-Max network beginning in 2008 and will pay Clearwire around a billion dollars over the next two years to lease backhaul capacity.

T-Mobile, meanwhile, uses mostly non-AT&T, non-Verizon backhaul for its towers. Recent estimates say something like 80% of T-Mobile sites are linked by smaller Special Access providers like Bright House, FiberNet, Zayo Bandwidth, and IP Networks. Lots of other providers exist, from the large cable companies like Comcast, Cox, and TimeWarner to smaller specialty firms like FiberTower and TowerCloud to large backbone providers like Level 3. The cable companies all report fast growing cell site backhaul sales, accounting for large shares of their wholesale revenue.

One of the rationales for AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile was that the two companies’ cell sites are complementary, not duplicative, meaning AT&T may not have links to many or most of T-Mobile’s sites. So at least in the short term it’s likely the T-Mobile cells will continue to use their existing backhaul providers, who are, again, mostly not Verizon or AT&T. It’s possible over time AT&T would expand its network and use its own links to serve the sites, but the backhaul business by then will only be more competitive than today.

This is a mostly unseen part of the Internet. Few of us every think about Special Access or Backhaul when we fire up our Blackberry, Android, or iPhone. But these lines are key components in mobile ecosystem, essential to delivering the voices and bits to and from our phones, tablets, and laptops. The wireless industry, moreover, is in the midst of a massive upgrade of its backhaul lines to accommodate first 3G and now 4G networks that will carry ever richer multimedia content. This means replacing the old T-1 and T-3 copper phone lines with new fiber optic lines and high-speed radio links. These are big investments in a very competitive market.

Given the Internet industry’s overwhelming contribution to the U.S. economy — not just as an innovative platform but as a leading investor in the capital base of the nation — one might think we wouldn’t lightly trifle with success. The chart below, compiled by economist Michael Mandel, shows that the top two — and three out of the top seven — domestic investors are communications companies. These are huge sums of money supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs directly and many millions indirectly.

via Michael Mandel

We’ve seen the damage micromanagement can cause — in the communications sector no less. The type of regulation of prices and terms on infrastructure leases now proposed for Special Access was, in my view, a key to the 2000 tech/telecom crash. FCC intrusions (remember line sharing, TELRIC, and UNE-P, etc.) discouraged investments in the first generation of broadband. We fell behind nations like Korea. Over the last half-dozen years, however, we righted our communications ship and leapt to the top of the world in broadband and especially mobile services.

I’m not arguing these regulations would crash the sector. But the accumulated costs of these creeping Washington intrusions could disrupt the crucial price mechanisms and investment incentives that are no where more important than the fastest growing, most dynamic markets, like mobile networks.Time for FCC lawyers to hit the beach — for Memorial Day weekend . . . and beyond. They should sit back and enjoy the stupendous success of the sector they oversee. The market is working.

— Bret Swanson

In the wake of the FCC’s net neutrality Order, published on December 23, several of us have focused on the Commission’s confused and contradictory treatment of “paid prioritization.” In the Order, the FCC explicitly permits some forms of paid priority on the Internet but strongly discourages other forms.

From the beginning — that is, since the advent of the net neutrality concept early last decade — I argued that a strict neutrality regime would have outlawed, among other important technologies, CDNs, which prioritized traffic and made (make!) the Web video revolution possible.

So I took particular notice of this new interview (sub. required) with Akamai CEO Paul Sagan in the February 2011 issue of MIT’s Technology Review:

TR: You’re making copies of videos and other Web content and distributing them from strategic points, on the fly.

Paul Sagan: Or routes that are picked on the fly, to route around problematic conditions in real time. You could use Boston [as an analogy]. How do you want to cross the Charles to, say, go to Fenway from Cambridge? There are a lot of bridges you can take. The Internet protocol, though, would probably always tell you to take the Mass. Ave. bridge, or the BU Bridge, which is under construction right now and is the wrong answer. But it would just keep trying. The Internet can’t ever figure that out — it doesn’t. And we do.

There it is. Akamai and other content delivery networks (CDNs), including Google, which has built its own CDN-like network, “route around” “the Internet,” which “can’t ever figure . . . out” the fastest path needed for robust packet delivery. And they do so for a price. In other words: paid priority. Content companies, edge innovators, basement bloggers, and poor non-profits who don’t pay don’t get the advantages of CDN fast lanes. (more…)

So, here we are. Today the FCC voted 3-2 to issue new rules governing the Internet. I expect the order to be struck down by the courts and/or Congress. Meantime, a few observations:

• The order appears to be more intrusive on the topic of “paid prioritization” than was Chairman Genachowski’s outline earlier this month. (Keep in mind, we haven’t seen the text. The FCC Commissioners themselves only got access to the text at 11:42 p.m. last night.)
• If this is true, if the “nondiscrimination” ban goes further than a simple reasonableness test, which itself would be subject to tumultuous legal wrangling, then the Net Neutrality order could cause more problems than I wrote about in this December 7 column.
• A prohibition or restriction on “paid prioritization” is a silly rule that belies a deep misunderstanding of how our networks operate today and how they will need to operate tomorrow. Here’s how I described it in recent FCC comments:

In September 2010, a new network company that had operated in stealth mode digging ditches and boring tunnels for the previous 24 months, emerged on the scene. As Forbes magazine described it, this tiny new company, Spread Networks

“spent the last two years secretly digging a gopher hole from Chicago to New York, usurping the erstwhile fastest paths. Spread’s one-inch cable is the latest weapon in the technology arms race among Wall Street houses that use algorithms to make lightning-fast trades. Every day these outfits control bigger stakes of the markets – up to 70% now. “Anybody pinging both markets  has to be on this line, or they’re dead,” says Jon A. Najarian, cofounder of OptionMonster, which tracks high-frequency trading.

“Spread’s advantage lies in its route, which makes nearly a straight line from a data center  in Chicago’s South Loop to a building across the street from Nasdaq’s servers in Carteret, N.J. Older routes largely follow railroad rights-of-way through Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. At 825 miles and 13.3 milliseconds, Spread’s circuit shaves 100 miles and 3 milliseconds off of the previous route of lowest latency, engineer-talk for length of delay.”

Why spend an estimated $300 million on an apparently duplicative route when numerous seemingly similar networks already exist? Because, Spread says, three milliseconds matters.

Spread offers guaranteed latency on its dark fiber product of no more than 13.33 milliseconds. Its managed wave product is guaranteed at no more than 15.75 milliseconds. It says competitors’ routes between Chicago and New York range from 16 to 20 milliseconds. We don’t know if Spread will succeed financially. But Spread is yet another demonstration that latency is of enormous and increasing importance. From entertainment to finance to medicine, the old saw is truer than ever: time is money. It can even mean life or death.

A policy implication arises. The Spread service is, of course, a form a “paid prioritization.” Companies are paying “eight to 10 times the going rate” to get their bits where they want them, when they want them.5 It is not only a demonstration of the heroic technical feats required to increase the power and diversity of our networks. It is also a prime example that numerous network users want to and will pay money to achieve better service.

One way to achieve better service is to deploy more capacity on certain links. But capacity is not always the problem. As Spread shows, another way to achieve better service is to build an entirely new 750-mile fiber route through mountains to minimize laser light delay. Or we might deploy a network of server caches that store non-realtime data closer to the end points of networks, as many Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have done. But when we can’t build a new fiber route or store data – say, when we need to get real-time packets from point to point over the existing network – yet another option might be to route packets more efficiently with sophisticated QoS technologies. Each of these solutions fits a particular situation. They take advantage of, or submit to, the technological and economic trade-offs of the moment or the era. They are all legitimate options. Policy simply must allow for the diversity and flexibility of technical and economic options – including paid prioritization – needed to manage networks and deliver value to end-users.

Depending on how far the FCC is willing to take these misguided restrictions, it could actually lead to the very outcomes most reviled by “open Internet” fanatics — that is, more industry concentration, more “walled gardens,” more closed networks. Here’s how I described the possible effect of restrictions on the important voluntary network management tools and business partnerships needed to deliver robust multimedia services:

There has also been discussion of an exemption for “specialized services.” Like wireless, it is important that such specialized services avoid the possible innovation-sapping effects of a Net Neutrality regulatory regime. But the Commission should consider several unintended consequences of moving down the path of explicitly defining, and then exempting, particular “specialized” services while choosing to regulate the so-called “basic,” “best-effort,” or “entry level” “open Internet.”

Regulating the “basic” Internet but not “specialized” services will surely push most of the network and application innovation and investment into the unregulated sphere. A “specialized” exemption, although far preferable to a Net Neutrality world without such an exemption, would tend to incentivize both CAS providers and ISPs service providers to target the “specialized” category and thus shrink the scope of the “open Internet.”

In fact, although specialized services should and will exist, they often will interact with or be based on the “basic” Internet. Finding demarcation lines will be difficult if not impossible. In a world of vast overlap, convergence, integration, and modularity, attempting to decide what is and is not “the Internet” is probably futile and counterproductive. The very genius of the Internet is its ability to connect to, absorb, accommodate, and spawn new networks, applications and services. In a great compliment to its virtues, the definition of the Internet is constantly changing. Moreover, a regime of rigid quarantine would not be good for consumers. If a CAS provider or ISP has to build a new physical or logical network, segregate services and software, or develop new products and marketing for a specifically defined “specialized” service, there would be a very large disincentive to develop and offer simple innovations and new services to customers over the regulated “basic” Internet. Perhaps a consumer does not want to spend the extra money to jump to the next tier of specialized service. Perhaps she only wants the service for a specific event or a brief period of time. Perhaps the CAS provider or ISP can far more economically offer a compelling service over the “basic” Internet with just a small technical tweak, where a leap to a full-blown specialized service would require more time and money, and push the service beyond the reach of the consumer. The transactions costs of imposing a “specialized” quarantine would reduce technical and economic flexibility on both CAS providers and ISPs and, most crucially, on consumers.

Or, as we wrote in our previous Reply Comments about a related circumstance, “A prohibition of the voluntary partnerships that are likely to add so much value to all sides of the market – service provider, content creator, and consumer – would incentivize the service provider to close greater portions of its networks to outside content, acquire more content for internal distribution, create more closely held ‘managed services’ that meet the standards of the government’s ‘exclusions,’ and build a new generation of larger, more exclusive ‘walled gardens’ than would otherwise be the case. The result would be to frustrate the objective of the proceeding. The result would be a less open Internet.”

It is thus possible that a policy seeking to maintain some pure notion of a basic “open Internet” could severely devalue the open Internet the Commission is seeking to preserve.

All this said, the FCC’s legal standing is so tenuous and this order so rooted in reasoning already rejected by the courts, I believe today’s Net Neutrality rule will be overturned. Thus despite the numerous substantive and procedural errors committed on this “darkest day of the year,” I still expect the Internet to “survive and thrive.”

See my analysis of the FCC’s new “net neutrality” policy at RealClearMarkets:

Despite the Federal Communications Commission’s “net neutrality” announcement this week, the American Internet economy is likely to survive and thrive. That’s because the new proposal offered by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski is lacking almost all the worst ideas considered over the last few years. No one has warned more persistently than I against the dangers of over-regulating the Internet in the name of “net neutrality.”

In a better world, policy makers would heed my friend Andy Kessler’s advice to shutter the FCC. But back on earth this new compromise should, for the near-term at least, cap Washington’s mischief in the digital realm.

. . .

The Level 3-Comcast clash showed what many of us have said all along: “net neutrality” was a purposely ill-defined catch-all for any grievance in the digital realm. No more. With the FCC offering some definition, however imperfect, businesses will now mostly have to slug it out in a dynamic and tumultuous technology arena, instead of running to the press and politicians.

The FCC appears to have taken the worst proposals for regulating the Internet off the table. This is good news for an already healthy sector. And given info-tech’s huge share of U.S. investment, it’s good news for the American economy as a whole, which needs all the help it can get.

In a speech this morning, FCC chair Julius Genachowski outlined a proposal he hopes the other commissioners will approve at their December 21 meeting. The proposal, which comes more than a year after the FCC issued its Notice of Proposed Rule Making into “Preserving the Open Internet,” appears mostly to codify the “Four Principles” that were agreed to by all parties five years ago. Namely:

• No blocking of lawful data, websites, applications, services, or attached devices.
• Transparency. Consumers should know what the services and policies of their providers are, and what they mean.
• A prohibition of “unreasonable discrimination,” which essentially means service providers must offer their products at similar rates and terms to similarly situated customers.
• Importantly, broadband providers can manage their networks and use new technologies to provide fast, robust services. Also, there appears to be even more flexibility for wireless networks, though we don’t yet know the details.

(All the broad-brush concepts outlined today will need closer scrutiny when detailed language is unveiled, and as with every government regulation, implementation and enforcement can always yield unpredictable results. One also must worry about precedent and a new platform for future regulation. Even if today’s proposal isn’t too harmful, does the new framework open a regulatory can of worms?)

So, what appears to be off the table? Most of the worst proposals that have been flying around over the last year, like . . .

• Reclassification of broadband as an old “telecom service” under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, which could have pierced the no-government seal on the Internet in a very damaging way, unleashing all kinds of complex and antiquated rules on the modern Net.
• Price controls.
• Rigid nondiscrimination rules that would have barred important network technologies and business models.
• Bans of quality-of-service technologies and techniques (QoS), tiered pricing, or voluntary relationships between ISPs and content/application/service (CAS) providers.
• Open access mandates, requiring networks to share their assets.

Many of us have long questioned whether formal government action in this arena is necessary. The Internet ecosystem is healthy. It’s growing and generating an almost dizzying array of new products and services on diverse networks and devices. Communications networks are more open than ever. Facebook on your BlackBerry. Netflix on your iPad. Twitter on your TV. The oft-cited world broadband comparisons, which say the U.S. ranks 15h, or even 26th, are misleading. Those reports mostly measure household size, not broadband health. Using new data from Cisco, we estimate the U.S. generates and consumes more network traffic per user and per capita than any nation but South Korea. (Canada and the U.S. are about equal.) American Internet use is twice that of many nations we are told far outpace the U.S. in broadband. Heavy-handed regulation would have severely depressed investment and innovation in a vibrant industry. All for nothing.

Lots of smart lawyers doubt the FCC has the authority to issue even the relatively modest rules it outlined today. They’re probably right, and the question will no doubt be litigated (yet again), if Congress does not act first. But with Congress now divided politically, the case remains that Mr. Genachowski’s proposal is likely the near-term ceiling on regulation. Policy might get better than today’s proposal, but it’s not likely to get any worse. From what I see today, that’s a win for the Internet, and for the U.S. economy.

— Bret Swanson

The FCC’s apparent about-face on Net Neutrality is really perplexing.

Over the past few weeks it looked like the Administration had acknowledged economic reality (and bipartisan Capitol Hill criticism) and turned its focus to investment and jobs. Outgoing NEC Director Larry Summers and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced a vast expansion of available wireless spectrum, and FCC chairman Julius Genachowski used his speech to the NARUC state regulators to encourage innovation and employment. Gone were mentions of the old priorities — intrusive new regulations such as Net Neutrality and Title II reclassification of modern broadband as an old telecom service. Finally, it appeared, an already healthy and vibrant Internet sector could stop worrying about these big new government impositions — and years of likely litigation — and get on with building the 21st century digital infrastructure.

But then came word at the end of last week that the FCC would indeed go ahead with its new Net Neutrality regs. Perhaps even issuing them on December 22, just as Congress and the nation take off for Christmas vacation [the FCC now says it will hold its meeting on December 15]. When even a rare  economic sunbeam is quickly clouded by yet more heavy-handedness from Washington, is it any wonder unemployment remains so high and growth so low?

Any number of people sympathetic to the economy’s and the Administration’s plight are trying to help. Last week David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed the way, at least in a broad strategic sense: “One Way to Trim the Deficit: Cultivate Growth.” Yes, economic growth! Remember that old concept? Economist and innovation expert Michael Mandel has suggested a new concept of “countercyclical regulatory policy.” The idea is to lighten regulatory burdens to boost growth in slow times and then, later, when the economy is moving full-steam ahead, apply more oversight to curb excesses. Right now, we should be lightening burdens, Mandel says, not imposing new ones:

it’s really a dumb move to monkey with the vibrant and growing communications sector when the rest of the economy is so weak. It’s as if you have two cars — one running, one in the repair shop — and you decide it’s a good time to rebuild the transmission of the car that actually works because you hear a few squeaks.

Apparently, FCC honchos met with interested parties this morning to discuss what comes next. Unfortunately, at a time when we need real growth, strong growth, exuberant growth! (as Mandel would say), the Administration appears to be saddling an economy-lifting reform (wireless spectrum expansion) with leaden regulation. What’s the point of new wireless spectrum if you massively devalue it with Net Neutrality, open access, and/or Title II?

One step forward, two steps back (ten steps back?) is not an exuberant growth and jobs strategy.

In a new white paper:

We believe that large clouds could one day deliver computing power at up to 80% lower cost than small clouds.  This is due to the combined effects of three factors:supply-sideeconomies of scale which allow large clouds to purchase and operate infrastructure cheaper; demand-sideeconomies of scale which allow large clouds to run that infrastructure more efficiently by pooling users; and multi-tenancy which allows users to share an application, splitting the cost of managing that application.

New numbers from Cisco allow us to update our previous comparison of actual Internet usage around the world. We think this is a far more useful metric than the usual “broadband connections per 100 inhabitants” used by the OECD and others to compile the oft-cited world broadband rankings.

What the per capita metric really measures is household size. And because the U.S. has more people in each household than many other nations, we appear worse in those rankings. But as the Phoenix Center has noted, if each OECD nation reached 100% broadband nirvana — i.e., every household in every nation connected — the U.S. would actually fall from 15th to 20th. Residential connections per capita is thus not a very illuminating measure.

But look at the actual Internet traffic generated and consumed in the U.S.

The U.S. far outpaces every other region of the world. In the second chart, you can see that in fact only one nation, South Korea, generates significantly more Internet traffic per user than the U.S. This is no surprise. South Korea was the first nation to widely deploy fiber-to-the-x and was also the first to deploy 3G mobile, leading to not only robust infrastructure but also a vibrant Internet culture. The U.S. dwarfs most others.

If the U.S. was so far behind in broadband, we could not generate around twice as much network traffic per user compared to nations we are told far exceed our broadband capacity and connectivity. The U.S. has far to go in a never-ending buildout of its communications infrastructure. But we invest more than other nations, we’ve got better broadband infrastructure overall, and we use broadband more — and more effectively (see the Connectivity Scorecard and The Economist’s Digital Economy rankings) — than almost any other nation.

The conventional wisdom on this one is just plain wrong.

See our commentary at Forbes.com, responding to Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback’s calls for Internet regulation.

What we have here is “mission creep.” First, Net Neutrality was about an “open Internet” where no websites were blocked or degraded. But as soon as the whole industry agreed to these perfectly reasonable Open Web principles, Net Neutrality became an exercise in micromanagement of network technologies and broadband business plans. Now, Louderback wants to go even further and regulate prices. But there’s still more! He also wants to regulate the products that broadband providers can offer.

Here were my comments in the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making on “Preserving the Open Internet” — better known as “Net Neutrality”:

A Net Neutrality regime will not make the Internet more “open.” The Internet is already very open. More people create and access more content and applications than ever before. And with the existing Four Principles in place, the Internet will remain open. In fact, a Net Neutrality regime could close off large portions of the Internet for many consumers. By intruding in technical infrastructure decisions and discouraging investment, Net Neutrality could decrease network capacity, connectivity, and robustness; it could increase prices; it could slow the cycle of innovation; and thus shut the window to the Web on millions of consumers. Net Neutrality is not about openness. It is far more accurate to say it is about closing off experimentation, innovation, and opportunity.

After yesterday’s federal court ruling against the FCC’s overreaching net neutrality regulations, which we have dedicated considerable time and effort combatting for the last seven years, Holman Jenkins says it well:

Hooray. We live in a nation of laws and elected leaders, not a nation of unelected leaders making up rules for the rest of us as they go along, whether in response to besieging lobbyists or the latest bandwagon circling the block hauled by Washington’s permanent “public interest” community.

This was the reassuring message yesterday from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals aimed at the Federal Communications Commission. Bottom line: The FCC can abandon its ideological pursuit of the “net neutrality” bogeyman, and get on with making the world safe for the iPad.

The court ruled in considerable detail that there’s no statutory basis for the FCC’s ambition to annex the Internet, which has grown and thrived under nobody’s control.

. . .

So rather than focusing on new excuses to mess with network providers, the FCC should tackle two duties unambiguously before it: Figure out how to liberate the nation’s wireless spectrum (over which it has clear statutory authority) to flow to more market-oriented uses, whether broadband or broadcast, while also making sure taxpayers get adequately paid as the current system of licensed TV and radio spectrum inevitably evolves into something else.

Second: Under its media ownership hat, admit that such regulation, which inhibits the merger of TV stations with each other and with newspapers, is disastrously hindering our nation’s news-reporting resources and brands from reshaping themselves to meet the opportunities and challenges of the digital age. (Willy nilly, this would also help solve the spectrum problem as broadcasters voluntarily redeployed theirs to more profitable uses.)

With the release of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, we continue to hear all sorts of depressing stories about the sorry state of American broadband Internet access. But is it true?

International comparisons in such a fast-moving arena as tech and communications are tough. I don’t pretend it is easy to boil down a hugely complex topic to one right answer, but I did have some critical things to say about a major recent report that got way too many things wrong. A new article by that report’s author singled out France as especially more advanced than the U.S. To cut through all the clutter of conflicting data and competing interpretations on broadband deployment, access, adoption, prices, and speeds, however, maybe a simple chart will help.

Here we compare network usage. Not advertised speeds, which are suspect. Not prices which can be distorted by the use of purchasing power parity (PPP). Not “penetration,” which is largely a function of income, urbanization, and geography. No, just simply, how much data traffic do various regions create and consume.

If U.S. networks were so backward — too sparse, too slow, too expensive — would Americans be generating 65% more network traffic per capita than their Western European counterparts?

Our new article at RealClearMarkets:

As Washington and the states pile up mountainous liabilities — $3 trillion for unfunded state pensions, $10 trillion in new federal deficits through 2019, and $38 trillion (or is it $50 trillion?) in unfunded Medicare promises — the U.S. needs once again to call on its chief strategic asset: radical innovation.

One laboratory of growth will continue to be the Internet. The U.S. began the 2000’s with fewer than five million residential broadband lines and zero mobile broadband. We begin the new decade with 71 million residential lines and 300 million portable and mobile broadband devices. In all, consumer bandwidth grew almost 15,000%.

Even a thriving Internet, however, cannot escape Washington’s eager eye. As the Federal Communications Commission contemplates new “network neutrality” regulation and even a return to “Title II” telephone regulation, we have to wonder where growth will come from in the 2010’s . . . .

“No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to . . . .

“Practical business: who will win the tug of war between private machines and the Cloud? Will you store your personal information on your own personal machines, or on nameless servers far away in the Cloud, or both? Answer: in the Cloud. The Cloud (or the Internet Operating System, IOS — ‘Cloud 1.0′) will take charge of your personal machines. It will move the information you need at any given moment onto your own cellphone, laptop, pad, pod — but will always keep charge of the master copy. When you make changes to any document, the changes will be reflected immediately in the Cloud. Many parts of this service are available already.”

— David Gelernter, “Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously”

Here are a few good perspectives on Google’s big announcement that it will no longer censor search results for google.cn in China, a move it says could lead to a pull-out from the Middle Kingdom.

“Google’s Move: Does it Make Sense?” by Larry Dignan

“The Google News” by James Fallows

I agree with Dignan of Znet that this move was probably less about about China and more about policy and branding in the U.S. and Europe.

UPDATE: Much more detail on the mechanics of the attack from Wired’s Threat Level blog.

Professors at a leading research unit put suspect data into a bad model, fail to include crucial variables, and even manufacture the most central variable to deliver the hoped-for outcome.

Climate-gate? No, call it Berkman’s broadband bungle.

In October, Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society delivered a report, commissioned by the Federal Communications Commission, comparing international broadband markets and policies. The report was to be a central component of the Administration’s new national broadband Internet policy, arriving in February 2010.

The 231-page report was an ode to foreign broadband success and especially to the regulatory model of “open access,” a euphemism for mandated sharing of network assets at government-set prices. Although U.S. Internet innovation is flourishing, the Berkman Center found the U.S. tragically lagging other nations in consumer broadband penetration, prices, and network speeds. In a perfect set-up for a dramatic re-regulation of U.S. communications networks, Berkman concluded that open access mandates have “a positive and significant effect” on broadband penetration and that the effect is “somewhat larger . . . and more robust than previously thought.”

Just one problem. Actually many problems. The report botched its chief statistical model in half a dozen ways. It used loads of questionable data. It didn’t account for the unique market structure of U.S. broadband. It reversed the arrow of time in its country case studies. It ignored the high-profile history of open access regulation in the U.S. It didn’t conduct the literature review the FCC asked for. It excommunicated Switzerland . . . .

See my critique of this big report on international broadband at RealClearMarkets.

This morning, the Technology Committee of the New York City Council convened a large hearing on a resolution urging Congress to pass a robust Net Neutrality law. I was supposed to testify, but our narrowband transportation system prevented me from getting to New York. Here, however, is the testimony I prepared. It focuses on investment, innovation, and the impact Net Neutrality would have on both.

“Net Neutrality’s Impact on Internet Innovation” – by Bret Swanson – 11.20.09

If you’re interested in Net Neutrality regulation and have some time on your hands, watch this good debate at the Web 2.0 conference. The resolution was “A Network Neutrality law is necessary,” and the two opposing sides were:

Against

• James Assey – Executive Vice President, National Cable and Telecommunications Association
• Robert Quinn -  Senior Vice President-Federal Regulatory, AT&T
• Christopher Yoo – Professor of Law and Communication; Director, Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, UPenn Law

For

• Tim Wu – Coined the term “Network Neutrality”; Professor of Law, Columbia Law
  
• Brad Burnham – VC, Union Square Ventures
• Nicholas Economides – Professor of Economics, Stern School of Business, New York University.

I think the side opposing the resolution wins, hands down — no contest really — but see for yourself.

“I hope that they (government regulators) leave it alone . . . The Internet is working beautifully as it is.”

— Tim Draper, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who along with many other SV investors and executives signed a letter advocating new Internet regulations apparently unaware of its true content.

See this comprehensive new Web traffic study from Arbor Networks — “the largest study of global Internet traffic since the start of the commercial Internet.” 

Conclusion

 Internet is at an inflection point

 Transition from focus on connectivity to content
– Old global Internet economic models are evolving
– New entrants are reshaping definition / value of connectivity

 New technologies are reshaping definition of network
– “Web” / Desktop Applications, Cloud computing, CDN

 Changes mean significant new commercial, security and engineering challenges

 This is just the beginning…

These conclusions and the data Arbor tracked and reported largely followed our findings, projections, and predictions from two years ago:

• “Estimating the Exaflood – The Impact of Video and Rich Media on the Internet – A ‘zettabyte’ by 2015?”
• “Unleashing the ‘Exaflood’”
• “The Coming Exaflood”

And an update from this spring:

• “Rapid Internet Traffic Growth Continues in U.S. and Around Globe”

Also see our analysis from last winter highlighting the evolution of content delivery networks — what my colleague George Gilder dubbed “storewidth” back in 1999 — and which Arbor now says is the fastest growing source/transmitter of Net traffic.

Holy Swedish silica/on. It’s an exa-prize!

Calling them “Masters of Light,” the Royal Swedish Academy awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics to Charles Kao, for discoveries central to the development of optical fiber, and to Willard Boyle and George Smith of Bell Labs, for the invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD) digital imager.

Perhaps more than any two discoveries, these technologies are responsible for our current era of dramatically expanding cultural content and commercial opportunities across the Internet. I call this torrent of largely visual data gushing around the Web the “exaflood.” Exa means 10¹⁸, and today monthly Internet traffic in the U.S. tops two exabytes. For all of 2009, global Internet traffic should reach 100 exabytes, equal to the contents of around 5,000,000 Libraries of Congress. By 2015, the U.S. might transmit 1,000 exabytes, the equivalent of two Libraries of Congress every second for the entire year.

Almost all this content is transmitted via fiber optics, where laser light pulsing billions of times a second carries information thousands of miles through astoundingly pure glass (silica). And much of this content is created using CCD imagers, the silicon microchips that turn photons into electrons in your digital cameras, camcorders, mobile phones, and medical devices. The basic science of the breakthroughs involves mastering the delicate but powerful reflective, refractive, and quantum photoelectric properties of both light and one of the world’s simplest and most abundant materials — sand. Also known in different forms as silica and silicon.

The innovations derived from Kao, Boyle, and Smith’s discoveries will continue cascading through global society for decades to come.

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, I address the once-again raging topic of “net neutrality” regulation of the Web. On September 21, new FCC chair Julius Genachowski proposed more formal neutrality regulations. Then on September 25, AT&T accused Google of violating the very neutrality rules the search company has sought for others. The gist of the complaint was that the new Google Voice service does not connect all phone calls the way other phone companies are required to do. Not an earthshaking matter in itself, but a good example of the perils of neutrality regulation.

As the Journal wrote in its own editorial on Saturday:

Our own view is that the rules requiring traditional phone companies to connect these calls should be scrapped for everyone rather than extended to Google. In today’s telecom marketplace, where the overwhelming majority of phone customers have multiple carriers to choose from, these regulations are obsolete. But Google has set itself up for this political blowback.

Last week FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed new rules for regulating Internet operators and gave assurances that “this is not about government regulation of the Internet.” But this dispute highlights the regulatory creep that net neutrality mandates make inevitable. Content providers like Google want to dabble in the phone business, while the phone companies want to sell services and applications.

The coming convergence will make it increasingly difficult to distinguish among providers of broadband pipes, network services and applications. Once net neutrality is unleashed, it’s hard to see how anything connected with the Internet will be safe from regulation.

Several years ago, all sides agreed to broad principles that prohibit blocking Web sites or applications. But I have argued that more detailed and formal regulations governing such a dynamic arena of technology and changing business models would stifle innovation.

Broadband to the home, office, and to a growing array of diverse mobile devices has been a rare bright spot in this dismal economy. Since net neutrality regulation was first proposed in early 2004, consumer bandwidth per capita in the U.S. grew to 3 megabits per second from just 262 kilobits per second, and monthly U.S. Internet traffic increased to two billion gigabytes from 170 million gigabytes — both 10-fold leaps. New wired and wireless innovations and services are booming.

All without net neutrality regulation.

The proposed FCC regulations could go well beyond the existing (and uncontroversial) non-blocking principles. A new “Fifth Principle,” if codified, could prohibit “discrimination” not just among applications and services but even at the level of data packets traversing the Net. But traffic management of packets is used across the Web to ensure robust service and security.

As network traffic, content, and outlets proliferate and diversify, Washington wants to apply rigid, top-down rules. But the network requirements of email and high-definition video are very different. Real time video conferencing requires more network rigor than stored content like YouTube videos. Wireless traffic patterns are more unpredictable than residential networks because cellphone users are, well, mobile. And the next generation of video cloud computing — what I call the exacloud — will impose the most severe constraints yet on network capacity and packet delay.

Or if you think entertainment unimportant, consider the implications for cybersecurity. The very network technologies that ensure a rich video experience are used to kill dangerous “botnets” and combat cybercrime.

And what about low-income consumers? If network service providers can’t partner with content companies, offer value-added services, or charge high-end users more money for consuming more bandwidth, low-end consumers will be forced to pay higher prices. Net neutrality would thus frustrate the Administration’s goal of 100% broadband.

Health care, energy, jobs, debt, and economic growth are rightly earning most of the policy attention these days. But regulation of the Net would undermine the key global platform that underlay better performance on each of these crucial economic matters. Washington may be bailing out every industry that doesn’t work, but that’s no reason to add new constraints to one that manifestly does.

— Bret Swanson

Yesterday, the Joint Project Agreement between the U.S. Department of Commerce and ICANN expired. Today, a new “Affirmation of Commitments” goes into effect.

Key points from the new Affirmation:

• ICANN will remain an independent, private-sector led organization.
• Nations from around the world will have new input through the Government Advisory Committee (GAC).
• Overall transparency and global involvement should improve.
• But this Affirmation should extinguish any notions that the UN, EU, or other international players might gain new power over ICANN.
• ICANN must focus its efforts to ensure three core objectives. That the Internet is:

1. always on
2. free and open
3. secure and stable

More big issues coming down the pike. But for now, I think, a fortuitous development.

This is the ironic but very legitimate question AT&T is asking.

As Adam Thierer writes,

Whatever you think about this messy dispute between AT&T and Google about how to classify web-based telephony apps for regulatory purposes — in this case, Google Voice — the key issue not to lose site of here is that we are inching ever closer to FCC regulation of web-based apps!  Again, this is the point we have stressed here again and again and again and again when opposing Net neutrality mandates: If you open the door to regulation on one layer of the Net, you open up the door to the eventual regulation of all layers of the Net.

George Gilder and I made this point in Senate testimony five and a half years ago. Advocates of big new regulations on the Internet should be careful for what they wish.

In what is sure to be a substantial contribution to both the technical and policy debates over Net Neutrality, Richard Bennett of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has written a terrific piece of technology history and forward-looking analysis. In “Designed for Change: End-to-End Arguments, Internet Innovation, and the Net Neutrality Debate,” Bennett concludes:

Arguments for freezing the Internet into a simplistic regulatory straightjacket often have a distinctly emotional character that frequently borders on manipulation.

The Internet is a wonderful system. It represents a new standard of global cooperation and enables forms of interaction never before possible. Thanks to the Internet, societies around the world reap the benefits of access to information, opportunities for collaboration, and modes of communication that weren’t conceivable to the public a few years ago. It’s such a wonderful system that we have to strive very hard not to make it into a fetish object, imbued with magical powers and beyond the realm of dispassionate analysis, criticism, and improvement.

At the end of the day, the Internet is simply a machine. It was built the way it was largely by a series of accidents, and it could easily have evolved along completely different lines with no loss of value to the public. Instead of separating TCP from IP in the way that they did, the academics in Palo Alto who adapted the CYCLADES architecture to the ARPANET infrastructure could have taken a different tack: They could have left them combined as a single architectural unit providing different retransmission policies (a reliable TCP-like policy and an unreliable UDP-like policy) or they could have chosen a different protocol such as Watson’s Delta-t or Pouzin’s CYCLADES TS. Had the academics gone in either of these directions, we could still have a World Wide Web and all the social networks it enables, perhaps with greater resiliency.

The glue that holds the Internet together is not any particular protocol or software implementation: first and foremost, it’s the agreements between operators of Autonomous Systems to meet and share packets at Internet Exchange Centers and their willingness to work together. These agreements are slowly evolving from a blanket pact to cross boundaries with no particular regard for QoS into a richer system that may someday preserve delivery requirements on a large scale. Such agreements are entirely consistent with the structure of the IP packet, the needs of new applications, user empowerment, and “tussle.”

The Internet’s fundamental vibrancy is the sandbox created by the designers of the first datagram networks that permitted network service enhancements to be built and tested without destabilizing the network or exposing it to unnecessary hazards. We don’t fully utilize the potential of the network to rise to new challenges if we confine innovations to the sandbox instead of moving them to the parts of the network infrastructure where they can do the most good once they’re proven. The real meaning of end-to-end lies in the dynamism it bestows on the Internet by supporting innovation not just in applications but in fundamental network services. The Internet was designed for continual improvement: There is no reason not to continue down that path.

In case my verses attempting an analysis of Quality-of-Service and “net neutrality” regulation need supplementary explanation, here’s a terrifically lucid seven-minute Internet packet primer — in prose and pictures — from George Ou. Also, a longer white paper on the same topic:

Seven-minute Flash presentation: The need for a smarter prioritized Internet

White paper: Managing Broadband Networks: A Policymaker’s Guide

Leviathan Spam

Send the bits with lasers and chips
See the bytes with LED lights

Wireless, optical, bandwidth boom
A flood of info, a global zoom

Now comes Lessig
Now comes Wu
To tell us what we cannot do

The Net, they say,
Is under attack
Stop!
Before we can’t turn back

They know best
These coder kings
So they prohibit a billion things

What is on their list of don’ts?
Most everything we need the most

To make the Web work
We parse and label
We tag the bits to keep the Net stable

The cloud is not magic
It’s routers and switches
It takes a machine to move exadigits

Now Lessig tells us to route is illegal
To manage Net traffic, Wu’s ultimate evil (more…)

See this new paper from economists Rob Shapiro and Kevin Hassett showing how artificial limits on varied pricing of broadband could severely forestall broadband adoption.

To the extent that lower-income and middle-income consumers are required to pay a greater share of network costs, we should expect a substantial delay in achieving universal broadband access. Our simulations suggest that spreading the costs equally among all consumers — the minority who use large amounts of bandwidth and the majority who use very little — will significantly slow the rate of adoption at the lower end of the income scale and extend the life of the digital divide.

If costs are shifted more heavily to those who use the most bandwidth and, therefore, are most responsible for driving up the cost of expanding network capabilities, the digital divergence among the races and among income groups can be eliminated much sooner.

Do you suffer from “network deprivation”? I hope so. I do.

See my new Forbes.com commentary on the Microsoft-Yahoo search partnership:

Ballmer appears now to get it. “The more searches, the more you learn,” he says. “Scale drives knowledge, which can turn around and drive innovation and relevance.”

Microsoft decided in 2008 to build 20 new data centers at a cost of $1 billion each. This was a dramatic commitment to the cloud. Conceived by Bill Gates’s successor, Ray Ozzie, the global platform would serve up a new generation of Web-based Office applications dubbed Azure. It would connect video gamers on its Xbox Live network. And it would host Microsoft’s Hotmail and search applications.

The new Bing search engine earned quick acclaim for relevant searches and better-than-Google pre-packaged details about popular health, transportation, location and news items. But with just 8.4% of the market, Microsoft’s $20 billion infrastructure commitment would be massively underutilized. Meanwhile, Yahoo, which still leads in news, sports and finance content, could not remotely afford to build a similar new search infrastructure to compete with Google and Microsoft. Thus, the combination. Yahoo and Microsoft can share Ballmer’s new global infrastructure.

We recently estimated the dramatic gains in “consumer bandwidth” — our ability to communicate and take advantage of the Internet. So we note this new study from the Internet Innovation Alliance, written by economists Mark Dutz, Jonathan Orszag, and Robert Willig, that estimates a consumer surplus from U.S. residential broadband Internet access of $32 billion. “Consumer surplus” is the net benefit consumers enjoy, basically the additional value they receive from a product compared to what they pay.

Om Malik surveys the Net traffic spike after Michael Jackson’s death:

Around 6:30 p.m. EST, Akamai’s Net Usage Index for News spiked all the way to 4,247,971 global visitors per minute vs. normal traffic of 2,000,000, a 112 percent gain.

Check out Cato Unbound’s symposium on Lawrence Lessig’s 1999 book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Declan McCullagh leads off, with Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain and my former colleague Adam Thierer next, and then a response from Lessig himself.

Here’s Thierer’s bottom line:

Luckily for us, Lessig’s lugubrious predictions proved largely unwarranted. Code has not become the great regulator of markets or enslaver of man; it has been a liberator of both. Indeed, the story of the past digital decade has been the exact opposite of the one Lessig envisioned in Code. Cyberspace has proven far more difficult to “control” or regulate than any of us ever imagined. More importantly, the volume and pace of technological innovation we have witnessed over the past decade has been nothing short of stunning.

Had there been anything to the Lessig’s “code-is-law” theory, AOL’s walled-garden model would still be the dominant web paradigm instead of search, social networking, blogs, and wikis. Instead, AOL — a company Lessig spent a great deal of time fretting over in Code — was forced to tear down those walls years ago in an effort to retain customers, and now Time Warner isspinning it off entirely. Not only are walled gardens dead, but just about every proprietary digital system is quickly cracked open and modified or challenged by open source and free-to-the-world Web 2.0 alternatives. How can this be the case if, as Lessig predicted, unregulated code creates a world of “perfect control”?

Lots of commentators continue to misinterpret the research I and others have done on Internet traffic and its interplay with network infrastructure investment and communications policy.

I think that new video applications require lots more bandwidth — and, equally or even more important, that more bandwidth drives creative new applications. Two sides of the innovation coin. And I think investment friendly policies are necessary both to encourage deployment of new wireline and wireless broadband and also boost innovative new applications and services for consumers and businesses.

But this article, as one of many examples, mis-summarizes my view. It uses scary words like “apocalypse,” “catastrophe,” and, well, “scare mongering,” to describe my optimistic anticipation of an exaflood of Internet innovations coming our way. I don’t think that

the world will simply run out of bandwidth and we’ll all be weeping over our clogged tubes.

Not unless we block the expansion of new network capacity and capability. (more…)

Check out Stephen Wolfram’s new project called Alpha, which moves beyond searching for information on the Web and toward the integration of knowledge into more useful, higher level patterns. I find the prospect of offloading onto Stephen Wolfram lots of data mining and other drudgery immediately appealing for my own research and analysis work. Quicker research would yield more — and one might hope, better — analysis. One can imagine lots of hiccups in getting to a real product, but this video demo offers a fun and enticing beginning.

When Cablevision of New York announced this week it would begin offering broadband Internet service of 101 megabits per second for $99 per month, lots of people took notice. Which was the point.

Maybe the 101-megabit product is a good experiment. Maybe it will be successful. Maybe not. One hundred megabits per second is a lot, given today’s applications (and especially given cable’s broadcast tree-and-branch shared network topology). A hundred megabits, for example, could accommodate more than five fully uncompressed high-definition TV channels, or 10+ compressed HD streams. It’s difficult to imagine too many households finding a way today to consume that much bandwidth. Tomorrow is another question. The bottom line is that in addition to making a statement, Cablevision is probably mostly targeting the small business market with this product.

Far more perplexing than Cablevision’s strategy, however, was the reaction from groups like the reflexively critical Free Press:

We are encouraged by Cablevision’s plan to set a new high-speed bar of service for the cable industry. . . . this is a long overdue step in the right direction.

Free Press usually blasts any decision whatever by any network or media company. But by praising the 101-megabit experiment, Free Press is acknowledging the perfect legitimacy of charging variable prices for variable products. Pay more, get more. Pay less, get more affordably the type of service that will meet your needs the vast majority of the time. (more…)

The supposed top finding of a new report commissioned by the British telecom regulator Ofcom is that we won’t need any QoS (quality of service) or traffic management to accommodate next generation video services, which are driving Internet traffic at consistently high annual growth rates of between 50% and 60%. TelecomTV One headlined, “Much ado about nothing: Internet CAN take video strain says UK study.” 

But the content of the Analysys Mason (AM) study, entitled “Delivering High Quality Video Services Online,” does not support either (1) the media headline — “Much ado about nothing,” which implies next generation services and brisk traffic growth don’t require much in the way of new technology or new investment to accommodate them — or (2) its own “finding” that QoS and traffic management aren’t needed to deliver these next generation content and services.

For example, AM acknowledges in one of its five key findings in the Executive Summary: 

innovative business models might be limited by regulation: if the ability to develop and deploy novel approaches was limited by new regulation, this might limit the potential for growth in online video services.

In fact, the very first key finding says:

A delay in the migration to 21CN-based bitstream products may have a negative impact on service providers that use current bitstream products, as growth in consumption of video services could be held back due to the prohibitive costs of backhaul capacity to support them on the legacy core network. We believe that the timely migration to 21CN will be important in enabling significant take-up of online video services at prices that are reasonable for consumers.

So very large investments in new technologies and platforms are needed, and new regulations that discourage this investment could delay crucial innovations on the edge. Sounds like much ado about something, something very big.  (more…)

Saul Hansell has done some good analysis of the broadband market (as I noted here), and I’m generally a big fan of the NYT’s Bits blog. But this item mixes cable TV apples with switched Internet oranges. And beyond that just misses the whole concept of products and prices.

Questioning whether Time Warner will be successful in its attempt to cap bandwidth usage on its broadband cable modem service — effectively raising the bandwidth pricing issue — Hansell writes:

I tried to explore the marginal costs with [Time Warner's] Mr. Hobbs. When someone decides to spend a day doing nothing but downloading every Jerry Lewis movie from BitTorrent, Time Warner doesn’t have to write a bigger check to anyone. Rather, as best as I can figure it, the costs are all about building the network equipment and buying long-haul bandwidth for peak capacity.

If that is true, the question of what is “fair” is somewhat more abstract than just saying someone who uses more should pay more. After all, people who watch more hours of cable television don’t pay more than those who don’t.

It’s also true that a restaurant patron who finishes his meal doesn’t pay more than someone who leaves half the same menu item on his plate. If he orders two bowls of soup, he gets more soup. He can’t order one bowl of soup and demand each of his five dining partners also be served for free. Pricing decisions depend upon the product and the granularity that is being offered. (more…)

Sun Microsystems was the first to know — and to boldly say — that “the network is the computer.” And yet they couldn’t capitalize on this deep and early insight. Here are six reason why.

Some good history on the evolution of the Internet. I especially liked Steve Crocker’s story about how he and his fellow early Internet developers would share ideas — not by email but by mail. Here’s Crocker’s first “Request for Comments” detailing networking protocols. Today there are some 5,000 RFCs.

As the Internet’s power grows — dominating our public discourse and driving deeper into every industry and commercial realm — it becomes a bigger target. As the key platform of our knowledge economy, it invites mischief, or worse.

Most digital citizens know the hassles and even dangers of viruses, phishing, and all manner of mal-ware. But cybersecurity is a much broader and deeper topic, and will grow ever more so. The Center for Strategic and International Studies published a good report on December 8 detailing the threats and offering recommendations to “the 44th Presidency.” CSIS suggested a number of specific actions, among them:

(1) a comprehensive national strategy; (2) that the White House lead the effort; (3) that we “regulate cyberspace”; (4) that we authenticate identities; (5) modernizing old laws not suited to the digital networked world; (6) building secure government systems;  and (7) not starting over, given what they saw as the previous administration’s productive start.

Yesterday the Senate Commerce Committee moved the ball forward with a hearing on the topic, including the head of the CSIS study James Lewis, nuclear engineer Joseph Weiss, cyber-guru Ed Amoroso of AT&T, and Eugene Spafford of Purdue University’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security — better known by its brilliant acronym, CERIAS. (more…)

As the wireless world continues to churn out terrific new hardware and software innovations and network speeds, Engadget talks about the industry in depth with AT&T’s wireless chief Ralph de la Vega.

Calm and reasoned discussion in debates over broadband and Internet policy are rare. But Saul Hansell, in a series of posts at the NYTimes Bits blog, does an admirable job surveying international broadband comparisons. Here are parts I and II, with part III on the way. [Update: Here's part III. And here's a good previous post on "broadband stimulus."]

So far Hansell has asked two basic questions: Why is theirs faster? And why is theirs cheaper? “Theirs” being non-American broadband.

His answers: “Their” broadband is not too much faster than American broadband, at least not anymore. And their broadband is cheaper for a complicated set of reasons, but mostly because of government price controls that could hurt future investment and innovation in those nations that practice it. 

Ask America. We already tried it. But more on that later.

Hansell makes several nuanced points: (1) broadband speeds depend heavily on population density. The performance and cost of communications technologies are distance-sensitive. It’s much cheaper to deliver fast speeds in Asia’s big cities and Europe’s crowded plains than across America’s expanse. (2) Hansell also points to studies showing some speed-inflation in Europe and Asia. In other words, advertised speeds are often overstated. But most importantly, (3) Hansell echoes my basic point over the last couple years:

. . . Internet speeds in the United States are getting faster. Verizon is wiring half its territory with its FiOS service, which strings fiber optic cable to people’s homes. FiOS now offers 50 Mbps service and has the capacity to offer much faster speeds. As of the end of 2008, 4.1 million homes in the United States had fiber service, which puts the United States right behind Japan, which has brought fiber directly to 8.2 million homes, according to the Fiber to the Home Council. Much of what is called fiber broadband in Korea, Sweden and until recently Japan, only brings the fiber to the basement of apartment buildings or street-corner switch boxes.

AT&T is building out that sort of network for its U-Verse service, running fiber to small switching stations in neighborhoods, so that it can offer much faster DSL with data speed of up to 25 Mbps and and Internet video as well. And cable systems, which cover more than 90 percent of the country, are starting to deploy the next generation of Internet technology called Docsis 3.0. It can offer speeds of 50 Mbps. . . .

(more…)

See this fun interview with the energetic early Web innovator Marc Andreesen. Andreesen is on the Facebook board, has his own social networking company called Ning, and is just launching a new venture fund. He talks about Kindles, iPhones, social nets, the theory of cascading innovation, and says we should create new “virtual banks” to get past the financial crisis.

Take a look at this 40 minute interview with Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of graphics chip maker Nvidia. It’s a non-technical discussion of a very important topic in the large world of computing and the Internet. Namely, the rise of the GPU — the graphics processing unit.

Almost 40 years ago the CPU — or central processing unit — burst onto the scene and enabled the PC revolution, which was mostly about word processing (text) and simple spreadsheets (number crunching). But today, as Nvidia and AMD’s ATI division add programmability to their graphics chips, the GPU becomes the next generation general purpose processor. (Huang briefly describes the CUDA programmability architecture, which he compares to the x86 architecture of the CPU age.) With its massive parallelism and ability to render the visual applications most important to today’s consumers — games, photos, movies, art, photoshop, YouTube, GoogleEarth, virtual worlds — the GPU rises to match the CPU’s “centrality” in the computing scheme.

Less obvious, the GPU’s attributes also make it useful for all sorts of non-consumer applications like seismic geographic imaging for energy exploration, high-end military systems, and even quantitative finance.

Perhaps the most exciting shift unleashed by the GPU, however, is in cloud computing. At the January 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, AMD and a small but revolutionary start-up called LightStage/Otoy announced they are building the world’s fastest petaflops supercomputer at LightStage/Otoy’s Burbank, CA, offices. But this isn’t just any supercomputer. It’s based on GPUs, not CPUs. And it’s not just really, really fast. Designed for the Internet age, this “render cloud” will enable real-time photorealistic 3D gaming and virtual worlds across the Web. It will compress the power of the most advanced motion picture CGI (computer generated imaging) techniques, which can consume hours to render one movie frame and months to produce movie sequences, into real-time . . . and link this power to the wider world over the Net. 

Watch this space. The GPU story is big.

How has debt-laden Level 3 survived (at least so far) two crashes now? Dennis Berman tells the story.

Since 2001, it has been paying $500 million to $600 million a year in interest. Yet it has never been able to cut its long-term debt load below $5 billion. Even worse, Level 3 hasn’t made a penny of profit since 1999. Its stock has traded below $8 for the past eight years. It closed at 98 cents on Monday.

Level 3 seemed a prime target to get pulled into today’s great credit maw, where decent but otherwise cash-strapped companies go to die. By November, bond investors were seriously doubting the company’s ability to pay off $1.1 billion in debt coming due this year and next, valuing its bonds as low as 30 cents on the dollar.

But the company has convinced large equity holders to bail them out of the crushing debt load, at least for the next year. 2010 and beyond will still be rough. Berman’s article did not mention the angel who saved Level 3 during the tech/telecom crash of 2000-02: Warren Buffett.

For those who found the Google-net-neutrality-edge-caching story confusing, here’s a terrifically lucid primer by my PFF colleague Adam Marcus explaining “edge caching” and content delivery networks (CDNs) and, even more basically, the concepts of bandwidth and latency.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal story on the supposed softening of Google’s “net neutrality” policy stance, which I posted about here, predictably got all the nerds talking. 

Here was my attempt, over at the Technology Liberation Front, to put this topic in perspective:

_______________________ 

Bandwidth, Storewidth, and Net Neutrality

Very happy to see the discussion over The Wall Street Journal’s Google/net neutrality story. Always good to see holes poked and the truth set free.

But let’s not allow the eruptions, backlashes, recriminations, and “debunkings” – This topic has been debunked. End of story. Over. Sit down! – obscure the still-fundamental issues. This is a terrific starting point for debate, not an end.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) and caching have always been a part of my analysis of the net neutrality debate. Here was testimony that George Gilder and I prepared for a Senate Commerce Committee hearing almost five years ago, in April 2004, where we predicted that a somewhat obscure new MCI “network layers” proposal, as it was then called, would be the next big communications policy issue. (At about the same time, my now-colleague Adam Thierer was also identifying this as an emerging issue/threat.)

Gilder and I tried to make the point that this “layers” — or network neutrality — proposal would, even if attractive in theory, be very difficult to define or implement. Networks are a dynamic realm of ever-shifting bottlenecks, where bandwidth, storage, caching, and peering, in the core, edge, and access, in the data center, on end-user devices, from the heavens and under the seas, constantly require new architectures, upgrades, and investments, thus triggering further cascades of hardware, software, and protocol changes elsewhere in this growing global web. It seemed to us at the time, ill-defined as it was, that this new policy proposal was probably a weapon for one group of Internet companies, with one type of business model, to bludgeon another set of Internet companies with a different business model. 

We wrote extensively about storage, caching, and content delivery networks in the pages of the Gilder Technology Report, first laying out the big conceptual issues in a 1999 article, “The Antediluvian Paradigm.” [Correction: "The Post-Diluvian Paradigm"] Gilder coined a word for this nexus of storage and bandwidth: Storewidth. Gilder and I even hosted a conference, also dubbed “Storewidth,” dedicated to these storage, memory, and content delivery network technologies. See, for instance, this press release for the 2001 conference with all the big players in the field, including Akamai, EMC, Network Appliance, Mirror Image, and one Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of . . . Novell. In 2002, Google’s Larry Page spoke, as did Jay Adelson, founder of the big data-center-network-peering company Equinix, Yahoo!, and many of the big network and content companies. (more…)

As perhaps the earliest opponent of “net neutrality” regulation, it feels good to know I’m no longer “evil.”

When you’ve written as much as I have about the weird Web topic known as “network neutrality,” this is big news indeed.

The celebrated openness of the Internet — network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic — is quietly losing powerful defenders.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

What some innocuously call “equal network access,” others call meddlesome regulation. Net neutrality could potentially provide a platform for Congress and the FCC to micromanage everything on the Net, from wires and switches to applications and services to the bits and bytes themselves. It is a potentially monstrous threat to dynamic innovation on the fast-growing Net, where experimentation still reigns. 

But now Google, a newly powerful force in Washington and Obamaland, may be reversing course 180-degrees. The regulatory threat level may have just dropped from orange to yellow.

Update: Richard Bennett expertly comments here.

An investigation confirms that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s crusade to force à la carte pricing and unbundling of cable TV channels was indeed a sham, as many of us have been saying for years.

My colleague Ken Ferree comments here.

A new report says we’re not prepared for the cyberwars to come and need a White House office to address emerging threats.

The venerable Economist magazine has made a hash of my research on the growth of the Internet, which examines the rich media technologies now flooding onto the Web and projects Internet traffic over the coming decade. This “exaflood” of new applications and services represents a bounty of new entertainment, education, and business applications that can drive productivity and economic growth across all our industries and the world economy. 

But somehow, The Economist was convinced that my research represents some “gloomy prophesy,” that I am “doom-mongering” about an Internet “overload” that could “crash” the Internet. Where does The Economist find any evidence for these silly charges?

In a series of reports, articles (here and here), and presentations around the globe — and in a long, detailed, nuanced, very pleasant interview with The Economist, in which I thought the reporter grasped the key points — I have consistently said the exaflood is an opportunity, an embarrassment of riches.

I’ve also said it will take a lot of investment in networks (both wired and wireless), data centers, and other cloud infrastructure to both drive and accommodate this exaflood. Some have questioned this rather mundane statement, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why they deny building this amazingly powerful global Internet might cost a good bit of money.

One critic of mine has said he thinks we might need to spend $5-10 billion on new Net infrastructure over the next five years. What? We already spend some $70 billion a year on all communications infrastructure in the U.S. with an ever greater portion of that going toward what we might consider the Net. Google invests more than $3 billion a year in its cloud infrastructure, Verizon is building a $25-billion fiber-to-the-home network, and AT&T is investing another $10 billion, just for starters. Over the last 10 years, the cable TV companies invested some $120 billion. And Microsoft just yesterday said its new cloud computing infrastructure will consist of 20 new “super data centers,” at $1 billion a piece.

I’m glad The Economist quoted my line that “today’s networks are not remotely prepared to handle this exaflood.” Which is absolutely, unambiguously, uncontroversially true. Can you get all the HD video you want over your broadband connection today? Do all your remote applications work as fast as you’d like? Is your mobile phone and Wi-Fi access as widespread and flawless as you’d like? Do videos or applications always work instantly, without ever a hint of buffer or delay? Are today’s metro switches prepared for a jump from voice-over-IP to widespread high-resolution video conferencing? No, not even close.

But as we add capacity and robustness to many of these access networks, usage and traffic will surge, and the bottlenecks will shift to other parts of the Net. Core, edge, metro, access, data center — the architecture of the Net is ever-changing, with technologies and upgrades and investment happening in different spots at varying pace. This is not a debate about whether the Internet will “crash.” It’s a discussion about how the Net will evolve and grow, about what its capabilities and architecture will be, and about how much it will cost and how we will govern it, but mostly about how much it will yield in new innovation and economic growth.

The Economist and the myriad bloggers, who everyday try to kill some phantom catastrophe theory I do not recognize, are engaging in the old and very tedious practice of setting up digital straw men, which they then heroically strike down with a bold punch of the delete button. Ignoring the real issues and the real debate doesn’t take much effort, nor much thought.

Microsoft, having a couple weeks ago finally capitulated to the Web with the announcement of Ray Ozzie’s new Net-based strategy, now says it will build 20 new data centers at $1 billion a piece. Google is already investing some $3 billion a year on its cloud infrastructure.

Lots of people have criticized my rough estimates of a couple hundred billion in new Net investment over the next five years, saying it’s closer to $5-10 billion, and I wonder what the heck they are thinking.

My colleague Adam Thierer with an excellent post warning of the coming war on Google:

So, here we have Wu raising the specter of search engine bias and Lessig raising the specter of Google-as-panopticon. And this comes on top of groups like EPIC and CDT calling for more regulation of the online advertising marketplace in the name of protecting privacy.  Alarm bells must be going off at the Googleplex. But we all have reason to be concerned because greater regulation of Google would mean greater regulation of the entire code / application layer of the Net.  It’s bad enough that we likely have greater regulation of the infrastructure layer on the way thanks to Net neutrality mandates. We need to work hard to contain the damage of increased calls for government to get it’s hands all over every other layer of the Net.

For someone like me who studies cloud computing and Internet traffic, which is measured in tera-, peta-, and exabytes, Google’s terabyte sorting record is interesting:

we were able to sort 1TB (stored on the Google File System as 10 billion 100-byte records in uncompressed text files) on 1,000 computers in 68 seconds. By comparison, the previous 1TB sorting record is 209 seconds on 910 computers.

But I suppose I can see how you might not feel the same way.

In the context of potential federal media regulation known as “à la carte,” my colleague Adam Thierer comments on new Internet video technologies and content here and here, and expertly reiterates an old theme of mine, namely that the Internet *is* à la carte.