The FCC’s Net neutrality plan is much worse than it looks

We’ve spent the past few weeks with at first some knowledge of the FCC’s “Slow Lane” plan (to call it “Fast Lane” is to be disingenuous), and later with the full plan. In that time, there has been a massive outpouring of disagreement — clearly plenty of it on this side of the screen. But with more time spent thinking about this awful plan come greater distaste and outright concern that this terrible set of guidelines may actually end up as the law of the land.

For instance, this plan turns ISP peering points and their own internal network interconnections into straight-up revenue generators in the worst possible way. Say that Comcast’s customers see sluggish performance and potential timeouts when trying to access resources on the other side of a peering point or even when accessing an internal interconnect into large portions of New England. In a normal, free-market situation, Comcast would negotiate terms with the Tier 1 provider for an additional 10G port if it’s a peering point, light up more fiber, or otherwise upgrade its network to alleviate poor performance and congestion.

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This is a normal cost of doing business, and those same fibers have carried 10Mbit through 10G just fine throughout the years. Remember, bandwidth is cheaper now than ever before.

However, under the new FCC proposal, upgrading those connections would work against Comcast’s financial interests. The proposed rules would in fact reward Comcast for letting its networks become congested. The more congested the pipes into Comcast’s network become, the more money Comcast is likely to make.

Why? Because once Comcast customers begin experiencing problems with accessing resources on the other side of that congestion, Comcast can demand a ransom from the content provider to give it “Fast Lane” access to its customers. This is straight-up extortion, but it would be fully permissible under the FCC’s proposal. Comcast can continue selling that congestion over and over until the only traffic that makes it through the 10G link has been paid for on both ends. Any small blog, small service, VPN connections to the corporate office, or an innovative startup company will only be accessible at modem speeds, if that. Those who have paid for clear passage will be consuming 99 percent of that 10G pipe.

Then, and only then, will Comcast add a second 10G peering connection, and it will potentially sell access to that peering point to both sides of the connection. “Want faster access to the wider Internet? Only $10 more per month!” will be the pitch to its downstream customers. On the other side, Comcast will sell “Fast Lane” access through that same 10G pipe to the content providers as fast as it can, continuing to squash the rest of that traffic into the ground.

And so on and so forth. The FCC may have vague language about charges being “commercially reasonable,” but we all know it will have zero impact on reality. We only have to look to Comcast’s refusal to participate — at no cost — in Netflix’s Open Connect program that would significantly reduce the bandwidth used by Netflix and provide better service to its customers. Comcast very clearly can and will harm its own customers in order to extract large sums of money from companies like Netflix. This is what happens when you have a monopoly.

The big ISPs have been built on the backs of the taxpayers and on the backs of their own customers through the fraud-laden Universal Service Fund, selling the content of others for decades. Now they are trying to further consolidate and bring us back to the time when owning a phone was illegal.

Think about that for a second. Only a few decades ago, it was illegal to own a phone or an answering machine. Now, we rent cable boxes and cable modems. Does that sound at all familiar? Why is there a differentiation between these two practices?

Functionally, logically, there is none to be found. And further down the illogical trail, AT&T is buying DirectTV, while Comcast is buying Time Warner. (NB: I really can’t believe that these deals are progressing or were ever seriously believed to escape the anti-competition laws. Am I taking crazy pills?)

Ma Bell fought its dissolution hard, claiming all kinds of mayhem would ensue. Instead, the world embarked on the most significant communications development of all time in the spread of the Internet. The MPAA’s Jack Valenti famously compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler, yet the movie industry has made untold billions on home movie rentals.

Uproariously hyperbolic claims by industry are nothing new. What is new is the medium. We are not talking about the telephone here or the VCR. This is not passive entertainment — this is interactive. We are fighting against the tyranny of those who would try to pinch off the Internet and serve us the ideas, works, and content developed by others, piecemeal, a la carte, and at exorbitant prices, all built on networks we are already paying for.

We look back at the robber barons of the early 20th century as mythical creatures that could only exist in those heady days of light regulation, the slow spread of information, and political payola. How far we’ve come technologically, but how little we seem to have progressed otherwise.

This is a threat that will not disappear quickly or easily. We need to remain vigilant — and in active discussion of the FCC’s proposed rules — for the remainder of the public commentary period. We have until September to save the Internet as we know it. I truly wish that statement was hyperbolic, but I fear that it is not.

This story, “The FCC’s Net neutrality plan is much worse than it looks,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia’s The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.