Thoughts on freedom, programming and other type stuffs.

Once More Unto the Breach: Ten Weeks Until The Master’s Degree

September 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Stunningly UselessThis marks the first of the final ten weeks of my Master’s program.

I’ve posted about it before, but for the uninitiated, I’m close to earning a Master’s in Information and Communication Technologies with an emphasis in Database Design and Management.

I’ll pause here while you swoon.

Ultimately, this means I’m sliding towards my final capstone (or thesis or what have you), and the thing is, even though I’m staring down the barrel of a fairly long paper, I’m pretty excited to continue blogging.  I’m pushing hard to make my paper an analysis of the intersection of ICT and civil liberties — with a particular emphasis on the stunningly useless FCC — and I can’t wait to share what I find as I delve into this thing.

You see, it’s been a book-tastic summer.  Between catching up on classics I never read the first go-round (Slaughterhouse-Five, Fahrenheit 451) and mindless fun (Robopocalypse), I read the superb The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America, and — hyperbole aside — few things have so buoyed my hope for the future.

We live in a world — this one right here — where until 1978, the Civil Aeronautics Board controlled every finite detail of air control, from means of entry into the marketplace to the food provided on the flights.  But in this very same world, deregulation fanatics like Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter of all people got the idea that maybe regulation was holding things back.

If you were alive in 1978, the Airline Deregulation Act is probably not news to you.  But in a world where the FCC not only exists but is essentially doing the same thing as the CAB, this came as a fascinating story to me.

This is the story I want to tell in my Master’s capstone: the idea that we can become more free.  That the answer to a problem caused by government (artificially high entry barrier for new ISPs) is not more regulation.  That we can have more choice, lower prices and better service when we stop passing stunningly useless legislation.

Ultimately, I guess, this post is a warning: I will probably care far too much about the stunningly useless FCC, Net Neutrality, and regulation over the coming weeks.  I will probably quote from Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose.  This pony may temporarily forget all but a single trick.

But hopefully you won’t mind.  Because, even with that paper’s barrel in my face (to reuse my terrible metaphor), I’m excited again.

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Stunningly Useless FCC Now Also Unable to Ruin Future of Internet

April 6, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Stunningly UselessOn the heels of announcing that its long-term goals were to…well, to do what was already going to happen without their help, the FCC today had its favorite solution in search of a problem, Net Neutrality, taken away.  Says the NYT:

A federal appeals court on Tuesday dealt a sharp blow to the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission to set the rules of the road for the Internet, ruling that the agency lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks.

Here’s the issue, simplified: video and VOIP take more bandwidth than static websites.  If you force the ISPs to use a dumb pipe, you’re restricting the growth of bandwidth-heavy resources (who wants to watch a choppy video or use a spotty VOIP service?)  By allowing the ISPs to manage the flow, you’re not inviting the industry to censor, you’re allowing them to make the best use of their resources.

The NYT article continues:

Members of Congress have expressed concern that the acquisition could give Comcast the power to favor the content of its own cable and broadcast channels over those of competitors, something that Comcast has said it does not intend to do. Now, members of Congress could also fret that Comcast will also block or slow down customers’ access to the Web sites of competing television and telecommunications companies.

And there’s the essence of the debate: the concern from members of Congress is over the ability for Comcast to harm their customers, not about any actual harm being done.  There’s no fraud taking place, no theft, no damages…but there could be someday, which means we must act!

Or not.  Maybe we could all just let a company and its customers enter into private agreements without inviting government into the middle of it?

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Stunningly Useless

March 24, 2010 by 1 Comment

Stunningly UselessAs the Washington Post editorializes, the National Broadband Plan, issued forth last week by the FCC, has set its sights on…well, on doing what was already going to happen without their help:

BY THE Federal Communications Commission’s own account, broadband use in the United States has exploded over the past decade: “Fueled primarily by private sector investment and innovation, the American broadband ecosystem has evolved rapidly. The number of Americans who have broadband at home has grown from eight million in 2000 to nearly 200 million last year.”

So it is curious that the FCC’s newly released National Broadband Plan faults the market for failing to “bring the power and promise of broadband to us all” — in reality, some 7 million households unable to get broadband because it is not offered in their areas. Such an assessment — and the call for government intervention to subsidize service for rural or poor communities — is premature, at best.

Having just finished writing a term paper on this for my Masters program, I can speak somewhat lucidly about how stunningly useless the FCC’s interference actually is: with absolutely no intervention from the government, the FCC estimated that 90% of households would have broadband access by 2013.  FiOS is growing, Google is getting in on the Fiber to the Home game, LTE is slated to bring mobile download speeds of up to 50Mbps to increasing areas in the near future…

So obviously, the private networks which are on pace to grow broadband access from 65% to 90% in the next three years must receive government grants.  The government must step in do something.

Here’s the thing: by the FCC’s own analysys, it would take $350 billion to provide truly universal broadband access.  That’s about a bajillion times larger than the $7.2 billion Congress gave the FCC to get the project done, which means there’s about 0.0% chance the plan will involve building infrastructure, which means that the money that is going to be taxed and spent is going to be on subsidies for satellite “broadband,” which means there’s absolutely no incentive to expand mobile or fiber internet in those areas through existing or emerging technologies.

Is there a better way to stifle innovation than by government intrusion?  And for what, bragging rights?

This must be what going mad feels like.

(Hat tip on the WashPost editorial to Becky Chandler’s Twitter feed.)

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One of those William Chase Johnson blogs.