Net Neutrality? How About Full Net Functionality?

The big news is that AT&T is supposedly agreeing to “Net Neutrality standards,” whatever that means, for the next 30 months as a condition for getting its acquisition of BellSouth approved.

I’d be more impressed if something would be done about Level 3, the company responsible for routing traffic through the Internet backbone. I have been unable to get through cleanly to Cincinnati.com, Yahoo!, CNN, and a couple of other sites for days. When I do a traceroute test, the problem is always somewhere in the middle of the connection landscape, which is the responsibility of Level 3 (apparently there are no meaningful alternatives; try it yourself, and see where your info goes through).

Level 3 won’t talk to consumers, and tells us to go to our local providers. My local provider tells me that it’s out of their control (which it is), and says they’ll contact Level 3 about the problem. Whether they do is anyone’s guess. Whether a slightly degraded Internet becomes the norm for more people in 2007 is also an open question.

____________________________________

UPDATE, 5PM: — Specifically, AT&T’s concessions were (link requires free registration):

To break a nearly two-month deadlock at the FCC, AT&T agreed to observe “network neutrality” principles; offer standalone high-speed Internet service for $20 a month to most of its customers; and cap prices on so-called special-access lines that serve big buildings with multiple business customers.
In addition, AT&T agreed to divest 2.5 GHz wireless spectrum owned by BellSouth and bring back 3,000 jobs performed outside the U.S. by 2008.

UPDATE, Dec. 30: Yesterday, Mike at Techdirt claimed that there’s a major network neutrality exception (para breaks added by me for readability) –

The wording is a little tricky, but while they agree not to remove network neutrality from their standard network, hidden in the middle of a later paragraph is this sentence: “This commitment also does not apply to AT&T/BellSouth’s Internet Protocol television (IPTV) service.”

At first that might seem innocuous, but Burstein has pointed out that AT&T’s always planned on using the IPTV network as that high-speed toll lane it wants Google, Vonage and others to pay extra for. Burstein notes that AT&T isn’t even set up to put quality of service on their existing network — so the agreement not to violate network neutrality on that network is effectively meaningless. It is, he claims, a sleight of hand that successfully fooled a bunch of people into supporting the deal, and will probably help it get approval.

AT&T promises not to violate network neutrality on a network they never intended to use that way, and carves out permission to use it on their new network, where they had planned all along to set up additional tollbooths.

Also, in response to the original post, the details show that the naked DSL they’re promising is limited to only 768k down, which is pretty slow these days. It’s also worth noting that they don’t say a damn thing about upstream speeds …..

The Save the Internet blog says that AT&T and its CEO Ed Whitacre have been “neutralized for now.” As noted many times previously, I believe the net neutrality argument is largely about major current players on the USER side (Google, MS, Ebay, Yahoo!, Amazon, et al) entrenching THEIR current position to the detriment of possible alternatives (the best set of arguments, courtesy of Don Luskin, are at this previous BizzyBlog post).

_________________________

UPDATE, Jan. 2, 2007: The WSJ agrees on the real effect and very bad precedent being set here (requires subscription):

Net neutrality travels under the euphemism of “nondiscrimination,” which sounds very nice. But what it really means in practice is that the government dictates what AT&T and other Internet access companies can charge users of their pipelines. So there’s “discrimination,” all right — against the companies that have invested billions to lay that pipe.

The beneficiaries of this discrimination are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other very rich Web businesses, which have loaded up on Beltway lobbyists to have these mandates imposed. Democrats are taking the PAC money and running interference. The Democratic Commissioners — Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps — were able to extort this concession from AT&T because one of the three GOP Commissioners recused himself from voting on the merger under pressure from Democrats on Capitol Hill. It was a nasty game of bad cop-worse cop, and it is probably a portent of things to come.

The one thing no one should be deceived about is that this ambush has anything to do with “consumers.” Internet users will benefit most from the rapid rollout of broadband, which requires letting companies get a return on their investment. Net neutrality is all about imposing price controls that shake down one corporate player for the benefit of another.