The ISPs and their pet FCC

The ISPs must be having a fantasy come true. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is now chaired by Ajit Pai, a man who once served as Associate General Counsel at Verizon Communications and is an outspoken opponent of Net Neutrality. He is a true champion of the lowly private internet service provider. I don't think they could have picked a better ally as chairman of the FCC.

Take note that Pai was appointed to the commission in 2012 by President Obama (a Democrat) on recommendation by Senator Mitch McConnell (a Republican) and ask yourself if we just have one political party running things. There is now a clear Republican majority at the FCC and they are very sympathetic to the concerns of the incumbent interests of the big ISPs. To them, consumers aren't really stakeholders. Couldn't get any better, right?

I guess not. According to DSL Reports, the ISPs and their lobbyists are now fighting to avoid the burden of disclosing internet access speed data down to the address level to the FCC. They claim that this would just be too expensive. They say that anything beyond identifying census blocks that have or could have internet access is too burdensome.

I've read many stories about how Comcast would say that service would be available at a particular home, before the buyer actually moves in. Then the buyer finds that he cannot get internet access without paying a hefty connection fee. I've even seen stories where the new homeowner, needing a good and fast connection for working from home, had to sell the house he just bought to get another house that actually has internet access.

This sort of baiting by the ISPs is disruptive to the market, and demonstrates that the ISPs are not all that interested in transparency. I think this will prove to be a real challenge for Chairman Pai if he truly is the champion of transparency that he claims to be.

Ajit Pai also says that one ISP is enough to make a market "competitive". Well, where I live, there is only one wired provider. Does that count as competition, Mr. Pai? I'm hoping there will be another soon, but it will be a public service sometimes known as "community broadband". That service is well known here in Utah as UTOPIA, the Utah Open Infrastructure Agency. After a lot of digging and pulling of conduit, we've been told that service will be available within the next month and if we do get it, well, that would make two wired ISPs available here.

I find it interesting that weeks before that impending service availability from a public utility that consistently kicks ass on the local competition, a few other "ISPs" have joined in. Rise Broadband (wireless) and HughesNet (satellite) have both appealed to us in their junk mailers. 25 Mbs for $30 a month! Right now I'm getting 20 Mbs for about $30 including taxes.

Here, third party service providers working as re-sellers of UTOPIA service are expecting to offer 250 Mbs for $35 a month. They are also offering 1 Gps for $50 a month, too. Compare that to Comcast or Centurylink, both of which have been loathe to really build their networks in these parts. I can't even get Comcast here and Centurylink offers me 20 Mbs while my neighbor on an adjacent street is getting 80 Mbs and never bothers to offer me more.

That disparity is probably why the ISPs are so comfy with census block disclosures rather than address level disclosures. First they said that info was proprietary, and that competitors will eat their lunch if they share it. But that information shouldn't be proprietary if I'm going to decide whether or not to plunk down a huge chunk of cash on a house only to discover that I can't get internet access after I get the other utilities in my name. That's like saying they don't want me to know for sure if I will have water service at a house I'd like to buy.

Internet access is now a utility, just like phone, water, power and sewer service. No longer do people consider life without the internet. They have it at home, on their phones and at work. It is hard to find a workplace or public shopping mall without free wifi these days. Some cities also offer free wifi in their public parks and libraries. Can anyone seriously say that internet access is a luxury anymore?

Now the ISPs are claiming it's too burdensome to tell the federal government if my house has internet access. That's odd because the Utah Broadband Outreach Center can tell me with reasonable confidence if a house has internet access. Apparently, the ISPs serving Utah don't have as much trouble submitting their service data to a state agency than to the feds. I guess they want to frame it as a states rights issue.

It's funny how the ISPs like to talk about competition, but don't want to open up about their speeds. How much could that cost to provide service availability data for every address? Once the information is in a database, it's easy to manage and its a sunken cost. That means the heavy lifting is done once it's in there. And a good DBA will have no trouble updating the records when there are major changes.

I guess the ISPs aren't so proud of the job they're doing and they'd rather not be held accountable. They like to talk about the free market as long as they're not being held to the fire of the free market. Funny thing about free markets: they require transparency.