May writes that the push for a health-care public option and what he calls the “Internet public option” share similar threads. The similarities are not the issues themselves, but May finds similarities in the thought process behind the two public options. “[B]oth are grounded in an almost unshakeable faith that government should play a central role in regulating certain services provided by the private sector,” he writes

To define the rationale, May explains that groups in favor of network neutrality regulations or Internet regulation in general are lobbying the FCC persistently to change the classification of Internet oversight from Title I to Title II. Title II would characterize the Internet as a “common carrier” and allow for more regulatory control by the FCC.

May says that moving to Title II will create new problems for consumers. He quotes Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell: “[I]f every consumer is to be treated the same regardless of usage, then all prices must rise to compensate for the costs imposed by heavy users.”

To read more of May’s thoughts on the “Internet public option,” click here.

The call for the corps is part of the agency’s forthcoming national broadband plan, which is due to Congress by March 17. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn announced the literacy plan at the “digital inclusion summit” co-hosted by the FCC and Knight Foundation.

She said the definition of literacy in the 21st century must be broadened to include teaching people how to use the Internet safely “and to its fullest potential,” and she added that “digital ambassadors” are needed to do the job. “This is about neighbors helping neighbors get online.”

The plan may sound good in theory, but in practice, government-run do-gooder programs rarely do the good they promise. Bureaucracy just gets in the way.

It has happened in the tech space before, with the push for a National Emergency Technology Guard after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The idea was to mobilize tech experts to help recover and rebuild communications after disasters. Congress authorized the guard when it created the Homeland Security Department in 2003, but it took five years for the department to provide a mere $320,000 to create a pilot program.

“This has taken way too long,” Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, a leading Senate advocate of NET Guard, told National Public Radio in 2008. “The Department of Homeland Security should have set this up, you know, years ago. … [I]t shouldn’t be taking five years to get off the ground.”

Now think about digital literacy. A central theme at yesterday’s summit was that technology has become essential. Commissioner Michael Copps said that high-speed Internet service “intersects with every great challenge confronting our nation.” Indeed, that belief is the basis for proposing a digital literacy corps in the first place — giving all Americans equal opportunities at success.

But with technology being that valuable, the country cannot afford to wait five years or more for the government to create a volunteer bureaucracy. More to the point, it doesn’t need to wait. The private sector is perfectly capable of doing the job now.

It did so after Hurricane Katrina, one of the nation’s worst natural disasters. Homeland Security’s funding for NET Guard didn’t materialize until three years after that disaster, but tech companies and volunteers filled the void the government had vowed to eliminate.

The same thing is happening on the digital education front, too. That much was obvious at yesterday’s summit, which featured a “voices of inclusion” segment where citizens old and young explained how learning to use technology had changed their lives.

The FCC is right to highlight the need for digital literacy, but Americans already are learning what they need from teachers in the private sector. They don’t need Uncle Sam as a principal.

AmtrakConnect is a shared Internet connection that works best when browsing basic Internet content or reading your email. We ask that you refrain from playing streaming video or downloading large files. Amtrak may restrict access to some websites or restrict individual customers from using high levels of bandwidth.

It’s not really a matter of just asking you not to do it, though.  Amtrak is actively blocking downloads and video streams – going so far as to prevent YouTube embeds in pages you load, and redirecting links to downloads.

A lot of people like to claim ISPs are only interested in network management as a pretense for preventing competition with their video offering.  Yet here is a perfect example of a privately owned network choosing to manage congestion by limiting downloads and video – absent any competing video service.

ISPs in the past have noted that universities provide no video service, yet routinely block P2P traffic in the same way

Since Karl Bode, Free Press, and countless others offer limited evidence as definitive proof of their worldview, I will simply declare their arguments about competition to be permanently rebuked.

I remember speaking to Geoff Daily of App-Rising about some of these “brain storming” sessions called “CampFibers” at Lafayette where a bunch of developers where placed inside a room to brain storm.  The developers were asked “what kind of apps would you create if bandwidth was not a limitation”.  The room fell silent until one brave soul said “why” which actually summed up the answer perfectly.

Why is this the case?  The reality software developers and system architects have to abide by a crucial design criteria for all Information Technology (IT) systems or else the whole system is simply a nonstarter.  This design criteria is called “scalability”: which is the ability of a system to scale up and support thousands to millions of end users.

We can certainly build several expensive arrays of servers with a total of 400 gigabits per second (Gbps) of capacity which would cost us $400,000 per month (at the lowest bulk rate) in bandwidth.  I can even offer an example of a fat bandwidth application today that requires 3 Gbps of capacity which is uncompressed 1080-60P video (1920×1080 resolution at 60 frames per second) which is beneficial for lower latency video conferencing, but would anyone ever deploy such a system?

Our $400,000 monthly bandwidth bill would allow us to serve a whopping 133 customers and that’s just about how many customers we’ll have out there that can actually afford to buy 3 gigabit broadband.  But even if a hundred people could afford to buy 3 Gbps service, would they actually waste their money on such a novelty that has minimal noticeable advantages over a 40 Mbps Blu-Ray system?  Probably not.  At a more practical level, we can develop an alternative low-latency compression algorithm for video conferencing that doesn’t use inter-frame compression and get the video down to 16 Mbps.

This is why scalability is an absolute requirement is because any $400K/month system must support at least 1 million concurrent end users.  So If we wanted to support 1 million concurrent users with 400 Gbps of capacity, our application must have an average bandwidth of not more than 400 kilobits per second (Kbps) which is pretty stingy for video.  It turns out that this is what it costs to run a low-end YouTube service with only low resolution 400 Kbps video.  If we wanted to serve up the kind of 3.75 Mbps “HD”* content that YouTube serves up, that would raise our costs nearly 10-fold or cut our concurrent viewers by 90%.

The suggestion that we could unleash a torrent of new bandwidth intensive applications if only we had faster broadband is laughable.  Once we understand the economics of video, we quickly begin to understand why applications will always lag broadband which is the exact opposite of “conventional wisdom”.  More fundamentally, the notion that application innovation or innovation in general must somehow involve higher bandwidth is simpleminded.  True innovation lies in lower bandwidth applications that solve real world problems, and Google’s biggest (and probably only) money makers are proof positive of this.

Speakers at today’s summit will include: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski; Commissioners Meredith Attwell Baker, Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn; and members of Congress. Keep a browser open here for live updates.

Why caching and multicasting

On a technical level, unicast video is simply unscalable at the core of the Internet.  While it might theoretically be possible to support 225,000 Mbps on some network links, we can’t even humor such an endeavor when there is 100 or 1000 times the traffic.  Even if it becomes possible to transmit that much data in the future, it will always be more efficient to use caching or multicasting techniques which allow for much higher quality and quantity content.  On an economic level, using the core of the Internet is cost prohibitive because long haul transit rates through the core are typically 3 times more expensive than paying for short haul peering at the edges.

Edge caching

The most common solution is to employ edge caching.  While this doesn’t change the fact that an aggregate of 225,000 Mbps of bandwidth is still needed on the “last mile” broadband portion of the Internet and many of the distribution networks near the last mile, it does alleviate traffic on the core of the Internet.  The bandwidth is also divided up into more manageable chunks near the edge of the network such that each caching server and the networks they support might only need to handle a maximum of 10,000 or 40,000 Mbps.

Caching solves a lot of problems but it doesn’t alleviate traffic on the last mile.  While that’s no problem for DSL or VDSL2 networks like AT&T and Qwest or for Fiber to the Home (FTTN) networks like Verizon FiOS, it becomes a problem for cable broadband networks and an even bigger problem for wireless networks.  Cable broadband networks are shared and wireless networks are shared as well as being more capacity constrained.  To a lesser extent, capacity constraints can also affect the distribution networks that feed the FTTN or VDSL2 networks.

Multicasting

Multicasting can resolve the last mile capacity problem because it is an analogue of broadcasting that operates on Internet Protocol (IP) networks.  Data is transmitted only once to all recipients on a network and each recipient receives the same data feed.  This can dramatically reduce the load on every part of the network including the distribution and access networks.

Note: MediaFlo is an example of digital broadcasting but it does not use IP and it requires dedicated radios or devices for viewing.  Cellphones that support MediaFlo require a second radio and second antenna.  A multicast solution on a wireless network would allow any generic Internet-enabled device to receive broadcasts over an IP network.

One downside to multicasting is that it may not be technically possible on every network and it does not work by default.  Networks have to collaborate with content providers to enable multicasting.  For example; the BBC works with many UK based ISPs to enable radio and television multicasting.

The other challenge is that multicasting may not be something the users desire.  More often than not, people don’t want to watch the same content and even if they want the same content, they may not want it at the same time.  Multicasting only works when a group of people want to watch the same content at the same time.  This doesn’t work too well for archived content, but it works great for live content such as sporting events or live news.

Multicasting might also work well for some software distribution tasks such as application updates, but this would require software on the computers that would have to remain operational, but software distribution doesn’t have to be time synchronized like video content and it can be delivered out-of-order.

On the one hand, 79 percent of the 27,000 adults polled in 26 countries believe that Internet access “should be a fundamental right for all people.” (Half of them strongly agree with that proposition.) But on the other hand, 53 percent believe that “the Internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere.”

The two answers may not seem to conflict on the surface. After all, wanting Internet access for all is consistent with hoping government leaders, especially those in dictatorial regimes like China, keeps their regulatory mitts off the Web.

But proclaiming something a “fundamental right” is more than a deterrent to bad behavior; it’s also an invitation for government intervention. In the case of Internet access, it is an invitation to destructive bureaucratic meddling in the digital marketplace.

Advocates of network neutrality want to persuade people that Internet access is a fundamental right because they want government to “protect” that right with regulation. “Net neutrality safeguards everyone’s fundamental right to an open Internet,” Tim Karr of Free Press said in a Save The Internet piece headlined “Seven Reasons Why We Need Net Neutrality Now.”

And last year in France, the Constitutional Council embraced Internet access as a right in striking down an anti-piracy law. It found that only courts can deny intellectual property thieves the Internet connections they use to steal content.

“The Internet is a fundamental human right that cannot be taken away by anything other than a court of law, only when guilt has been established there,” the council said.

People need to remember sound bites like that before they endorse the concept of Internet access as a right with constitutional weight. In the long run, the world may lose more freedom in the marketplace than it will gain in democracy.

Moderator Deborah Taylor Tate, an adjunct senior fellow at the foundation and a former FCC commissioner, joined several panelists to discuss the upcoming FCC broadband plan, which is due to be released March 17. The panel included:

The panel discussion revolved around expectations for the broadband plan — what is good, what is bad and how it might affect the telcom landscape.

You can find the complete transcript here.

The starting point for this effort, of course, is the First Amendment.  A free press, independent of government control, is a foundational principle of our democracy. Any time the government even looks at the media, we have to be very careful. Keeping that principle in mind always, the experts here working on these issues will work first to gain a detailed, fact-based understanding of what’s happening in the media world. Then, we will make recommendations, including possibly suggestions for government policy changes.

So the commission recognizes the substantial first amendment ground they are stepping all over, but jumped right in anyway.  A lot of small government and libertarian types felt the hair on the back of their neck stand up.  The Progress & Freedom Foundation went as far as to say the very inquiry would chill free speech.

The problem is that the very act of initiating such an inquiry will chill protected speech; government inquiries into what is and is not working in the area of news, information, and media is itself an affront to the First Amendment. And it is no answer that the Commission has embarked on this journey with beneficent motives, it has no power to derogate from the protections of the First Amendment in the name of what one group of bureaucrats may think are important government interests.

Some suggested the FCC’s commitment to ‘vibrant and diverse news’ was code for the regulation of news content and a return of something akin to the Fairness Doctrine.

Our good friends at Free Press are apparently hoping that is the case, at least according to a post on their Save The News blog.

The “Future of Media” inquiry calls on citizens to report on the quality of their local media and imagine what a better media system might look like… In short, this is an opportunity to envision the media we want to see, not merely accept the media we currently have.

It is absolutely no secret how left-wing fringe groups like Free Press feel about “the media we currently have”.  Things like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or even the conservative viewpoint of their local paper’s editorial board send them into a sweat.  As a result, it’s not too hard to guess what “the media we want to see” would look like.

I suspect the media they want to see is one where opposing viewpoints (like those offered by the now defunct Air America) receive government subsidies to push the fringe view – regardless of whether those views can draw an audience outside Austin and Berkeley.

In short, this isn’t about the “Future of Media.”  At least in the hopes and aspirations of Free Press, this is about a return to the Fairness Doctrine – or something even worse.  As Free Press’ founder Robert McChesney described it:

In the U.S, there is a sort of religious attachment to the idea of “free-press,” which is taken to mean the state has absolutely no role to play…  We have to appreciate that the U.S. media system is based on subsidies, monopoly power and the government playing a large role… The last thing we want to do, however, is rebuild the old media system. We are moving ahead toward a new kind of journalism. We are struggling for a journalism that incorporates the new media technologies so as to greatly democratize, open up, and make more accountable, the public information system… The result of such democratization will, in my view, be a marked shift to the political Left.

In this paper, Darby and Fuhr make the case for maintaining current Internet policies to continue fostering innovation. The FCC has cited innovation as a key element in recent regulation talks, and Darby and Fuhr present arguments about the topic based on current literature. The two believe that “innovation is thriving at both the core and the edge of the network in the current policy environment, which has fundamentally allowed the Internet to evolve with little government involvement.”

The authors make the following arguments to support their claim:

• Within the current regulatory system, infrastructure companies have produced new technologies, including creative business practices, transmission and switching technologies, services, and distribution devices.
• Cable, wireline and wireless networks have created technologies, services, business models and equipment.
• Innovations at the core have both encouraged and enabled innovation around the edges.
• There is an “undeniable link” between network innovation and broadband infrastructure investment.
• Many technologies and innovations at the edge are possible because of their introduction by Internet providers.
• Common-carrier regulation would decrease incentives for innovation and investment.
• No literature proves that proposed network neutrality regulation would promote innovation.
• Net neutrality proponents incorrectly associate the “incidence of innovation activities and accomplishments.”
• They also assume that rules on core networks would enable edge innovation at a risk of affecting a constantly changing ecosystem.

You can find the paper in full here.