The reality is that building core network capacity to handle the likes of Netflix and 8k television is possible and gets cheaper as time goes on. I just participated in the buildout of new datacenter... The cost of building densities of network interconnect and compute unfathomable in 2005 is actually lower than the old 1gb stuff. WAN and telecom equipment that used to take up 10k ft^2 now take two racks and cost 80% less.

The capital investment issues the ISPs face have nothing to do with interconnect -- their dollars are spent in the last mile.

The public interest isn't compatible with Mark Cuban's ability & desire to throw millions of dollars at telcos to give his ventures an advantage. Market forces don't apply when the ISP business is slowly consolidating into a circa 1965 AT&T redux.

Also expect to see someone like Cuban challenge this on 1st amendment grounds. Given that for the 1% mindset spending money equals speech, the government stopping them spending money to again an advantage is in their mind a restriction on speech. Sad but true.

So very true. I'm an ISP owner. The other factor is peering agreements over those last miles but, yes, totally agree.

An update to original article lends evidence to what you said:

Note: 2:08 pm. Thursday. As readers have noted, Cuban has been a celebrity spokesman of sorts for AT&T, appearing in a series of commercials for the wireless giant.

Whatever dialog he spurs is going to be an intellectual dead end.

BTW, why isn't anyone talking about the Interstate Commerce Commission, the predecessor to the FCC, and the similarities between common carrier status of railways and Internet service providers?

We have over a hundred years of actual evidence to support the pros and cons of regulating public communications. Why are we choosing to instead resort to blind conjecture based on talking point samples from the last decade?

If we had a functional market, the excesses of the ICC would be a cautionary tale of great impact. Unfortunately the behavior of the ISPs has illustrated that we don't have that functional marketplace. I think we should follow the path successfully implemented (in most places) for utilities like water, electricity and the legacy telephone service.

Anyways... I'm not disagreeing with you. I agree that we should follow historical precedent and that ISPs should be regulated as Type II common carriers.

The railways that the ICC were primarily established to regulate were most definitely not a functional market. Railways at the time were also charging different fees for the different things they were transporting. Their customers also didn't have a choice of competitors and suffered under collusion between companies. Network Neutrality is essentially an extension of the same conversation.

The ICC also had statues for regulating communication. The FCC took over for the ICC's role in regulating communication in 1934 and the organizational was modeled on the ICC with 5 member appointed by the president.

We should be talking about what worked with the ICC and what didn't. If people are offering conjectures about what the results of these FCC regulations will have on the Internet they have plenty of historical evidence to use for their arguments. We can point to how the railroads abused and had a negative impact on society. We can show how overregulation harms industry. We can show example of regulatory capture. We can show example of tragedies involving unmanaged shared common resources.

Railways and the ICC are a very similar analogy but we can reason about all sorts of other precedent. We can find examples from the Hanseatic League, the Holy Roman Empire, the Dutch East Indies Company, the South Seas Bubble or anything else from our history. It all applies and led to our existing systems of government, business and law.

That is revisionist history. From the outset of the NN debate, a large subset of the pro-NN crowd has pushed for Title II, and this increased after the court made clear that the critical elements of net neutrality could not be enforced by regulation, without substantial gaps, except under Title II.

It is simply not true that, until very recently, everyone considered Title II the "nuclear option".

When you edit a comment, it would help others if you could explicitly mark what you changed with the annotation "Edit:".

> Conservatives don't like it because it allows the FCC to do things like rate-setting, even if this administration chooses not to use that power.

The FCC hasn't been granted any new authority, they always could have done the reclassification and then done rate-setting. The only way to change that is to pass a law, which can happen or not independent of reclassification.

> Liberals don't like the specter of FCC regulation of content.

Are they regulating content? They haven't classified it under Title III or VI.

> Mark Cuban faults ‘Silicon Valley groupthink,’ says FCC broadband rule a mistake

I can't understand what Mark Cuban is talking about. He keeps talking about "uncertainty" and asking questions as if the presumptive answers would be problematic. What if they classify cable TV as an over the top service that can't have paid prioritization? I don't see the problem. There is no actual reason why HBO and CNN can't be delivered like Netflix.

He just seems to be confused in general. Like talking about broadcast TV indecency regulations that aren't even under Title II.

This is a funny line of reasoning on the part of Conservatives. Reclassification under Title II is supposedly bad because it allows future Commissions to impose rate-setting requirements. But, in the absence of Title II reclassification today, a future Commission could still have imposed a rate-setting regime. How? They could have reclassified broadband under Title II! In other words, reclassification under Title II today doesn't allow future Commissions to do anything they couldn't have done before, if they wanted to, because in either case, the the Commission has the power to take both steps simultaneously.

I guess you could argue that it makes it easier politically to impose rate setting in the future. But I'm not sure this holds any water if the very thing that worries most critics of Title II reclassification is rate setting.

Also, in Verizon v. FCC SCOTUS essentially reinforced the Chevron doctrine even more. So there essentially is no slippery slope at the FCC. They don't require a gradual rules change procedure, there is no slippery slope for them to fall down.

Does it refer to download/upload rates, or does it refer to $$ rates (between whom)?

As far back as the 90s, when Mosaic was still the most advanced browser out there, I was noting that Title II common carrier rules for ISPs were the best choice to balance free speech needs -- to prevent ISPs and Backbone providers from censoring the content they carry -- and protect ISPs from liability for their users' communications.

It's only taken two decades for the industry to realize the same.

Unless it's not deemed "legal." And I'm not talking about torrenting.

In any case, this is a red herring.

Ha, cable network owner Mark Cuban is totally unbiased, of course.

Don't know what AXS TV is worth

Src: http://www.cnbc.com/id/102097968

I'm not sure what Netflix's official stance is on net neutrality, but it's possible Mr. Cuban thinks this way.

They've had trouble getting cooperation from ISPs even when they've gone as far as offering free caching devices to ISPs to minimize their interconnect traffic. This should be a pretty big win for them.

I don't understand this fear. Let's consider two hypotheticals in which this administration does not want to do rate setting but a future one does.

Hypothetical one:

• This administration uses Title II with forbearance of rate regulation for NN.

• Later administration drops the forbearance and imposes rate regulation.

Hypothetical two:

• This administration finds some way to do NN without using Title II (perhaps not being able to do as strong a version of NN as they want).

• Later administration wants to do rate regulation. They reclassify as Title II and impose rate regulation.

I don't see how the later administrations ability to impose rate regulation is significantly easier under hypothetical one. It just changes the specific rule they have to write. Since they have the power to impose Title II, they can drop that into their rule if it hasn't been done by an earlier administration.

Up until recently (2005), ADSL was classified as Title II. Reclassifying it as an information service made it so much better that VDSL2 (which can provide 100Mbps!), defined in 2005, has .... hardly rolled out anywhere.

Why won't this happen with cable? What motivation does Comcast have to keep increasing the speed of their network? Especially since, believe you me, the calls for the FCC to mandate "open networks" (i.e. competitive access) could be right around the corner.

As soon as it was deregulated, Verizon and AT&T began upgrades. But before then, they weren't going to build upgrades to networks that any competitor could borrow at wholesale value.

The title II being proposed is a lot lighter than the old kind applied to the DSL, so it won't necessarily destroy invesment. But the fear is reasonable.

Given the great intentions that such bastions of corporate ethics like AT&T and Verizon have, is it possible that they simple held out until the got what they wanted?

So, not investing in infrastructure is not the problem, but preventing others from doing so, is scummy.

They do not want to invest AND they don't want to compete.

It's actually a rational move. Title II prevented them from competing effectively with the companies that were not under Title II, hence the rational decision not to invest in competing infrastructure.

Then why, when reclassified as an information service, did it not get better? It got better from 1999 to 2005 (768kbps -> 1-6Mbps), but only in very select regions has it actually improved beyond that in the past ten years.

(This is where AT&T switched to "Uverse" fiber-to-the-neighborhood network, with speeds up to 40+mbps. And since that's an "information service", no other companies are allowed to use it to sell internet, even though it's literally the same phone line as DSL, with almost identical technology and performance seen in other countries faster DSL services)

And I wouldn't say "very select regions." At least a quarter of the country live in areas with FTTN or FTTP networks deployed by the telecoms.

The FCC even tried to create a net neutrality rule without reclassifying broadband providers under Title II, but it was struck down by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Verizon v. FCC (2014)[0]

Nobody really wanted to impose the Title II regulations, which were written for a different technology and era, on broadband providers. But absent new legislation, which is a no-go in today's Congress, it was the only way for the FCC to establish the legal authority to promulgate the rule.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v._...

Though I'm in the libertarian anti-NN legislation camp, I don't know if this is true. Previously when I tried to express my views I got voted down. I assumed from this that HN is naturally heavily pro-NN legislation. (Or maybe they just didn't like the particular argument I made. * shrugs *)

Though, I do agree that it's a bad rhetorical tactic.

On the global stage, though, countries that have set similar policies (e.g. the UK) have ended up with much healthier broadband ecosystems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Unit...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_the...

Title II doesn't force the government to care about what's going through the pipes; nor did the UK's broadband law. That was entirely a separate bout of moralizing, that was no easier or more difficult to enact or enforce given the broadband law.

[1] https://www.icuk.net/broadband-reseller/broadband.asp

>Rate Regulation: >the Order makes clear that broadband providers shall not be subject to utility-style rate regulation, including rate regulation, tariffs, and last-mile unbundling.

>Universal Service Contributions: >the Order DOES NOT require broadband providers to contribute to the Universal Service Fund under Section 254. The question of how best to fund the nation’s universal service programs is being considered in a separate, unrelated proceeding that was already underway.

http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-strong-sustainable-ru...

Then he joined Broadcast.com, a sort of mini-Netflix-but-audio for broadcasting sporting events, which sold to Y! for $5 billion or so dollars.

He then co-founded AXS TV, which was the first HD satellite network.

He may be wrong on this issue. He may be right. But to pretend he isn't tech-savvy is to either ignore his history or to set the bar to an absurdly elitist standard. At the least, he's likely more tech savvy than your elected representatives, and possibly moreso than Tom Wheeler.

Whether this is germane to the discussion is another matter.

This is a prime example of FUD. Can you cite any precedent where title II powers have been applied to regulate content (also known as "speech") in any other medium?

I'm glad someone with a history agrees.

You sound upset about the accusation. What if it were true though?

If it were true, that would be bad and a problem. We crack down on such misuses of HN in every way we know how. As a matter of fact, we take them personally as an attack on the whole community.

But making such accusations indiscriminately is a sure way to poison the very same community. We don't want that to happen either. That means we all have to be disciplined about this and not just cry "NSA Shill!" (or whatever) out of frustration at wrong or contrary opinions.

The truth is that opinion is divided on this, as on most other issues, among legitimate community members. That alone means that ipso facto accusations of astroturfing aren't legit here. Without evidence, it's just a personal attack, and those are not ok.

I don't know what it is about us message board nerds that makes this so hard to grok, but you cannot suggest that someone is a shill without overtly calling their integrity into question. Questioning someone's integrity is intrinsically uncivil. Don't be uncivil.