Interesting People mailing list archives
Re eisenbach on net neutrality -- testimony.
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2016 22:22:46 -0500
Begin forwarded message:
From: Richard Bennett <richard () bennett com> Date: November 12, 2016 at 6:16:28 PM EST To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Cc: ip <ip () listbox com> Subject: Re: [IP] eisenbach on net neutrality -- testimony. First, nobody in the know assumes Jeff Eisenach is going to be nominated to chair the FCC. He’s in charge of the agency review of the FCC for the Trump transition, which is a very different job than running the agency for the new administration. For example, FCC agency review was handled by Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford for the Obama transition, and neither of them was subsequently nominated for an agency job. Werbach went on with this teaching job at Wharton and Crawford was nominated for the National Economic Council, a job she ultimately accepted. Until quite recently, Jeff was a Never Trumper. Second, free market advocates - of which Eisenach is one - have never made a secret of their disdain for the various prophylactic regulations that fall under the umbrella of net neutrality. Net neutrality is an overly broad and essentially lazy attempt to prevent future harms to the Internet by banning a broad set of behaviors deemed to be “discriminatory.” The problem, of course, is that some forms of discrimination are harmful (to competition, innovation, etc., but other forms of discrimination are helpful to network efficiency, promoting adoption, and raising the visibility of new products and services. The separation of good and bad discrimination requires analytical, technical, and regulatory skill. Cynically, broad net neutrality regulations presume that such skills will never be found in the FCC. This becomes a self-fulfulling prophecy in the aftermath of populist campaigns for net neutrality. Third, the focus on net neutrality as the magic wand of Internet policy and a general obsession for Internet regulators for the past decade has meant that other, more important problems have done unaddressed. The current US net neutrality regulations have not prevented the increasingly nasty DDoS attacks, email hacks, and botnet diffusion we’ve seen this year. Where would the Internet be today if we had spent the energy we wasted on net neutrality arguments on making the Internet more secure and generally less friendly to criminal activity? I don’t know that these problems would have been solved since they flow from the Internet’s software architecture, but it’s reasonably clear we’d be ahead of where we are today. Finally, as someone who has worked with Jeff - I was a visiting fellow at AEI until July of this year - I can tell you he has very little interest in net neutrality and has devoted very little energy to it. The same can be said of most leading Democratic Party thinkers on Internet policy. Nobody knows who Trump will nominate to lead the FCC, but many people have written that Commissioner Ajit Pai will win the nomination. See this on the transition: http://hightechforum.org/trump-administration-telecom-program/ And hear this podcast with Commissioner Pai: http://hightechforum.org/ajit-pai-talks-spectrum-fcc-reform-high-tech-forum/ Richard BennettOn Nov 12, 2016, at 3:48 PM, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote: Begin forwarded message:From: "Michael Gurstein" <gurstein () gmail com> Date: November 12, 2016 at 5:14:15 PM EST To: "Forum@Justnetcoalition. Org" <forum () justnetcoalition org>, "'internetpolicy'" <internetpolicy () elists isoc org> Subject: [Internet Policy] eisenbach on net neutrality -- testimony. Net neutrality by the assumed to be head of the US FCC… M Sent: November 11, 2016 8:47 PM Subject: eisenbach on net neutrality -- testimony. http://www.nera.com/content/dam/nera/publications/2014/EisenachOpenInternetTestimony_0914.pdf My testimony today advances three main points. First, net neutrality regulation cannot be justified on grounds of enhancing consumer welfare or protecting the public interest. Rather, it is best understood as an effort by one set of private interests to enrich itself by using the power of the state to obtain free services from another – a classic example of what economists term “rent seeking.” Second, the potential costs of net neutrality regulation are both sweeping and severe, and extend far beyond a simple transfer of wealth from one group to another. Third, legitimate policy concerns about the potential use of market power to disadvantage rivals or harm consumers can best be addressed through existing antitrust and consumer protection laws and regulations. To begin, net neutrality regulation cannot be justified as a means of enhancing consumer welfare or advancing or protecting the public interest, and instead is best understood as a classic example of rent seeking.1 This is particularly true of the more extreme flavors of net neutrality regulation advanced by companies like Netflix, which would ban payments from companies like Netflix to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like AT&T.2 _______________________________________________ To manage your ISOC subscriptions or unsubscribe, please log into the ISOC Member Portal: https://portal.isoc.org/ Then choose Interests & Subscriptions from the My Account menu.Archives | Modify Your Subscription | Unsubscribe Now— Richard Bennett Founder/Publisher, High Tech Forum IPR Consultant
------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125 Unsubscribe Now: https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20161112222259:75FDF10E-A950-11E6-87F5-E930526B1639 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- Re eisenbach on net neutrality -- testimony. Dave Farber (Nov 12)