The FCC has received 27,027 comments to its inquiry on Net Neutrality. Last March, the FCC asked the public to comment on whether it needs to enact regulations to ensure net neutrality. According to Freepress.net, most of the commenters want the FCC to ensure that the broadband operators do not interfere with their customers’ choice of content. But any regulation short of structural separation is doomed to fail. That is why the EU is moving towards structural separation.
The FCC has received 27,027 comments to its inquiry on Net Neutrality. Last March, the FCC asked the public to comment on whether it needs to enact regulations to ensure net neutrality.
Can broadband providers discriminate among the “bits” they deliver to their customers? If one lived in a place where there were many broadband providers all competing fiercely for your business, net neutrality would not be such a hot issue. If, however, you live in a place like the US, which has a broadband duopoly, controlled by very large incumbent operators like Verizon, then it’s a problem.
SaveTheInternet.com says:
If you want to view all of the comments to the FCC’s inquiry, go to: http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/comsrch_v2.cgi and enter 07-52.
I believe the only effective and long-term solution to this problem is true structural separation: forcing operators to separate the broadband infrastructure business from the service business so that customers do not have to get their Internet service from the same company that owns the broadband infrastructure through which those bits are carried. Anything short of structural separation will be circumvented by operators who have deep pockets. They will file lawsuits, influence regulators disproportionately and play funny games.
Europe has been successful in creating a competitive broadband marketplace by forcing the incumbents to share their lines with competitors (local loop unbundling), but even that may not be enough, according to many national regulators and the European Commission’s telecom regulator, Viviane Reding.
Reding has been talking about structural separation for some time now, and said in a recent EU rural broadband conference that local governments should deploy broadband infrastructure if private firms don’t. According to the Wall Street Journal, big EU telcos are afraid of being broken up by the Commission. I think structural separation will happen because broadband and Internet access are just too important to leave to firms that have overwhelming market power. It’s just a sign of the times, like food safety regulation and pollution controls in the 1960s.
The most encouraging signs in Europe are the widespread deployments of FTTH infrastructure in rural areas and in large cities like Paris and Amsterdam. Amsterdam’s Citynet project, a true public-private partnership, has already launched but not yet all over Amsterdam. People can choose from a variety of service plans because the network is open to all service providers.
A lot of work still needs to be done in Europe, though. Large operators like Deutsche Telekom, which employs thousands of people, still throw their weight around in Germany. Recently, the European Union filed a lawsuit against the German government which passed a law allowing Deutsche Telekom to exclude competitors from its new fiber optic network.
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