I’ve been meaning to do another post on net neutrality based on a fair amount of recent activity on various blogs but haven’t had time. To cut down on the number of open tabs in my browser, I’m just going to dump the links here and let you read them yourselves:

• Vint Cerf for Google on reasonable approaches to managing networks
• A “history lesson” from Verizon
• Joost CEO Mike Volpi on net neutrality and Adam Smith

I’m not convinced any of these companies has 100% the right approach but I’m glad we’re finally discussing it in a reasonable manner rather than simply posturing or suing one another about this…

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Update: I’ve added some links to the pieces that I’ve done since on the blog.

I attended the Ericsson North American analyst event yesterday and came back with lots of ideas for pieces to write over the next couple of months. One or two of them may end up being blog posts here but the rest will likely be content published for Ovum’s paying customers (I’ll try to share some snippets here regardless). Here is a list of most of them:

• 5 things regulators can do to help telecoms to continue to grow in a sluggish economy. This was sparked by some comments from one of the speakers at the Ericsson event who talked about regulators screwing up markets – and it made me realise that much of Ovum’s regulatory content (which now sits within my practice) is pretty much after-the-fact commentary rather than prescriptive advice for regulators.
• The impact of a billion new middle class consumers on the global telecoms market. The 1 billion number is the estimate of a number of (non-telecom) analysts about the additional members of the ‘middle class’ (whatever that means on a global scale) who will come out of China, India and other emerging markets in the next few years.
• How real are economies of scale and scope in telecoms? We talk about this a lot as if it’s an obvious fact of life in telecoms, but I’m not sure much analysis has been done on how real the impact is compared with the price (specifically, acquisition and integration expenses and associated disruption) that is often paid to achieve them. Not yet sure how to measure that but it’ll be an interesting challenge.
• Advertising and its impact on the telecoms market. Much has been made of the entry of Google and others into the telecom market, and their potential for disrupting traditional business models with advertising-funded, free-to-the-consumer services. Much has also been made of the opportunity for mobile advertising and other forms of advertising telcos can take advantage of. But how big is the advertising pie really, and how much impact will it have on telcos?
• Bandwidth and storage. Since both the bandwidth available to consumers and the price of storage are vastly improving at a rapid pace, what is the future of content delivery likely to look like? Does cheap storage enable models where vast amounts of content are distributed to users under lock and key, and they merely unlock them by paying for what they use? Or does the availability of abundant bandwidth (including increasingly wirelessly) mean we are likely to use streaming to obtain content? In all likelihood the answer is both, but I’m interested in the mix of the two.
• Mobile broadband overtakes fixed broadband. Ericsson makes much of the fact that mobile broadband will overtake fixed broadband in terms of subscribers next year. In practical terms, there are multiple users for every fixed broadband subscriber, so that’s not as straightforward as it sounds, but increasingly the world will be made up of as many mobile Internet users as fixed ones – how will this change the shape of the Internet, the way websites are designed, the way content is displayed and delivered?
• Inertia as a factor in telecom. I’m constantly struck by how many standalone long-distance subscribers AT&T, Verizon ( through MCI) and Sprint still have even several years after they stopped marketing services (because of DO NOT CALL) and with local incumbents aggressively marketing bundles of local and long-distance. This is a reminder of the power of inertia among users slowing market shifts and preserving calm even in the face of dramatic changes at the leading edge.

• A review of the BlackBerry Bold (still haven’t done this but did one on the Storm here). I was just sent one of these by RIM – thanks RIM, as always. I’ve been playing with it a bit already but only just got it hooked up to my corporate email account. So I’ll be playing with it some more and doing a review of sorts here on the blog (not much call for this sort of thing in Ovum’s published content). Particularly keen to compare its performance with the iPhone, which has replaced my Curve as current phone of choice. Might make that either an audio or video post – haven’t decided yet.

If you have any ideas, input or suggestions for any of these pieces please let me know – I’d love to hear it. If you’re interested in any particular piece let me know that too and I can let you know when I’ve written it.

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I just installed a new plugin from Kaltura which is supposed to add ‘interactive’ video to WordPress blogs. It allows you to upload videos you’ve already recorded through desktop software but also permits you to record new video on the fly via a webcam and a Flash interface.

I recorded a video from my webcam but now it’s disappeared – not an auspicious start… However, I’ve been able to insert it by going back into the ‘Add interactive video’ dialog box and browsing for videos. Not sure why I wasn’t able to get it to do that first time around – either human error or a flaw in the interface. At any rate, I’ve embedded the video below so you can see for yourself. Not bad – I’ve been looking for something that will do both things this program will do for some time so I’m glad to have something finally that looks like it may do the trick. Now we’ll see how well it holds up once more and more users pile on…

[kaltura-widget wid="m0qf4j2l2w" width="410" height="364" /]

The audio is a little quiet – that’s probably more a function of the microphone on my MacBook than anything wrong with Kaltura’s plugin.

And you’ll have to excuse the boxes in the background – we had people in to replace the carpet and paint the walls in the basement here while I was out of town recently, and haven’t moved the boxes back to where they came from, so I’m currently sitting amidst a mini-city of box towers in my home office.

Update: and, upon attempting to view the video, it appears that something went wrong somewhere. it works fine until the 22 second mark and then something about the way I arched my eyebrows made the thing stop recording properly and yet take up another 39 minutes or so of video recording time with nothing. I promise the original was only 33 seconds long. I’ll have to try again one of these days.

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So the FCC finally dealt with the Comcast net neutrality issue and issued a 3-2 decision castigating Comcast for doing whatever it did but not fining it:

Ruling on a complaint by Free Press and Public Knowledge as well as a petition for declaratory ruling, the Commission concluded that Comcast has unduly interfered with Internet users’ right to access the lawful Internet content and to use the applications of their choice. Specifically, the Commission found that Comcast had deployed equipment throughout its network to monitor the content of its customers’ Internet connections and selectively block specific types of connections known as peer-to-peer connections.

The problem is, these “rights” don’t exist – at least as a fact of law. Neither the FCC nor Congress has ever passed a ruling or legislation that says Comcast can’t do what it did. There have been various policy statements – especially the famous one about the four net freedoms – but those don’t carry the weight of law. So the FCC is essentially finding Comcast in contravention of a law and passing the law at the same time, which is exactly Comcast’s complaint, and one that’s echoed by the two Republican Commissioners – here’s Commissioner McDowell:

In short, we have no rules to enforce. This matter would have had a better chance at appeal if we had put the horse before the cart.

That’s an important secondary point – this will likely end up being simply a symbolic gesture because the appeals courts are bound to side with Comcast and the two Republicans – there was no law there to enforce and so Comcast had no way of knowing what it did was wrong. Which means as well as falling short in this particular case, it will also fail to set the precedent this is already being hailed as.

Now, I’m no shill for Comcast. As my previous posts on this topic show, however, I do have a certain amount of sympathy for its position. I do think it’s far more reasonable for a cable company to adopt traffic management policies to deal with occasional network congestion than to invest in a massive upgrade of its network to ensure that congestion never occurs. However, according to the evidence the FCC majority accepted to be true, Comcast throttled all P2P traffic all the time, regardless of congestion, which is unreasonable even if you think they have a right to throttle traffic when there is congestion. It’s not clear the FCC did any of its own research on this topic – it would have been hard to, since Comcast had discontinued the practice some time ago – but it seems to have taken various consumer rights groups’ word for it.

I still think the most reasonable approach to all this is to give ISPs – whether cable companies, telcos or wireless operators – the right to set their own reasonable use terms and make these clear to customers, including whatever network management policies the provider intends to apply in general terms, and then let customers decide whether they’re willing to put up with those or not. As I’ve mentioned before, this already applies in the case of running servers on consumer DSL lines, for example, and no-one seems to have objected to that.

However, it appears Kevin Martin has decided to step away from the set of principles he held when he first took this position and go with the popular flow as a bid to leave some kind – any kind – of legacy before he gets ditched as one of the first acts of an Obama presidency. The problem is that the decision is both wrong and unenforceable and so it will end up being remembered as a hollow gesture that did very little real good.

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