This debate was central to the fascinating discussion at the State of Telecom event at Columbia’s Instititue of Tele-Information, held in mid-October. I attended the afternoon sessions.

Wall Street’s vision

Simon Flannery, managing director at Morgan Stanley, described the challenges that are eroding the margins of the cellcos. Of course, the top two cellcos are doing better than the rest. Flannery said that margins at Verizon at about 45 percent, while margins at Sprint are about 16 percent. Apps that are eroding core revenues include free text messaging and free calling.

Meanwhile, cellcos are selling advanced services that require more bandwidth. “Backhauling fiber to towers requires a massive build,” said Flannery. “Smaller carriers lack the cash flow to reinvest, and there is no financing for newtowkrs that are without returns.”

The market is trending towards a duopoly.

Craig Moffett, senior analyst at Bernstein Research, said that the services that people pay for are the easiest to provide: internet access, phone calls, and so on. “People are less willing to pay for information and entertainment, which are services that cost more to provide.”

Voice may require 9.6 Kbps and people will pay $50 per month for it. People will only pay about $30 per month more for the next generation services that multiply data usage by 10 or 100 times. “The sale price per bit is falling faster than the cost per bit.”

At the bottom end of the market, Moffett said, there is the “poverty problem” where households whose net income is negative after paying for food, clothing, and shelter account for perhaps 40 percent of all homes. “Retailers can depend on the upper two quintiles, but telcos have to sell to the full 100 percent of the population,” Moffett claimed.

The consumer advocate concurs

Mark Cooper of the Conumer Federation claimed that he disagreed with everyone on all sides of this debate. He said that in some poor countries, there are 75 cell phones per 100 people. “People who have no electric power at home may have cell phones.”

If a cellco is just adding voice customers, it’s easy to grow. “It is easy to add subscribers but it is expensive to add capacity. Users, uses, and usage all add costs to wireless mobile networks.”

He agreed with the Wall Street analysts that the marginal sale price of bandwidth drops rapidly.

He added, however, that unlicensed wireless spectrum is the great success story of the past two decades. Even AT&T is now selling Wi-Fi. “Unlicensed has no champion in the scrum for spectrum.” Cooper said that at most 10 percent to 20 percent of spectrum should be sold to the cellco monopolies, so that the Washington can avoid the next monopoly and the next “100 year mistake.”

The Economist Magazine has the data

In an article entitled The Limits of Frugality, The Economist magazine warns that those rural cellphone users who have no electricity in their homes will soon be paying higher prices. “Sunil Mittal, the boss of Bharti Airtel, the mobile-phone operator … said the extra cost of servicing rural customers, and their low usage levels, had made things unprofitable. Prices are now expected to go up across the industry, after two decades of decline. India’s low-cost telecoms revolution has, it seems, reached its limit.”

Buildouts will now focus on the urban rich. “Today perhaps 17 percent of India’s population has half of its spending power, according to the Asian Development Bank …. One proxy for the difference in profitability between the urban rich and the rural poor is the price paid for mobile-telecoms spectrum. In the 2010 auctions for 3G telecoms licences, operators bid ten times more for a slice of the airwaves in affluent Delhi, with 18m people, than in east Uttar Pradesh, with 120m people.”

Washington, D.C.’s policymakers should expect fixed wireless and wireline internet to connect the rural poor at an affordable price. The true price of cellular broadband is going up fast, worldwide, and like all price rises, it will harm the poorest the most.

She warned that key decisions being made about the internet now could harm the U.S. forever.

Crawford opened her speech by recommending the new movie “Inside Job,” which is about the banking industry and about how regulators failed to stop it from taking risks that caused the current recession.

“There is a constant flow of people, a revolving door back and forth between the industry and the regulators. The banking industry, therefore, places key people in DC, as fundraisers as well as regulators.”

“The core problem in any regulated industry is regulatory capture. It’s not corruption. It happens when regulators and the industry have a shared world view and approach to issues. This cultural problem is more powerful than corruption.”

The movie, she said, showcases a key moment when the banking catastrophes that have caused the great recession could have been avoided by regulatory action, but those moments showed instead how powerful the lobbyists are. When one regulator was considering oversight of derivatives, he received a call from the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury saying, “there are thirteen bankers in my office and they say this will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.”

The irony here, of course, is that the regulator’s failure to act was a cause of the crisis but the primary cause of the worst financial crisis since World War II was those bankers themselves.

“Even now, there is no serious consideration of regulating derivatives, and no attempt to break up the banks that are ‘too big to fail.’”

For the record, here are candidate Obama’s promises on the subject of Wall Street reform.

Crawford noted that working hand in hand with the banking industry’s ideas is the fact that the banking industry offers a seductive lifestyle “particularly in New York City where life is so expensive.”

Recent headlines concerning bankers’ pay include “Love ‘Em or Hate ‘Em, Wall Street Bonuses Buy a Lot of Luxury Cars“.

News coverage of Wall Street is less kind abroad. Scotland’s The Herald writes, “Conspicuous consumption is back on Wall Street, in anticipation of bonuses close to pre-recession levels. Some American companies have just posted the largest quarterly profits ever. Meanwhile, one in five families is relying on food stamps to get by and unemployment remains stuck at around 10% … this year, shameless extravagance is making a comeback. One investment analyst booked hip-hop star Lil’ Kim for his Halloween party. Another paid Playboy bunnies to dance for guests behind a satin screen … The Japanese bank Nomura has estimated that America’s top five financial firms – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase – have set aside almost $90 billion for bonuses.”

Telecommunications

There have been several telecommunications recessions in the past decade or so, but we have not yet reached the disaster scenario where, Crawford said, the USA becames “an internet backwater without high speed internet or IPv6.”

Crawford pointed to several things the FCC did wrong that have harmed the growth of high speed internet here in the USA, the nation that invented the internet.

The regulators’ first error was the Bush FCC’s decision to deregulate high speed internet. This was a slow motion disaster: cable was deregulated in 2002, line sharing ended in 2003, and then in 2005, the courts ruled that since cable was deregulated, DSL should be deregulated too.

In response to one of these errors in 2003, then-FCC Commissioner Copps declared, “I fear this decision will result in higher prices for consumers and put us on the road to re-monopolization of the local broadband market. As harmful as this decision is, it may not be the last battle this year in the headlong rush to deregulate broadband. Shortly, we may be considering whether to deregulate broadband entirely by removing core communications services from the statutory framework established by Congress.”

Crawford commented, “it makes sense to share facilities that require a massive initial investment. That ended under the Bush FCC.”

The lobbyists were aided by surveys bolstering their position.

All of this could have been undone with the election of Barack Obama. Crawford noted that the Obama Campaign released an impressive technology policy statement. Had it been implemented, we would be better off today.

It included the statement, “Barack Obama supports the basic principle that network providers should not be allowed to charge fees to privilege the content or applications of some web sites and Internet applications over others. This principle will ensure that the new competitors, especially small or non-profit speakers, have the same opportunity as incumbents to innovate on the Internet and to reach large audiences.”

She noted, however, that some have said that while Obama won the election, Clinton won the transition, as experienced hands were favored in the rush to tackle important problems. She did not say, but implied, that the experienced hands tried old answers to pressing problems. One of the NYU students pointed out that in financial regulation, Obama even retained many Bush administration personnel.

Obama had promised fact-based decisions and the end of lobbyists.

Obama’s FCC, however, has tried a position that reminds Crawford of trick shots in ESPN’s billiards show and that the FCC’s current Chairman calls The Third Way.

The Bush FCC had claimed that the FCC had no authority to regulate the internet because, it said, the internet is an information service, not a telecommunications service. The FCC was saying, in effect, that it still did not believe that it had the authority to regulate the internet, except that it retained six specific powers.

“This set off a firestorm. The telcos, who really stop at nothing, put pressure on regulators, Congress, and the White House.”

“73 confused Democrats signed a letter that was drafted by Gene Green.”

In the other camp, the tea party took a stance on broadband regulation that was “likely provided by the telcos.”

In all of this, “the FCC was only trying to roll back the clock eight years to 2002.”

The telcos produced studies predicting disaster.

She said that watching this was like watching Lucy pull the football away from Charlie Brown, even though both were, in theory, on the same team. The statement reminded me of a comment by Rep. Markey in 2003: “By endoring the policy of ‘new wires, new rules’ the Bells say what we will now get is ‘no new hires, no new investment.’ Do you feel betrayed? You guys look like Charlie Brown after Lucy pulls the football away. The Bells pulled it right out from under you.”

“The commercial internet began in 1995. It was delivered by companies that we used to call ISPs.”

Today, due to the failure of the FCC’s “Third Way,” the FCC’s power to regulate the internet at all is in doubt.

Comcast-NBCU merger

To understand the cable industry, you have to understand the cable industry’s 1997 summer of love: “No one would consider Leo Hindery a hippie, but he is often remembered as the architect of the cable industry’s ‘summer of love.’ As president of Tele-Communications Inc. in 1997, Hindery orchestrated a series of mergers, partnerships and system sales that created geographic clusters making it easier and more cost-effective for operators to do business.”

Earlier this year, Verizon began ceding cities to cable. In particularly ironic timing, Alexandria, Va. was told it might never get FiOS one week before the release of Obama administration’s National Broadband Plan.

The National Broadband Plan (NBP), Crawford noted, did not discuss market structure or competition.

The phone companies cannot use DSL to compete with cable broadband, Crawford noted. To the extent that video streaming is the primary activity of broadband users — cable supports it and DSL simply lacks the necessary speed. “Only about 10 percent of Americans will have access to FiOS,” Crawford said.

When Comcast merges with NBCU, one pipe will be a media company, the largest broadband provider, the largest cable provider, and the nation’s third largest phone company. As it is, there are few media companies.

“When Verizon stops competing with Comcast, net neutrality is no longer an issue,” Crawford said.

Obama’s campaign statement said, “Barack Obama believes that the nation’s rules ensuring diversity of media ownership are critical to the public interest. Unfortunately, over the past several years, the Federal Communications Commission has promoted the concept of consolidation over diversity.”

“Comcast will use popular programming, especially sports programming, to make it difficult to compete,” Crawford said.

ISPs are worried about being asked to pay for ESPN360.

Today, ISPs are even more worried by Comcast’s charging fees to Level 3.

Level 3 said today, “On November 19, 2010, Comcast informed Level 3 that, for the first time, it will demand a recurring fee from Level 3 to transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast’s customers who request such content. By taking this action, Comcast is effectively putting up a toll booth at the borders of its broadband Internet access network, enabling it to unilaterally decide how much to charge for content which competes with its own cable TV and Xfinity delivered content. This action by Comcast threatens the open Internet and is a clear abuse of the dominant control that Comcast exerts in broadband access markets as the nation’s largest cable provider. On November 22, after being informed by Comcast that its demand for payment was ‘take it or leave it,’ Level 3 agreed to the terms, under protest, in order to ensure customers did not experience any disruptions.”

Crawford wrote in her blog that the Level 3 incident coincided with an action by Comcast against modem maker Zoom that appears to be designed to ensure that cable customers cannot buy a cheaper modem at Best Buy than whatever Comcast is offering.

Comcast is building a massive moat of comparitive advantage around its cable system, a monopolistic position that is contrary to the public interest. “They have influence and they have armies,” said Crawford.

“I think the merger is a fight over the future of the internet. The FCC is supposed to be an apolitical expert but at the moment the internet is operating without supervision.”

She contrasted the business as usual in the USA with Australia’s vision and leadership. The government of Australia is building a fiber network (aided in part by the fact that the largest companies in Australia are mining companies that are poorly served by the ILEC Telstra). Australia is also ordering the structural separation of Telstra, a historic advance that cannot even be imagined in the U.S. today.

Crawford said that in the U.S. policy advisors can pretend that there is competition between the three ILECs and between the phone and cable companies,

Crawford said that she hopes that the example of Australia, and local fiber such as that on offer in Chattanooga, may represent a true paradigm shift, a really new way of doing things in the original meaning that Thomas Kuhn imparted to the phrase.

But those hope-filled words cannot hide the fact that the Federal government lacks leadership. Instead, innovation and vision will need to come from other countries and, within the U.S., from local government and rural private ISPs.

A student asked why companies that would be harmed by this state of affairs, such as Google and Microsoft, don’t stand up to Comcast, but Crawford noted that it’s difficult, when you’re a large company that could be accused of being a monopoly, to ask for more regulation of a company that’s not you.

Joly MacFie, who was filming the speech, asked why the leaders of left wing organizations such as Crawford and Columbia professor Tim Wu are arguing for structural separation when the organizations they advise, Free Press and Public Knowledge, are still fighting about net neutrality. Crawford noted that as professors, she and Wu can argue for what should be, while the activist organizations have to work with what seems possible.

While everyone in theory understands that the internet brings wealth and business and tax dollars, far too many governments are trying to tax it in ways that could kill it in their area. Recently, the state of North Carolina told me a few years ago that he had to deal with:

Minnesota State Historical Preservation Office, US Army Corps of Engineers, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Trails and Waterways Division, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Division of Lands and Minerals, each county’s soil and water conservation district, and, last and perhaps most enormous, every township and city in the coverage area (Smith says there were 103).

In addition, he submitted linear yards worth of paperwork in order to obtain funding from the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Rural Utilities Service (RUS).

Joe Calzone of ION said that he’s worried about the cost of using poles. The language in the National Broadband Plan is vague enough that the state of New York, which faces a massive budget shortfall, wants to tax the use of rights of way by networks like ION.

“The national broadband plan is just a series of recommendations. It’s not a plan,” said Calzone.

“We need a national fiber plan,” said Newby. He pointed out that places like Australia and The Netherlands have fiber because the government has made it so.

“In Australia they did the right thing. They did not trust Telstra, the ILEC. They built carrier neutral fiber. I was concerned about whether the plan would survive the cash that Telstra spent on Australia’s election, but the fiber plan has survived.”

“Meanwhile, in North America, we’re building networks on an ROI basis in an era of no finance. The banks, which are not creditworthy, can get finance, but they won’t lend, because they don’t see businesses as creditworthy.”

“The Bell System was a quasi-socialist enterprise that built the foundation for America’s technological leadership of the world.”

The stimulus has not helped North America either.

“Canada is only subsidizing companies that are already in the business,” said Louis Houle, general manager of Quebec Connect. “I don’t think that Bell Canada needs a grant. We need money here at the rural level and we don’t have it.”

“The government is only interested in cell phones, while people in rural areas understand that without high speed internet and computers in the village, the kids will not return here.”

No infrastructure without corruption

New York City has the world’s largest subway system in terms of route miles (although Tokyo’s rail system, which includes elevated ground trains, carries more people). It could not have been built without Tammany Hall corruption.

Bruce Kushnick of TeleTruth pointed out that the phone companies have collected hundreds of millions of dollars each year in taxes that are not spent. He added that less than 20 years ago, the various states signed deals with the Bell companies to allow the phone companies to collect billions of dollars in taxes from customers — illegally — to deliver 45 Mbps to each home.

“In Sweden, the state built a network and rented it,” said an NYU student attending the meetup.

“Yes, but you have health care too,” said another NYU student.

“In Finland, broadband is a birthright,” said Newby.

The idea of disruptive innovation says that some progress inevitably displaces market leaders, so market leaders try to preserve their dominance by ensuring that there is no technological innovation and by buying up and shutting down any bringers of change.

So perhaps it is inevitable that large internet companies will try to crush the small. It may even be inevitable that government will help large internet companies crush innovation.

But entrepreneurs such as those at the ISOC-NY meeting will surely give innovation a chance.

Allied Fiber

Hunter Newby, CEO of Allied Fiber, was invited back to ISOC (he presented an introduction to Allied Fiber to ISOC in August). I heard Newby present Allied Fiber at The Broadband Expo in Dallas, which I covered for WISPA.

“We’re a landlord, not a carrier,” Newby said. Allied fiber is not a CLEC. It’s not even a C-Corp. It’s an LLC. The company has an agreement to utilize the rights of way of several railroads, along which it will run fiber. There will be a drop off point every 60 miles along the route. The first build will be a triangle connecting Ashburn, Va., New York, and Chicago. Within New Jersey, the fiber will run by some areas that are very popular for financial industry data centers.

“Server-based environments with high end applications that are very latency sensitive require dark fiber,” Newby said.

The eventual goal is to connect the places in the USA where fiber arrives from overseas. “The subsea landing points hold the earth’s continents together,” Newby said.

Newby has a career background in open networks, having worked for Telx for many years, where he helped build 60 Hudson Street.

ION: The Independent Optical Network

Joe Calzone, vice president of Albany, N.Y.-based ION, a group that brings 12 rural ILECs (RLECs) together. ION won $39 million in a round one middle mile BTOP broadband stimulus grant.

The group was founded by 12 RLECs who each contributed seed capital. It is independently operated and carrier neutral. “We’re Switzerland,” Calzone said.

The network covers most of New York state and the grant will allow it to bring service to areas of the state that have a significant amount of people in them but that are considered tier 3 and tier 4 markets.

Quebec Connect

Louis Houle, general manager of Quebec Connect and also president of ISOC-Quebec, discussed the issues that groups face in building community broadband.

“We are transferring knoweldge. We teach people how to run a network, at least how to handle customer service.”

“Our network is mostly Wi-Fi, with some fiber. We provide a public service. We want the network to be open.”

He said that local governments may mistrust even nonprofits. “The mayor often does not understand the interent and is not comfortable signing an agreement when they don’t know how it works and how much it should cost.”

Given the population density of Quebec versus that of New York, Houle said that you should divide by 40 for the cost of equivalent projects. He said that Quebec Connect currently has about 5 to 10 projects underway, each costing about $25,000.

Conclusion

“We all face the same issues,” Newby said. “It’s like physics. The internet is the same wherever you go.”

Towns want broadband because it brings business.

“The same thing happened 150 years ago. 151 Front Street in Toronto is a carrier hotel now. It was also the first telegraph station in Toronto. Things are where they are now because that’s where they were then.”

“The railroad brought businesses to the train stations, and cities without train stations declined. The highway system brought businesses to the exits, and cities without highway access declines. Business goes to the ports. The internet is the central nervous system of today’s communications network.”

(For Part II of this report, see: ISOC-NY: Building Tomorrow’s Broadband, Part II: The Issues The Networks Face)

Also, a clear majority believe that the broadband provider should always “deliver the promised speed” — they clearly don’t know that the contract they signed but did not read merely promises a “best effort”.

Only a third of cell phone customers are pleased with the price and speed they get, though a majority are happy with the cell phone as a phone.

It is not clear at this time how or whether the survey will influence FCC policy.

On Saturday, I spoke at a related event, talking about What Broadband Is And Why We Need It. I argued that broadband is not a luxury.

What is Broadband?

Broadband is faster than dialup, and the speed enables not just convenience but entirely new applications. I like to compare it to the diffrence between a phone call and the telegraph. The telegraph was patented in the U.S. in 1837, while the telephone was patented almost forty years later.

With a phone call, you get direct contact, intimacy, and the ability to ask and answer questions immediately. The telephone does more than transmit data faster than the telepgraph.

In order to use broadband for real time applications, it needs to have low latency. Just as a phone call on earth is different than a phone call to the space shuttle, applications that encounter latency break or degrade in quality.

While this may seem to be a simple question, the FCC is still pondering its definition of broadband, although the questions it is asking suggest that the definition of 2009 will be better than the definition of the past: 200 Kbps in one direction.

Why is Broadband Important?

As the quality of services offered over broadband increase, the quality of comparable offline services declines. Craigslist is harming the newspaper industry by attacking classified ads, a service that subsidized investigative journalism, but classified ads on the internet are easier to publish, search, and read than classified ads in newsprint.

The same is true with government services. One of the best government websites is the IRS, where you can download tax forms quickly. The offline alternative is to go to an IRS office in person to get the forms. At New York City’s MTA website, you can get subway maps and bus schedules. These maps and schedules are not always available on buses or in subway stations.

Finally, broadband is critical for business. Businesses are expected to be able to communicate over the internet, to be able to send and receive proposals and presentations and invoices.

Broadband is good for America. A recent report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Broadband’s Impact on Citizen Engagement, said that people who have broadband are more likely to vote. I would add that they are also more likely to make informed decisions when they vote. The report said that people with broadband are more likely to interact with their representatives and to know about their own community.

During this recession, broadband is critical. A recent report from Pew, The Internet and the Recession, said that 69 percent of Americans have used the internet to cope with the recession, 88 percent of internet users. Americans have sought information about jobs, investment strategies, housing, and more.

14 percent of those interviewed had lost a job during the recession.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project is a great resource for researchers on a budget. While research organizations like Gartner and Forrester and Yankee Group charge for the insights they deliver, Pew is free. I strongly recommend it, especially to students.

Who Has Broadband?

Rich people have broadband. According to Pew’s Home Broadband Adoption 2009 report, 63 percent of adult Americans have broadband at home.

Surprisingly, the average price of that service has risen from $34.50 in 2008 to $39 in 2009, an increase of over 10 percent, faster than inflation and particularly surprising in an industry driven by deflationary economics.

Pew also reported that the recession will prevent some people from upgrading from dialup to broadband, exacerbating the digital divide.

Universal Broadband in the U.S.:
A Problem and a Proposed Solution

The rate of growth of broadband is the Leichtman Research Group.

The broadband stimulus is the government’s solution to this problem. The FCC has allocated $7.2 billion to improve access to broadband in poor and rural areas.

But there are doubts about this strategy. In broadband, the U.S. is 15 years behind South Korea. One attendee at Saturday’s event, Regina Walton, writes that the speeds don’t tell all of the story: Korea’s utilities also provide — gosh — customer service. As this map from the BBC shows, several other nations around the world are also ahead of the U.S. in broadband speeds.

Australia’s ILEC recently rejected the policies of an imported American CEO, Sol Trujillo, and its new CEO admitted that Telstra had lied to regulators under Trujillo. Phone companies can change and start telling the truth. This is a developing story, one to watch. I expect Australia’s broadband speeds to improve markedly as Telstra becomes more like a utility and stops the dirty tactics.

Other nations provide a good example of what not to do. Canada has just allowed the Bell company there to restrict the broadband speeds of not only its own customers but also the customers of its competitors. Canadian Regulators Send Another Love Letter To Bell Canada warned DSL Reports’ Karl Bode. Bode is a strong advocate for consumer rights and his reporting is bolstered by the massive DSL Reports community that frequently alerts him to stories that others are not covering.

In the UK, a lax regulator (one that occasionally delivers good decisions, but too rarely) has allowed just four companies to own over 90 percent of the broadband market. According to Dave Burstein, an experienced commentator on the telco side of broadband, the regulator in the UK needs to take a close look at the price at which bandwidth is sold to ISPs.

Broadband Pricing

For details on bandwidth pricing, see yesterday’s post, Prof. Andrew Odlyzko’s screed against DPI

Look at that chart, and you can see why Verizon the phone company wants to become Verizon Wireless (plus, maybe, the professional services of Verizon Business).

The current pricing scheme — anywhere in the world — is largely determined by regulation, and the U.S. could do much better.

Internet Regulation

The FCC has embraced net neutrality, the common carrier credo that all internet traffic should be treated the same in order to avoid problems such as those caused by the railroad robber barons when they decided which farmers could deliver their food to the market, or by Western Union when it refused to carry telegraph news reports if they concerned Democrats. Modern analogs to these issues exist on the internet, such as when Verizon refused to carry the message of an abortion rights group a few years ago.

Where net neutrality is a band aid, structural separation is a solution. If you separate the provider of internet bandwidth from the provider of content and services, then the provider of bandwidth will gain nothing from favoring some content and services over others. Although this solution is working in most of the high bandwidth nations of the world, the Obama administration is unwilling to try it in the U.S.

The Obama administration is trying to do one thing right: crack down on the influence of lobbyists over laws that affect everyone. However, the FCC has been criticized for hiring a lobbyist to develop its broadband plan.

The FCC and the U.S. need you to keep an eye on them.

Conclusion: Broadband is a Utility, not a Luxury

Broadband is the key to accessing services that are becoming a vital part of everyday life at a point when the country is challenged by a recession and requires an informed and active electorate. It is vital to finding a job. It is the key to telework. It is useful in interacting with the government, from obtaining forms to contacting your representatives. It is useful for everyday things such as obtaining a bus schedule and reading the news.

It can even help you read this presentation and access the slides that I made for it.

Yet the importance of broadband is not well recognized. The music industry want to deny it to people accused of wrongdoing under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), the only law in the U.S. where people are guily until proven innocent. Even those who were accused of downloading music but were able to prove they did not have a computer had to “settle” with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), because the DMCA violates basic and established principles of justice and common law.

Similarly, there is no guarantee that the Obama FCC will behave in an enlightened manner. It could be captured by lobbyists, just like Canada’s CFTC.

Broadband is not a luxury. It is a necessary component for success, but there are no guarantees that the government, lobbyists, or corporations will do the right thing. It’s up to you.
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