On 11/19/2014 8:49 AM, Drew Lentz wrote: > I put up a quick poll, results will be shared and are anonymous. > > https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3R6YTH9 > > I'm curious to see what the percentages are between those that support > and those that don't support the Title II argument. I've been trying > to get a good feel for who would and wouldn't like it (mostly it seems > carriers love it, web services hate it.) I have a feeling WISPs might > be on the "hate it" side, but I'm interested to find out. Thanks for > your answer and have a fantastic day! >
You asked the question very poorly, so there is no one correct answer. "Broadband" is an adjective. You don't regulate adjectives, you regulate nouns. Broadband what? This is the fallacy of today's public discourse -- they are using this adjective as a noun without the noun, so different people use it to have different referents. I think I'm in pretty close harmony with the WISPA position here, given that Steve Coran chose me to help him give his NN talk in Vegas last month based on my detailed Comments on the topic to the FCC. And I've been writing and Commenting on this for years. Several years ago I told the FCC that they were using this adjective as a noun, but that they could separate the two primary implied nouns by using a Spanish-language convention. El Broadband would refer to the physical facility, the high speed transmission medium. La Broadband would refer to the content of the facility, including Internet service delivered over it. (If you don't know Spanish, "el radio" is a device and "la radio" is a program.) But in lawyer terms, El Broadband is the telecommunications component, and La Broadband is the information service riding atop it. The reason NN is a Thing is that the FCC, in 2005, threw away the law (TA96) and decided that telephone companies could stop being common carriers, stop providing ISPs with El Broadband (raw DSL), and simply sell La Broadband as a vertically-integrated service with exclusive access to their formerly common-carrier facilities. So typical consumers in cities went from having many ISP choices (one cable company and many ISPs available via DSL) to two (one each cable and DSL). The public reaction to this was, understandably, rather negative. They recognized that they could be screwed by their cable and telco duopolists (monopolists in many areas, and more in the future as the ILECs abandon their copper plant without replacing it). But not recognizing the difference between a "network" (what carries IP) and an "internetwork" (the Internet itself, content slung across many networks), they demanded "network neutrality" referring to the ISP function itself. And the FCC obliged, being basically political, by proposing the regulation of Internet services, but not regulating the actual telecom provided by the monopolists. So I'm in favor of applying Title II to the actual telecommunications component of broadband services provided by incumbents, and those using rivalrous facilities (those that exclude others, including pole attachments, conduits, and exclusively-licensed frequencies). But those who only compete with incumbent cable and telco, or who use non-rivalrous facilities and frequencies (that includes essentially all WISPs), would not fall under Title II whatsoever, and neither would the Internet backbone or anything done on the Internet itself (IP layer on up, but this does not refer to IP-based voice services provided by facility owners). So I'm in favor of Title II for some broadband stuff (where it opens monopoly wire to competitive ISPs) but not others (where it regulates the Internet or WISPs). Got it? That's why the question is wrong. -- Fred R. Goldstein k1io fred "at" interisle.net Interisle Consulting Group +1 617 795 2701 _______________________________________________ Wireless mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
