As if to ask: "Would we do that to you?"

Maybe it’s because incumbent telecom providers have lost every Net Neutrality argument that they’ve even forsaken the general appearance of "good behavior" for fear of proving the opposition’s points for them.

It’s hard to tell what motivation AT&T and Verizon would have for that. There could be many: they’ve quit arguing and have commenced to doing while they still can; they feel they’ve buried the argument, have won the government, and are therefore immune; or whoever makes and enforces policies isn’t communicating very well the spin-doctors trying sell a much different story.

Who knows? But it wasn’t long ago that the "solution in search of a problem" was relegated to isolated incidents in Canada and Net Neutrality proponents had only fear they could point to. (That wasn’t entirely true, just reviewing – concerned citizens had at least the words from the horse’s mouth to go on…)

Just after AT&T’s Pearl Jam fiasco, where a nice proof of concept was exhibited at the expense of Eddie Vedder’s right to speak, Verizon blames "a dusty policy" for disallowing a Pro-Choice group to send text messages across its system.

Regardless of your stance on that volatile matter, that is Verizon deciding who speaks and who doesn’t.

Call it the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Citing these two instances of censorship, as well as Verizon and AT&T’s close relationship with the National Security Agency (remember, the handing over of private citizen phone records?), Free Press is calling for Congressional hearings.

Which of course, we know from how Congress has dealt with both oil companies and juiced-up baseball pros, means a lot. But at least some feet may be held to a gentle candle flame, you know, for five minutes or so.

Oh well, it’s something, right?

"Phone companies are supposed to deliver our messages, not censor them," said Ben Scott, of Free Press, coordinator of SaveTheInternet.com. "If the phone company can’t tell you what to say on a phone call, then they shouldn’t be able to tell you what to say in a text message, an e-mail, or anywhere else. We can’t trust these corporate gatekeepers. Congress needs to step in immediately to safeguard free speech and the free flow of information."

I hope Ben doesn’t go through AT&T for Internet or mobile phone service. According to the company’s latest Terms of Service, they can disconnect you for talking trash about them if they like.

"The censorship policies of AT&T and Verizon are what we can expect to see time and again with these corporations as gatekeepers," said Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press. "Verizon’s text message ban is the same as Comcast blocking our email or AT&T preventing us from making phone calls. We need to put in place laws that protect our right to speak out on the Internet, on cell phones — everywhere."

Sort of seems that way. And sort of seems like they don’t care if it’s obvious anymore or not.

Cringely Details Why Your Broadband Stinks

Tech pundit Robert X. Cringely took a deeper look at something we’ve noted previously. Thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, telecoms profited handsomely from a broadband future that looks like a pipe dream today.

Cringely noted the efforts to deliver faster broadband services were meant to create a National Information Infrastructure at the federal and state levels. Federal deployment amounted to a mixed bag of success (schools and libraries) and failures (healthcare and public safety).

The state level represents where Americans were taken to the cleaners by an assortment of telecom interests. Per Cringely:

All 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia contracted with their local telecommunication utilities for the build-out of fiber and hybrid fiber-coax networks intended to bring bidirectional digital video service to millions of homes by the year 2000. The Telecom Act set the mandate but, as it works with phone companies, the details were left to the states. Fifty-one plans were laid and 51 plans failed.

Failure is not foreign to the information technology business. Big development projects fail all the time and I have written several times about this and how those failures come to be and how they can be avoided. But I find it hard to remember any company or industry segment ever going zero for 51. This is a failure rate so amazing that any statistician would question the motives of those even entering such an endeavor.

Between higher phone rates and tax breaks, the telecom industry pocketed some $200 billion over a ten-year period, 1994-2004. America lags behind much of Europe, not to mention high-speed front runners like Japan and South Korea, in terms of what people pay versus what they get in broadband access.

There’s a word for what America got in this confidence game. Filtering software doesn’t permit me to print it here.

Analysts cited by the Financial Times Mergermarket report think the big data centers Microsoft or Google could construct would lead them to offer hosting services.

The significant reason for this rests with the telecom industry in the country. Said Financial Times:

Paul Budde, an Australian telecommunications analyst agreed that “in a new digital media environment the value-added infrastructure will evolve around IT, including data centres, content hosting, management, billing and outsourcing.” This, he said, is one of the fastest growing segments of the market.

“In their scramble to keep their monopolies in place, the telcos have taken their eyes off the ball and, for example, MSN, Google and Yahoo are building more than one million servers as we speak,” Budde said. Telcos “should have been in this business,” but have chosen to see the Internet companies as enemies rather than customers, he said.

Such shortsightedness leaves big Internet companies without formidable entrenched telcos to battle, as they have to deal with in the US. Whether Microsoft and other companies want to step into Australian Internet hosting operations in this manner depends on how well they can profit from doing so.

Sam Lagrone, a reporter for The News & Observer, states that HB 1587 “would sharply limit local governments’ ability to create their own telecommunications network,” and “would not allow local governments to use tax revenue to fund any kind of telecommunications utility.”

At first glance, that might not be too upsetting.  After all, tax revenue is already spread pretty thin in most places, and local governments (or those around Lexington, Kentucky, anyway) might not be the best choice to deal with cutting-edge technology.

But John Burchett, Google’s state policy counsel, explained some of the bill’s negative implications in a letter to the North Carolina House Speaker, and suggested that it “would prevent cities and towns from partnering with private telecom providers to establish broadband networks” (italics mine).

“HB 1587 threatens to undermine the establishment of such partnerships, particularly in rural and high-cost urban areas of North Carolina in which the state’s incumbent providers are either serving poorly or not at all,” Burchett continued.

Burchett’s not alone in his opinion; as mentioned earlier, several other companies (and a number of North Carolina towns and cities) agree with Google.  The search engine company has clashed with telecoms on a number of occasions, and it looks like this is one battle that it will win.

As The Next Net’s Eric Schonfeld noted, Google’s proposed auction process is “much like the one it uses to sell advertising via its AdWords.”  And as Google suggested that just 5% of the available radio spectrum is sometimes used, Schonfeld added, “That would certainly make for a more efficient use of the spectrum.”

The FCC may also respond well to Google’s suggestions.  “FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has expressed general support for initiatives that drive wider broadband penetration,” reported Corey Boyles of the Associated Press.  “In an interview Monday, he said he hadn’t yet seen the Google submission but would consider any proposal that accomplishes this goal.”

Of course, the telecoms are liable to object to Google’s interference, and some uninvolved bystanders may do the same – it is a little unnerving to have any company in a close dialogue with the government.  Blair Levin, a telecommunications analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, also told the AP that “questions exist about the economic viability of such a scheme.”

“For example,” Schonfeld writes, “he said a potential problem could arise if a bidder invests significantly in devices for the consumer market that would use spectrum but were then outbid in the auction.”

Yet all signs seem to indicate that Google’s proposal is looking forward.  Up next: Google begins working out a plan for peace in Iraq.

“It’s easy to try something new when you don’t have to deal with the old network because it’s in the lake,” New Orleans CIO Greg Meffert told PCWorld.

The wireless system was originally installed for security cameras and use for police communication. It’s now also used for a free municipal WiFi service. Lawyers and other businesspersons are making lemonade in the sultry city, employing VoIP phone calls from recently reopened coffee shops.

It’s little wonder the big telecoms are more than a little spooked by the implications of wireless networks and VoIP services. As New Orleans is demonstrating, it’s time for Verizon and others to evolve or die (and maybe pay a little penance for the years of nickel-and-diming and substandard customer service). The Big Easy is a sharp contrast to the Big Difficult.

Meanwhile, in other WiFi news, researchers say they’ve successfully developed a wirelessly controlled implanted microchip that can administer doses of medicine. Doctors say those capabilities would be beneficial for patients who have trouble following their schedules, or who need to have doses increased or decreased.

But the conspiracy theorists are already at work, imagining the potential for abuse and assassination.

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Verizon, along with BellSouth, AT&T, and others, want to charge Google and other content providers for the use of their networks.

I still am amazed at the audacity of the telecoms, who already reap a fortune from the fees you and I pay to access this content over their networks. Imagine paying your cable company for the shows you watch and then learning that the cable company also charged Discovery Channel and HBO to send their content over the cables. Absurd, isn’t it? The cable companies pay the content providers; when the content providers increase their fees, those costs are passed along to us, the customers. But the telecoms want it both ways-they want to charge the consumers AND the content providers and make money on both ends. The ethics of this philosophy make Jack Abramoff look like a saint.

Vint Cert, often referred to as the father of the Internet, sees other reasons to fear the telecoms’ greed. In the post interview, Cerf (who now works for Google), said, “”My big concern is that suddenly access providers want to step in the middle and create a toll road to limit customers’ ability to get access to services of their choice even though they have paid for access to the network in the first place.”

Since Congress is going to start discussing the issue (and the telecoms have a powerful lobby), we in the US need to make our feelings known to our legislators. I’ve never (to my recollection) used this blog to urge anybody to write their legislators. I’m doing it now. This outrage is goes far beyond the pale and must be stopped.

Read more about the issue here and especially here.

Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

Luigi: "Well everything breaks, don't it Colonel? (he breaks something on desk) Oh dear."
Dino: "Oh see, my brother's clumsy, Colonel, and when he gets unhappy he breaks things. Like say, he don't feel the army's playing fair by him, he may start breaking things, Colonel."
Colonel: "What is all this about?"
-- the Mafia puts the squeeze on the British Army, Monty Python's Flying Circus (ep8 season one)

What’s it all about? The same things it’s always been about – control and money. Those things can be neatly interchanged with lots of others. In discussing the Internet, an older reference could be to the auto industry. The Internet was supposed to put an end to buying cars at dealerships, cut costs by eliminating the middleman.

Seen that happen yet?

Today it’s about well-connected telecoms instead of well-connected car dealers, though. Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, sees net neutrality threatened in a detailed post he makes recounting several ways our northern neighbors have been affected by meddling telecoms. Here’s a few snippets from his article:

Control and money. Pay those in control to give you something that you thought you were paying for already. The theme seems to be “just because you’re paying for Internet access doesn’t mean you’re paying for *Internet* *access*.

It’s not just Professor Geist seeing this happen. Doc Searls has been warning people for over a solid month about the threat, but he gives credit to a host of people, including legal expert Lawrence Lessig for starting the discussion way back in 2002.

Searls currently serves at the senior editor for Linux Journal, and on that website he posted his “Saving The Net” essay in November. He summarizes the telecom perception of the Internet in one scenario of his essay, where the telecoms win the fight (spacing added):

Paranoid? They say it isn’t paranoia if people really are after you. BellSouth CTO William L. Smith may be threatening net neutrality:

Ed Whitacre, CEO of of SBC-now-AT&T (again), may be threatening net neutrality:

And yes, the US Government is definitely threatening net neutrality:

Both BellSouth and AT&T have been lobbying for a two-tiered Internet. Big online players like Google, Yahoo, AOL’s Time Warner, and tech giant Microsoft oppose them. Who wins will be important, but not nearly as important as who stands to lose.

We’ll close with how Searls suggested how a telecom-controlled future will look:

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

While firms like Brightcove and GoFish have been making deals that should make VOD easier to find and see for Internet users, obstacles still block the way for actually delivering video to users on a broad scale.

A number of groups in both the media and telecoms industries met in France, Reuters reported, to try and get Europeans connected to video online. The results of that conference didn’t make any strides toward resolving the issue of dividing the money that could be made from VOD.

Money isn’t the only concern, though it is the biggest concern. The potential for piracy worries the groups, as no method of copy protection has proven itself invulnerable to determined crackers.

If they can find a business model that suits everyone, or at least extracts the fewest complaints, control could stay in the hands of the studios instead of the distributors. On the music side of the entertainment industry, iTunes gained dominance and revitalized the major music labels.

Now those labels want a bigger cut of the profits available, and are battling with Apple CEO Steve Jobs over tiered pricing schemes for iTunes. Video media concerns don’t want to make a deal that doesn’t maximize their profits, but right now the telecoms aren’t eager to give up a huge portion of the VOD pie.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.