Category: Government
A few weeks before the FCC vote on Net Neutrality, I spent the weekend in Las Vegas with my dad. He recently wrote a beautiful post about his side of the experience.
Right after we got back I wrote a post about explaining Net Neutrality to him and referenced drawing a picture on a napkin as I explained how the Internet actually works and why Net Neutrality is important.
“Over ice cream (#3 for this trip) I drew him a detailed picture on a napkin of how the Internet actually worked. I rarely do this since I just assume everyone understands it. Bad assumption. It was fascinating to answer his questions, explain the parts he had wrong, and help him understand some nuances around data and how it gets from one place to another. At some point I mentioned John Oliver and Cable Company Fuckery to him.”
I assumed the napkin was long gone as I vaguely remember cleaning up the table after we ate our ice cream and throwing everything away. But, lo and behold, my dad sent me an email this morning titled “Net Neutrality Napkin.”
Dad, I’m always amazed at what you find in your pockets and the bottom of your desk drawers.
Some Final Thoughts on the FCC and Title II Ahead of Tomorrow’s Vote on Net Neutrality
Tomorrow, the FCC is expected to vote on a proposal for new rules around Net Neutrality. The vote is likely to be 3-2 in favor of the rules, split along partisan lines (3 democrats, 2 republicans – shocker…). There has been an enormous amount of bombastic rhetoric in the past few months about the issue that has recently become especially politicized in the same way the debate about SOPA/PIPA unfolded.
I’ve been very public about being a supporter of net neutrality and the idea that the FCC should put down clear, legally enforceable rules around it. However, every time I write or tweet something about the topic, I get a flurry of responses telling me why I’m wrong, why this is bad, or why I’m an idiot. I find these helpful as they force me to focus on the objectionable issues, although I have to put some work in to separate the noise from the signal. And unfortunately there’s a lot of noise these days around anything our government tries to do.
I’m not a lawyer, nor do I ever plan to be one, but I spent plenty of time with them. As a result, over the past 20 years I’ve learned a lot about how the law works in the context of innovation, new products, infrastructure, and consumer protection. I’ve been involved in a number of public policy debates, especially around the Internet, innovation, and immigration. And I’ve made a bunch of friends, on all sides of the discussions, who I’ve argued with, agreed with, been frustrated by, and likely annoyed greatly with my strong opinions and continuous questions to better understand whether my opinions are valid. I learn, evolve, and change my mind based on data and compelling arguments, not on sound bites, so this can be hard work to sort through, but it’s the way my brain was trained, both through my experience at MIT and reflecting on many of the successes and failures I’ve had along with what I’ve learned from them.
A few weeks ago I wrote the post Explaining Net Neutrality to My Dad. He and I engaged in a continuous discussion about this in the past few weeks. He’s endlessly intellectually curious and deeply negative about our government as a result of their engagement with the healthcare system so he has been sending me the “anti-net neutrality” and “the government is taking over the Internet” messaging that has been floating around. I was able to directly respond to some of it, especially the real nonsense, but there were some things that I didn’t completely understand, so I talked to some of my lawyer friends about it.
A few days ago, I decided to summarize what I believe to be the truth around several of the key things I keep hearing over and over as opposition to the FCC proposal, especially around the reclassification of ISPs as Title II telecommunication services. My perspective is informed by two meetings I’ve attended with Wheeler – one a year ago where I was terrified by where he was starting from and one a month ago where I strongly endorsed where he had ended up. In the most recent meeting, I learned a lot about his own intellectual framework for what he’s proposing, which I wrote about in my post Death of Distance and the End of Time.
So – here are a few of the things that I’m regularly hearing as opposition to the new FCC proposal, along with what I’ve believe to be the facts. This comes from the premise that I have which is that strong net neutrality rules are critical to protect an Open Internet and that I’m directly aligned with companies like Twitter who recently wrote why they favor #NetNeutrality and Tim Berners Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, who recently said “YES to #NetNeutrality.”
The Government Is Taking Over The Internet: The rules will not lead to the FCC regulating the Internet. The rules around Title II only allow the FCC to regulate transmission which many refer to as the on-ramps to the Internet provided by cable and telephone companies. There used to be rules around this, but there haven’t been for over a year since the federal court struck down the prior rules.
Title II Will Make the Internet a Public Utility: Reclassifying ISPs as Title II “telecommunications services” will not make them “public utilities.” While Title II is the firmest legal ground for the net neutrality rules, the FCC is applying a light-touch version of Title II where there will be no rate regulation, no tariffs, no burdensome administrative filings, and no last-mile unbundling. Instead, there will be prohibitions on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.The FCC will be able to stop any practice that harms user choice or edge providers’ ability to reach users and will be able to act on complaints that ISPs are acting unreasonably when they interconnect with transit providers (e.g. Level 3) or content delivery networks (e.g. Netflix, Amazon.)
ISPs and Broadband Companies Will Invest Less In Their Networks: There is no evidence that Title II will cause ISPs to invest less in their networks. Most Wall Street analysts have said that they see no threat to investment from reclassification because there will be no rate regulation. Sprint, Google, Verizon, Charter, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and others have told Wall Street that Title II poses no threat to investment. Mobile voice is already regulated under light-touch Title II and wireless companies invested nearly $300 billion in their networks in the last 20 years.
Obama is Forcing the FCC To Do This: When I met with Wheeler about a year ago, he had a very different starting point around this issue. I had a strong negative public reaction to this during the initial public comment period and made my point of view clear on the original set of proposals along with about four million of my American friends. I’ve been told this was by far the most comments on FCC rules of any sort. The vast majority of people asked for the strongest possible net neutrality rules which align with the Title II approach. These got incorporated into the proposal as a result of this public response and Obama didn’t actually weigh in publicly until after Title II was incorporated into the proposal. When I checked on history, it turns out that it’s not unusual for the President to weigh in on FCC matters as Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush have all publicly urged the FCC to take certain actions on regulatory matters.
Everything Was Done In Secret: This is a talking point that apparently started when one of the FCC Commissions (Ajit Pai) put it out there that the upcoming final proposal (what government people call “the order”) was not made public before the FCC vote. It turns out that no FCC Chairman has ever made the full text of an order public prior to a vote. Given how the existing process works, which incorporates public comments on the draft (remember those four million comments I mentioned above), the notion around the FCC making the final proposal public before the vote seems like a cynical ploy for delay, as any comment on the proposal would have to then be considered and incorporated, leading to an endless cycle of public comment.
Ultimately, Congress can weigh in with new laws around this. Remember that the FCC can’t make new laws, they can only enforce things under current laws. There’s a clear-minded article in the New York Times this morning titled F.C.C. Net Neutrality Rules Clear Hurdle as Republicans Concede to Obama that create additional perspective on both the partisan dynamics at play along with the challenge that paralyzes Congress in general right now.
While this certainly isn’t the end of this issue, and given the dynamics around networks in general, I expect it will be one we face for the rest of time, I continue to believe strongly in the proposal the FCC is considering. And I’m proud that so many people have engaged constructively in the discussion.
As an almost daily writer, I occasionally feel that something I’ve written or said has long term impact and meaning. Today is not one of those days.
Instead, I give you Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech on August 28, 1963 which we now refer to as his “I Have A Dream” speech. For the original speech, take a look in that US Archives copy or at the text of the speech on the BBC website.
Stop whatever you are doing and take 18 minutes out of your day to watch one of the greatest speeches of all time. And then take at least two more minutes to contemplate what you might do differently in your life going forward from today.
I’ve sat in the background and expressed my opinion privately on the energy utility municipalization issue in Boulder. It’s been one where the debate and exploration so far has been much more emotional, at least in my opinion, that rational.
Beth Hartman recently reached out to me with an extremely clear point of view that parallels mine. It was stimulated by a recently announced spending increase of 18% for the 2015 budget, borrowing $4 million from the general fund for the municipal utility effort. I’ve long felt that the city of Boulder could take a much more innovative approach to this problem, but everyone I’ve suggested this to who is an advocate of municipalization had said “but we can’t spend the money on that.” Now that the city has demonstrated that they’ll take money from the general fund to spend on municipalization, I encourage everyone in Boulder to rethink the path we are taking.
Following is the OpEd and Beth and I had published in the Boulder Daily Camera today. I’m certain it will generate plenty of emotional response, which I put in the “whatever” category. I’m much more interested in the rational, thoughtful responses that discuss what we could be doing around our energy future that’s actually progressive as well as innovative.
The original article is at Boulder’s budget: Our best bet?, but the Daily Camera took all the links out, so if you want the backstory, they are in the post that follows.
Boulder’s Budget: Our Best Bet? By Brad Feld and Beth Hartman
Boulder recently announced a spending increase of 18% for the 2015 budget, borrowing $4 million from the general fund for the municipal utility effort – in addition to the money that the city has already spent. With the utility business model currently under pressure around the world from disruptive forces that many in the industry refer to as a “death spiral,” the city’s assertion that this money will soon be repaid should be carefully examined by every citizen and business leader in town.
Citizens and businesses would be wise to scrutinize this investment not just because of the millions that are being spent now, but more importantly because of the serious impact that potentially higher electricity prices could have on this community in the coming years. While Boulder is currently building a strong reputation as an entrepreneurial ecosystem to rival Silicon Valley and is consistently voted among the top cities to live in the country, there is almost nothing more fundamental to quality of life and competitive business than affordable energy.
A municipal utility may be able to provide electricity that is cheaper or about as affordable as our current utility offers – or the city may waste millions of dollars trying, just as communities in Florida, California, and New Mexico have done recently. Although the city is hoping that rates will be lower and Boulder will actually earn money, the fact that Barclays recently downgraded the entire utility sector indicates that this is not currently a business model with strong growth opportunity for new entrants. In addition to uncertainty about costs, there are several big legal questions pending that must be answered before we know if the plan will even work, over which the city has little to no control.
Why are we taking this considerable risk? Instead of buying a bunch of old poles and wires, we could be spending the money on more innovative initiatives that would have a real impact on saving energy and reducing carbon emissions, such as solar panels, an electric vehicle car sharing program, or installing Nest thermostats the way Airbnb is doing.
There are many innovative energy companies right here in Boulder, offering an opportunity to support solutions that can be rapidly replicated in other cities around the world. Instead of spending so much on a 20th century business model, the city could focus more on coordinating efforts between local energy entrepreneurs, the university, research labs, and consulting companies, providing thought leadership on new energy solutions. This would also offer amazing economic benefits to our own community, through helping to create more jobs at Boulder-based organizations. The city could start offering this support now, without waiting to see what happens with the uncertainty of forming a utility.
Another important question is what else our community could be doing with the millions of dollars we are spending on this effort, whether it’s schools, roads, affordable housing, open space maintenance, or any other initiative that our city needs. If you are a citizen who is concerned about the city’s new budget, please reach out to city council and ask them what else we could be doing with so much money. We could also ask for more details on how exactly they plan to deliver an energy service that is at least as good as what we’re getting now.
If you understand the difference between renewable energy and efficiency, distributed generation and demand response, and net metering and decoupling, please reach out to city council and have a conversation with them about their plans to start a utility during this time of disruption for an incredibly complex and challenging industry. Finally, if you are a business owner and you rely on affordable energy for your company to run every day, please reach out to city council and ask them how they are going to support your needs.
Getting into the utility business now is in many ways akin to starting a land line telephone company right when the internet and cell phones were really starting to get popular. Our community needs to question the wisdom of our city investing in this industry right now, with so many real risks.
John Oliver and his new show Last Week Tonight has become Sunday night entertainment in my house. He’s simultaneously brilliant and hilarious.
Oliver took on Net Neutrality on Sunday. Due to my cable connection being down, I didn’t see it until Monday when I was able to watch it on my DVR. He started off by reminding us that American’s simply don’t respond to “boring” so he suggested we change the phrase “Net Neutrality” to “Cable Company Fuckery.” He then goes on to explain, in clear and outstanding prose while being hysterically funny, exactly what is going on.
If you are perplexed by Net Neutrality and are having trouble parsing the discussion, just watch this. If you want to laugh your ass off, watch this. And then take the requested action at the end.
Boing Boing has a good set up cribnotes up on their post It’s not Net Neutrality that’s at stake, it’s Cable Company Fuckery. The snippets they highlighted (a few of many) were:
– On Internet Fast Lanes: “If we let cable companies offer two speeds of service, they won’t be Usain Bolt and Usain Bolt on a motorbike. They’ll be Usain Bolt and Usain Bolted-to-an-anchor.”
– On the Rare Cooperation Between Consumer Advocates & Major Tech Companies: “What’s being proposed is so egregious, activists and corporations have been forced onto the same side. That’s basically Lex Luthor knocking on Superman’s apartment door and going, ‘Listen, I know we have our differences but we have got to get rid of that asshole in apartment 3-B.”
– On the Appointment of Former Cable/Wireless Industry Front Man Tom Wheeler As FCC Chair: “The guy who used to run the cable industry’s lobbying arm is now running the agency tasked with regulating it. That is the equivalent of needing a babysitter and hiring a dingo.”
– On the Notion that the Comcast/TWC Merger is Okay Because the Companies Don’t Overlap: “You can’t reduce competition when nobody is competing. You could not be describing a monopoly more clearly if you were wearing a metal while driving a metal car after winning second prize in a beauty contest.”
This effectively creates “fast” and “slow” lanes for the Internet which means that website owners and entrepreneurs may be forced to pay an arbitrary fee to ISPs like Comcast and Time Warner if they want their visitors to be able to access their website at regular speeds – or at all.
Last week I wrote a post titled Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane. What you are seeing on my site for the rest of this week is the demo. Don’t worry, you’ll only have to endure that popup and slow down once, unless the FCC does something like what they are proposing with these new rules.
#StopTheSlowLane is an initiative to raise awareness about this issue. At its core is a simple JavaScript widget, an animated GIF like the one below, or a WordPress Plugin for your website or blog that will inform your visitors about what’s going on and empower them to easily contact Congress and the FCC about the issue.
The call to action, js code, and WordPress plug in for #stoptheslowlane is available for you to put on your site if you want to demo this for your users. The GitHub repo fightforthefuture/stoptheslowlane has the full source code in case you want to modify / add to it.
Help us send a message that a slow lane on the Internet isn’t acceptable.
Just now Fred Wilson posted an Open Internet Letter to the FCC that my partners and I at Foundry Group signed on to. It came together in the last 24 hours and was driven by our friends at Union Square Ventures.
If you are a VC and are interested in signing on before we file this formally with the FCC, please send me or nick [at] usv [dot] com an email.
Help us avoid the fast lane / slow lane / no lane problem on the Internet that the new FCC proposed regulations may create, which we strongly believe will stifle innovation, inhibit competition, and limit interest in new startup activity.
Yesterday when we were having Comcast issues in downtown Boulder, I thought about how slow the Internet speed at my office was. For several hours, it was 0 Mbps down and 0 Mbps up (0/0) until I gave up and tethered my iPhone to my computer and used Verizon LTE for the rest of the afternoon.
When I got home, Pandora had trouble starting up on my CenturyLink connection, which Speedtest showed was 2/0.5. So I switched over to my other ISP at home, Skybeam, and got 9.5/2.5. This morning CenturyLink is showing up as 8.5/0.75. Recognize that this is my actual speed, not what I’m paying for and could theoretically get. For example, on Skybeam I’m paying for “up to 15/3.”
At my office, on Comcast, I usually get 75/25. But even that feels slow after hanging out at my Google fiberhouse in Kansas City and getting 800/? (I don’t remember what the upload speed was.)
And yes – as a consumer, I’m spending a ton of money for all of this Internet connectivity.
Fred’s post from yesterday – The Fast Lane, The Slow Lane, and The No Lane – got me thinking. When the SOPA/PIPA issue came to a head, the most effective way to help people understand the potential implications was to blackout the Internet for a day.
What if we did the same by Demoing the Slow Lane for a day. Algorithmically, all sites could slow themselves down dramatically, demonstrating what performance might look like over a 1/1 pipe. Or even a 0.5/0.5 pipe. I’m no server expert, but it looks like Apache has a setting called mod_ratelimit that does bandwidth throttling for client connections. And I’m sure some intrepid readers could quickly come up with elegant solutions to this.
Let the world see “Waiting for”, “Connecting”, and “Buffering” show up in their browser continuously throughout the day. Explain what is going on. Then click a button to bypass the Slow Lane and get normal connectivity.
Instead of everyone getting tangled up in the legal question of what “net neutrality” means, consumers can see what could happen if / when ISPs can decide which companies get to use their fast lanes by paying extra and who is relegated to the slow lane.
Two big proposals from Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick today. First, he’s proposing to ban non-competition agreements. He’s also proposing an incredibly clever and innovative approach to immigration reform applicable only to Massachusetts.
I lived in the Boston-area for twelve years (Cambridge for four years and Boston for eight years. ) Even though I often say that was 11 years and 364 days too many for my “non-big city, non-east coast” personality, Boston still has a sweet spot in my heart. I had an amazing (and often excruciating) experience at MIT which was foundational to my personality, thought process, and character. I started and sold my first company there (first office – 875 Main Street, Cambridge; last office 1 Liberty Square, Boston). Techstars Boston was the first geographic expansion for Techstars. I’m not a sports fan but I always root for the Red Sox. I think I have more close friends in the VC business in Boston than in the Bay Area. Two of my closest friends – Will Herman and Warren Katz – both live there. And I know my way around downtown Boston – even after the Big Dig – better than any other downtown in the world.
The Massachusetts non-competition situation has always been stupid. In 2009, my partners and I at Foundry Group joined a coalition of VCs to try to eliminate non-competition agreements in MA. It’s awesome to see Governor Patrick take action on it since it’s one of the major inhibitors of the MA entrepreneurial scene.
The immigration report proposal is even more fascinating. It’s a great example of creative and innovation public-private policy at the state level to encourage and enhance entrepreneurship. Jeff Bussgang from Flybridge explains it succinctly in his post so I’ll just repeat it here.
“The idea is a simple one: create a private-public partnership to allow international entrepreneurs to come to Boston and be exempt from the restrictive H-1B visa cap. How is it possible to do this? The US Citizenship and Immigration Services Department (USCIS) has a provision that allows universities to have an exemption to the H-1B visa cap. Governor Deval Patrick announced today that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will work in partnership with UMass to sponsor international entrepreneurs to be exempt from that cap, funding the program with state money to kick start what we anticipate will be a wave of private sector support.”
Brilliant. As our federal government continues to struggle to make any real progress on immigration reform, I love to see it happening at the state level. In addition to being good for innovation, it’s the kind of thing that dramatically differentiates states from one another on a policy, business, and innovation dimension that actually matters and likely has significant long term positive economic impacts on the region.
Governor Patrick – kudos to you. Governor Hickenlooper – I encourage you to roll out exactly the same thing in the State of Colorado. I know exactly the people at CU who would be happy to lead this, as would I. And since one of our Senators (Michael Bennet) is leading the immigration reform effort in the US Senate and our other Senator (Udall) has been a strong supporter of the Startup Visa and immigration report from the first discussion about it in 2009, I expect you already know your broad constituents support it.
Oh – and to my friends in NY who have been helping on the immigration reform front, let’s crank this up in NY also! Why should MA have all the fun?