FCC examining reasons for Internet traffic jams - Yahoo Finance

FCC examining reasons for Internet traffic jams - Yahoo Finance: Former FCC Commissioner Michael Powell, now president of National Cable & Telecommunications Association, blasted Netflix and other unnamed Internet companies for trying to "move the goal posts" to suit their own interests. "They want to protect their profits by ensuring that the disproportionate impact caused by delivering traffic to their customers is spread across all broadband subscribers and not just those who actually use the service," Powell wrote in a blog post earlier this week.

Powell's narrow, outdated cable TV perspective is old school thinking that no longer works given the growing multiplicity of those holding a stake in and benefiting from modern Internet-based telecommunications and its vital role in interstate and international commerce.

Netflix is just one of many services the Internet makes available just as roads and highways bring us both direct benefit when we travel over them and indirect benefit when they bring us goods and services. We need a new way of thinking and a new way of building out and regulating the Internet ecosystem that takes into account this reality.

Top Cable Lobbyist Argues Against Broadband as Utility - NYTimes.com - NYTimes.com

Top Cable Lobbyist Argues Against Broadband as Utility - NYTimes.com - NYTimes.com: While the Internet and broadband systems were built “with the help of the government,” Mr. Powell said, “they have suffered terribly chronic underinvestment.” In 2002, when Mr. Powell was chairman of the F.C.C., the agency voted to regulate cable-modem broadband service as a lightly regulated “information service” rather than as a “common carrier.”

Mr. Powell, a former U.S. Federal Communications Commission chairman, correctly diagnoses the poor state of American Internet telecommunications infrastructure in characterizing it as suffering from chronic underinvestment. But oddly, he offers the wrong remedy in declaring the government should take a hands off approach and avoid treating it as a common telecommunications carrier like landline telephone service, available to anyone who wishes to order it.

That's been the status quo since the 1996 Communications Act become law, leaving about a quarter or more of all premises without modern landline Internet access, with some still offered only dialup service that most Americans were using since before the law was enacted. Powell's tortured logic would suggest that requiring Internet service providers serve all premises will somehow make that sorry situation worse. It simply doesn't add up.