Sidecut Reports

We now have an official “starting date” for round two of the net neutrality debate: Aug. 1, when the details of the FCC’s order against Comcast should be made public. News reports Thursday said that FCC chairman Kevin Martin is expected to announce on that date some form of penalties and punishment for the cable operator’s now-infamous blocking actions of peer-to-peer traffic on its broadband networks; but instead of putting a close to the matter, the FCC order is widely expected to just be the start of a fresh round of net neutrality gymnastics, which likely won’t reach a conclusion until after the November elections and into 2009, when the FCC will likely have a new cast of commissioners.

Though Martin said Friday he wouldn’t seek any fines against Comcast, the devil will be in the details of the order, especially the specifics about how Martin interprets how Comcast might have violated the FCC’s 2005 Internet policy principles order. The most immediate question after the order is released is whether or not Comcast will file a lawsuit against the FCC, challenging the agency’s jurisdiction over cable operators; as our analyst friends at Stifel, Nicolaus said in a note today, such legal actions may not be the best move for Comcast, since if the company was victorious in having the order revoked, it could spur Congress into taking more direct net neutrality action, passing legislation giving the FCC clear authority over cable operators.

There are also questions about how the order might affect operators of wireless networks, and how a new President and new Congress will deal with the issue going forward. To quote the conclusion of the Stifel, Nicolaus report today, no doubt penned in part by our good friend Blair Levin:

We see the real significance in how the order and the subsequent court decision sets the stage for how the new Congress and the new FCC may wish to address the wider network neutrality issue.

Sounds like a perfect time for a Sidecut Report on net neutrality, giving you all the background info on the issue as well as in-depth interviews with major players on both sides of the debate, along with analysis on how the topic will affect businesses, entrepreneurs and investors in entities that will be affected by new communications legislation or regulation. If you’d like an email notification when our report is ready, drop me a line at kaps at sidecutreports.com and I will ping you personally.

From the looks of it, the second round of the Net Neutrality debate is going to be a lot like the first: Lots of blather and not a lot of attention paid to facts, as warring factions try to tilt public perception in their favor. Surprising? Hardly, given the stakes of the game. Disappointing? Certainly, especially for those who were hoping that there could be more consensus-building discussions instead of the he-said/she-said arguing of the past, which hasn’t really served either side well.

Today’s editorial by Richard Bennett in the San Francisco Chronicle is a case in point: While Bennett, a self-proclaimed networking expert, makes valid points about the need for regulators to closely examine the market power of Google’s search advertising deals, his emotional one-offs on several items raise two red flags: Not only are some of them inaccurate, but their almost word-for-word mimicry of similar opinions voiced recently by the major telcos, AT&T and Verizon, shows there might be more to his argument than just the concerns of an average netizen.

In recent interviews for our upcoming Sidecut Report on Net Neutrality, I was reminded once again just how good the telcos are at playing the lobbying game by synchronizing their messaging. In separate interviews at the recent NXTcomm show, the top policy execs for both big telcos — AT&T’s Jim Cicconi and Verizon’s Tom Tauke — both stressed the ideas that A) the Net Neutrality debate was started by, and mostly run by, Google; and B) that privacy concerns, especially those related to online advertising, were a much bigger problem than net neutrality, which was already being solved anyway by business-to-business solutions. Clearly, I thought, these are the new marching orders for the telco side of the issue.

Both those ideas are embodied in Bennett’s essay, in which he accuses Google of a “political head-fake,” using net neutrality to distract regulators from the privacy concerns. I would posit that you could flip that coin on its head, and say that it’s the telcos who are raising a big stink about privacy in order to try to move net neutrality to a back burner. To me, they seem like two separate issues that should be resolved on their own merits. But neither am I naive! Welcome to Net Neutrality, Round Two.

While I still hope to interview Bennett for the upcoming report — it’s clear from his writing and public testimony that he knows more about networking than your average law professor — there are several points in his column that shouldn’t go unchallenged. The first is his claim that net neutrality is a topic that “Google thrust into the political spotlight two years ago.” The reality is that Google, if anything, was late to the game and supremely unorganized in its approach to net neutrality, not really getting its act together until it hired former MCI lobbyist Rick Whitt in early 2007. If anything, it was former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre’s not on my pipes bromide that made net neutrality a front-page topic, more so than anything Google did or said.

Bennett also says Google gets a free pass from the tech press, and that despite its “squeaky-clean” image, Google also has relations with “Washington power brokers,” perhaps an attempt to sketch Google as some nefarious broker of back-room deals. I’m not sure where Bennett is reading his so-called “cheerleading” for Google — most everything I can find in searches on the topic are straightforward, balanced news accounts, with plently of growing cynicism about Google and its endeavors in things like Street View. My pal Om has been anything but a Google cheerleader, like others questioning how Google will square its open networking ideals with the exclusive partner deals that were part of its $500 million investment in WiMax provider Clearwire.

On the D.C. influencer side, all I can say is it wasn’t Google who convinced Congress to change its mind and grant immunity to telcos in their FISA-related lawsuits. According to AT&T’s Cicconi, he oversees a staff of some 700 people. Google’s Whitt, on the other hand, is one of only three Google people “on the Hill,” and he is still the only one with a focus on the FCC. So who exactly is to be feared in Washington?

You could keep picking Bennett’s essay apart — claiming Google had “largely abandoned” net neutrality earlier this year is just laughable — but at some point you just get tired of the game, and wish there was a better way. Fortunately, many of the other players on both sides seem to be eager to work together to find solutions that don’t require political endgames; today’s surprise agreement between Vonage and Comcast to work together on networking concerns is just another signal that maybe there is a better place for the debate, centered around what is reasonable network management, and how it can be achieved so that both sides feel their concerns have been considered, and become part of the implementation. Other interviews we’ve done with folks like Public Knowledge and Comcast reflected such ideas.

Given Bennett’s past calls for more technical expertise and less political interference in debates about matters Internet, it’s surprising to read that he now thinks that regulators, and not market players, should intervene. But it is pretty clear who agrees almost exactly with everything he says today.

“The carriers try to frame this as being between themselves and Google — I’m a veteran of MCI so I saw this in the ’90s,” said Whitt in our recent interview. “They came after MCI as the poster child of the CLEC side, and unfortunately, they did a pretty good job.”

Will the same game work again? That will be one of the questions we ask in our upcoming report, which unfortunately has been slowed a bit by my recent surgery. If you want an email update when it’s ready, drop me a line at kaps at sidecutreports.com and I will ping you when it’s done.

Back in February, we reported how frustrated FCC commish Jonathan Adelstein was at the pace of broadband deployment in the U.S. While we liked his idea of national broadband summits, at the time it seemed like a good idea without much behind it.

Tuesday, Google and a few of its friends got behind the idea in a big way, launching something called Internetforeveryone.org, which is clearly a place for Google and others to promote their ideas for open, more-available Internet to the masses.

Google, which explains the new endeavor on its public policy blog, is continuing its all-in push into public policy by backing the Adelstein/Lessig/Free Press idea. By holding the as yet-unscheduled summits, Google and its partners can also produce dialogue that with any luck won’t be as scripted or stilted as the FCC hearings that pass for the best discourse on public policy and broadband matters.

Since our next report (due out soon) is about network neutrality, we couldn’t agree more that the level of debate on broadband policy needs to be increased. No better time than now.

Was it really two years ago that I asked why couldn’t Google build a Desktop Bandwidth detector? In a post from my old blog on the Pulvermedia network, I wrote:

One idea I kicked around a bit at this past weekend’s Vloggercon (in no small agreement with fellow blogger Matt Sherman, who is about 179 degrees away from me on most net neutrality matters) was the idea of Google (or Microsoft, anyone with buckets of folding money and a desire to get into online apps) buying or building an online application that would show anyone who wants to use it exactly what’s happening to their packets as they course to and fro.

Sure, that’s a simplistic view but it’s the consumer version of what all the self-proclaimed net wizards are talking about when they tell you how to “ping” a server. Why not use some of that Google cash, some of the otherwise wasted programming talent chasing Web 2.0 dreams (how many social network/hookup/map mashups do we need, anyway?) and build something we’d all like to see — a desktop dashboard that could flash red when an ISP tries to block or degrade service, or starts narrowing the pipe for Skype?

And now, apparently, that’s just what Google plans to do, according to their top policy exec Rick Whitt, in a report from Hot Hardware:

“We’re trying to develop tools, software tools…that allow people to detect what’s happening with their broadband connections, so they can let [ISPs] know that they’re not happy with what they’re getting — that they think certain services are being tampered with,” Google senior policy director Richard Whitt said this morning during a panel discussion at Santa Clara University.

Maybe I should have trademarked the idea? From my old post:

I’ve seen all the flashy demos from the equipment providers who are mining enterprise dollars in this territory, so I know it’s possible. Maybe not easy, but one little app — call it the Google Desktop Bandwidth Detector ™ — could go a long way to keeping Big Ed and his pipes honest and open.

Stay tuned for our upcoming Sidecut Report on Network Neutrality, featuring in-depth interviews with Google’s Whitt and a host of other execs on the policy and technology front lines. In the meantime, you can order our WiMax report on the state of WiMax deployment in the U.S., with the first analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal.

In our previous analysis of Google’s participation in the Clearwire funding deal, we surmised it made sense both from a business standpoint as well as a public policy standpoint. In the first public comments about Clearwire we’ve seen from him since the deal was announced on May 7, Google CEO Eric Schmidt tells the German publication FAZ that the search giant’s half-billion dollar commitment “is a good business and it also supports the principles of openness.”

For more of the Q&A, which also touches on mobile advertising, here’s the link.

And here’s a taste of the analysis from our upcoming (very very soon!) revised version of the WiMax report (hint: if you order now, you automagically get the new version), which details our take on Google’s $500 million investment:

GOOGLE: While the search giant’s commitment of a half-billion dollars puzzled some observers, it’s easy to see some big wins for Google in both the technology development and policy arenas. On the mobile broadband front, Google now has a captive provider to test out its Android open-source mobile-device operating system, a technology that might have had an extremely tough time finding a handhold on the cellular networks run by AT&T and Verizon. On the policy side, Google can now quiet the complaints of the big telcos (who have charged Google and other Internet application providers of being “free riders” who don’t adequately contribute to the costs of the networks that provide their customers). By actively funding an attempt to build the so-called “third pipe” of broadband in the U.S., Google removes a big arrow from its competitors’ policy quivers.

Just like Eric said, makes sense for business and policy. More soon!

As of this writing, we are projecting four Sidecut Reports will be completed in this calendar year, with the first one, “Xohm or Go Home: Why 2008 Is WiMax’s Breakout Year in the U.S. — Or Else!” all ready for your credit card on our ordering page.

The WiMax report is the first in our “Wireless Broadband” coverage category. For the purchase price of $149.95, you not only get the full report PDF, you also get a yearly subscription for report updates and news flashes on that topic area for the full calendar year.

Reports will be issued in the following categories as they are completed:

PUBLIC POLICY — Report on “Network Neutrality,” due out by early June, 2008.

INTERNET VIDEO INFRASTRUCTURE — Report due out late Q2 2008.

ADVANCED TELEPHONY — Report due out Q3 2008.

For editorial calendar information or report structure, send me an email to kaps at sidecutreports.com.

Allow me to add my condolences to the growing list of folks remembering blogger and journalist Russell Shaw, who passed away last week. For those of us who covered the sometimes arcane topics of telecommunications and public policy, Russell could always be counted on to not just stay on top of the news (often linking to other blogs without any ego), but to give his readers the type of analysis that moves the ball forward. Not as easy as it looks.

And while he was clearly on the side of innovation and openness, Russell didn’t pull any punches or stay silent when it came time to knock down silly ideas — here is just one post that shows clarity of thinking in the middle of an issue where it was easy to get lost in emotion. It will be a quieter news room at VON this week, with one less sane voice in the mix.

Is there such a shortage of news around telecom public policy that normally respectable information outlets still fall so easily for astroturf announcements? If you are a Comcast lobbyist you just have to love the official sound of the lead graf in this non-news missive from IDG “news” service, which asserts that “a coalition of seven civil rights groups” is now banding together to fight off the resurrection of network neutrality, mainly in reference to the recent FCC hearing about Comcast’s network management practices.

C’mon. Please. Does anyone really believe anymore that the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association, League of Rural Voters, and National Council of Women’s Organizations just happen to have the same viewpoints on net neutrality and cable network management? Or maybe, they are all BFF and on Facebook together, and said “hey, we really need to work together to ensure our voices are heard.”

Right.

Or maybe, they are all organizations that get substantial contributions from large telecommunication companies or cable providers, whose legislative agendas just happen to mesh with those of the civil rights groups. (Or maybe they all just use the same policy PR firm, whose prinicpals have been at this a long time.)

C’mon, InfoWorld. C’mon, Mike. Do some digging before you post — the scoop on these outfits is already out there thanks to the fine work of Bruce Kushnick and many others.

While the Bell companies have been somewhat legendary in their Astroturf funding, a little digging shows that some of these new groups are doing a lot of letter-writing on behalf of cable companies. The National Congress of Black Women, for example, is no friend of AT&T’s — but they seem to be well versed in the arcane subject of video franchising laws and now, apparently, in network management as well.

The point here is not to say that telcos and cable companies don’t have an argument; I think there should be some meaningful debate between the actual parties involved (perhaps at a national broadband summit?), where needs of both sides can be discussed and perhaps some common ground found. And this is not meant to belittle the national groups, some of which no doubt perform important work to ensure that civil rights are continually advanced and upheld. But it’s lame to argue, as the “coalition” does, that:

Network management promotes free speech by ensuring that all online content and applications flow freely over the Internet and are not thwarted by a few heavy users of peer-to-peer (”P2P”) file-sharing services.

As the kids say nowadays, that is fail.

Remember, Astroturf only works if you let it work.

Could Comcast step into it any deeper? Sure, according to this report, which quotes Comcast as saying it paid people to save places in line for those waiting to attend the FCC hearing at Harvard Monday.

That’s sad enough, but it even went farther, according to Portfolio’s Sam Gustin, who reports:

Some of those placeholders, however, did more than wait in line: They filled many of the seats at the meeting, according to eyewitnesses. As a result, scores of Comcast critics and other members of the public were denied entry because the room filled up well before the beginning of the hearing.

Now that’s network management in real time, eh?

Gotta love the photo! (courtesy of Free Press, which has its own report on the seat-blocking) Gripping stuff, that net neutrality debate.