It’s easy to look at the net neutrality debate and assume that everyone is acting in their self-interest and against consumer welfare. Thus, many on the left denounce all opposition to Title II as essentially “Comcast-funded,” aimed at undermining the Open Internet to further nefarious, hidden agendas. No matter how often opponents make the economic argument that Title II would reduce incentives to invest in the network, many will not listen because they have convinced themselves that it is simply special-interest pleading.

But whatever you think of ISPs’ incentives to oppose Title II, the incentive for the tech companies (like Cisco, Qualcomm, Nokia and IBM) that design and build key elements of network infrastructure and the devices that connect to it (i.e., essential input providers) is to build out networks and increase adoption (i.e., to expand output). These companies’ fundamental incentive with respect to regulation of the Internet is the adoption of rules that favor investment. They operate in highly competitive markets, they don’t offer competing content and they don’t stand as alleged “gatekeepers” seeking monopoly returns from, or control over, what crosses over the Interwebs.

Thus, it is no small thing that 60 tech companies — including some of the world’s largest, based both in the US and abroad — that are heavily invested in the buildout of networks and devices, as well as more than 100 manufacturing firms that are increasingly building the products and devices that make up the “Internet of Things,” have written letters strongly opposing the reclassification of broadband under Title II.

There is probably no more objective evidence that Title II reclassification will harm broadband deployment than the opposition of these informed market participants.

These companies have the most to lose from reduced buildout, and no reasonable nefarious plots can be constructed to impugn their opposition to reclassification as consumer-harming self-interest in disguise. Their self-interest is on their sleeves: More broadband deployment and adoption — which is exactly what the Open Internet proceedings are supposed to accomplish.

If the FCC chooses the reclassification route, it will most assuredly end up in litigation. And when it does, the opposition of these companies to Title II should be Exhibit A in the effort to debunk the FCC’s purported basis for its rules: the “virtuous circle” theory that says that strong net neutrality rules are necessary to drive broadband investment and deployment.

Access to all the wonderful content the Internet has brought us is not possible without the billions of dollars that have been invested in building the networks and devices themselves. Let’s not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Filed under: antitrust, law and economics, markets, monopolization, net neutrality, technology, telecommunications, vertical restraints, wireless Tagged: antitrust, net neutrality, open internet, tech companies, Title II

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_e7YBw-Nyo&list=PLR5Q3wC5nyVly6zQBygRg7bkk1ZYIs8PC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_e7YBw-Nyo

Excerpt

Meet iHolo. This innovative (though hypothetical) startup sells a tiny cube that hooks into smartphones and projects a holographic image above the screen. Now we can see actual 3D holographic characters and movie explosions, hovering right in front of us! There’s just one problem: “Holovids” require an incredibly fast connection, and tons of bandwidth. The typical smartphone user has neither the speed nor the data capacity to use the new technology: after extended buffering waiting for the holovid to load, a user would exhaust his data plan within minutes.

Worried that users won’t materialize, iHolo offers a deal to the big wireless carriers: To any carrier that will boost the speed of iHolo customers and exempt iHolo material from users’ data caps, iHolo will sell a minority interest in its fledgling company.

It’s a potential win-win. iHolo gets access to much-needed capital, boosts demand for its product, and gains the stability that comes from having a big backer. That institutional support would mollify investors who would otherwise be wary of betting on an unproven technology. The carrier could differentiate itself in the wireless market, and the two companies could work together to figure out how to stream holovids efficiently.What’s not to love? Well, the business model that could make this innovation possible isn’t “neutral.” It could be banned if Net neutrality hardliners get their way.

Net neutrality — the idea that all data should be treated the same as it zips over the Internet — sounds appealing in principle. Who wouldn’t want every competitor to have a fair shot, and for the best ideas to rise to the top? But in practice, rigid Net neutrality regulation could cripple the potential business arrangements that help launch new companies.

Continue reading on Computer World

In the 2014 Open Internet NPRM, the Commission began the process of closing the gap created by the Verizon decision, which left no legally enforceable rules for the Commission to prevent broadband providers from acting to limit Internet openness. The2014 Open Internet NPRM sought broad public comment on how the Commission should ensure that the Internet remains open, and proposed new rules and enhancements to current rules.

To further develop our understanding of the issues, the Commission is hosting a series of staff-led Open Internet Roundtable Discussions that are free and open to the public. The Open Internet Roundtable Discussions provide an opportunity for the Commission staff and interested parties to further examine the actions the Commission should take for its goal of determining the best approach to protecting and promoting Internet openness.

The roundtable discussions will focus on public policy considerations and how they should be addressed to protect and promote Internet openness in both the fixed and mobile markets; the technological considerations involved in protecting the open Internet; how the competitive landscape and the economics of providing broadband and online services affects Internet openness; how the Commission can effectively enforce the current and proposed open Internet requirements; and the various legal theories underlying possible Commission actions in this area.

Roundtable 3: Enhancing Transparency
This roundtable will consider proposed enhancements to the existing transparency rule, which currently requires providers of broadband Internet access services to disclose accurate information about their service offerings and make this information accessible to the public.

Click here to view the roundtable

The free market position on telecom reform has become rather confused of late. Erstwhile conservative Senator Thune is now cosponsoring a version of Senator Rockefeller’s previously proposed video reform bill, bundled into satellite legislation (the Satellite Television Access and Viewer Rights Act or “STAVRA”) that would also include a provision dubbed “Local Choice.” Some free marketeers have defended the bill as a step in the right direction.

Although it looks as if the proposal may be losing steam this Congress, the legislation has been described as a “big and bold idea,” and it’s by no means off the menu. But it should be.

It has been said that politics makes for strange bedfellows. Indeed, people who disagree on just about everything can sometimes unite around a common perceived enemy. Take carriage disputes, for instance. Perhaps because, for some people, a day without The Bachelor is simply a day lost, an unlikely alliance of pro-regulation activists like Public Knowledge and industry stalwarts like Dish has emerged to oppose the ability of copyright holders to withhold content as part of carriage negotiations.

Senator Rockefeller’s Online Video Bill was the catalyst for the Local Choice amendments to STAVRA. Rockefeller’s bill did, well, a lot of terrible things, from imposing certain net neutrality requirements, to overturning the Supreme Court’s Aereo decision, to adding even more complications to the already Byzantine morass of video programming regulations.

But putting Senator Thune’s lipstick on Rockefeller’s pig can’t save the bill, and some of the worst problems from Senator Rockefeller’s original proposal remain.

Among other things, the new bill is designed to weaken the ability of copyright owners to negotiate with distributors, most notably by taking away their ability to withhold content during carriage disputes and by forcing TV stations to sell content on an a la carte basis.

Video distribution issues are complicated — at least under current law. But at root these are just commercial contracts and, like any contracts, they rely on a couple of fundamental principles.

First is the basic property right. The Supreme Court (at least somewhat) settled this for now (in Aereo), by protecting the right of copyright holders to be compensated for carriage of their content. With this baseline, distributors must engage in negotiations to obtain content, rather than employing technological workarounds and exploiting legal loopholes.

Second is the related ability of contracts to govern the terms of trade. A property right isn’t worth much if its owner can’t control how it is used, governed or exchanged.

Finally, and derived from these, is the issue of bargaining power. Good-faith negotiations require both sides not to act strategically by intentionally causing negotiations to break down. But if negotiations do break down, parties need to be able to protect their rights. When content owners are not able to withhold content in carriage disputes, they are put in an untenable bargaining position. This invites bad faith negotiations by distributors.

The STAVRA/Local Choice proposal would undermine the property rights and freedom of contract that bring The Bachelor to your TV, and the proposed bill does real damage by curtailing the scope of the property right in TV programming and restricting the range of contracts available for networks to license their content.

The bill would require that essentially all broadcast stations that elect retrans make their content available a la carte — thus unbundling some of the proverbial sticks that make up the traditional property right. It would also establish MVPD pass-through of each local affiliate. Subscribers would pay a fee determined by the affiliate, and the station must be offered on an unbundled basis, without any minimum tier required – meaning an MVPD has to offer local stations to its customers with no markup, on an a la carte basis, if the station doesn’t elect must-carry. It would also direct the FCC to open a rulemaking to determine whether broadcasters should be prohibited from withholding their content online during a dispute with an MPVD.

“Free market” supporters of the bill assert something like “if we don’t do this to stop blackouts, we won’t be able to stem the tide of regulation of broadcasters.” Presumably this would end blackouts of broadcast programming: If you’re an MVPD subscriber, and you pay the $1.40 (or whatever) for CBS, you get it, period. The broadcaster sets an annual per-subscriber rate; MVPDs pass it on and retransmit only to subscribers who opt in.

But none of this is good for consumers.

When transaction costs are positive, negotiations sometimes break down. If the original right is placed in the wrong hands, then contracting may not assure the most efficient outcome. I think it was Coase who said that.

But taking away the ability of content owners to restrict access to their content during a bargaining dispute effectively places the right to content in the hands of distributors. Obviously, this change in bargaining position will depress the value of content. Placing the rights in the hands of distributors reduces the incentive to create content in the first place; this is why the law protects copyright to begin with. But it also reduces the ability of content owners and distributors to reach innovative agreements and contractual arrangements (like certain promotional deals) that benefit consumers, distributors and content owners alike.

The mandating of a la carte licensing doesn’t benefit consumers, either. Bundling is generally pro-competitive and actually gives consumers more content than they would otherwise have. The bill’s proposal to force programmers to sell content to consumers a la carte may actually lead to higher overall prices for less content. Not much of a bargain.

There are plenty of other ways this is bad for consumers, even if it narrowly “protects” them from blackouts. For example, the bill would prohibit a network from making a deal with an MVPD that provides a discount on a bundle including carriage of both its owned broadcast stations as well as the network’s affiliated cable programming. This is not a worthwhile — or free market — trade-off; it is an ill-advised and economically indefensible attack on vertical distribution arrangements — exactly the same thing that animates many net neutrality defenders.

Just as net neutrality’s meddling in commercial arrangements between ISPs and edge providers will ensure a host of unintended consequences, so will the Rockefeller/Thune bill foreclose a host of welfare-increasing deals. In the end, in exchange for never having to go three days without CBS content, the bill will make that content more expensive, limit the range of programming offered, and lock video distribution into a prescribed business model.

Former FCC Commissioner Rob McDowell sees the same hypocritical connection between net neutrality and broadcast regulation like the Local Choice bill:

According to comments filed with the FCC by Time Warner Cable and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, broadcasters should not be allowed to take down or withhold the content they produce and own from online distribution even if subscribers have not paid for it—as a matter of federal law. In other words, edge providers should be forced to stream their online content no matter what. Such an overreach, of course, would lay waste to the economics of the Internet. It would also violate the First Amendment’s prohibition against state-mandated, or forced, speech—the flip side of censorship.

It is possible that the cable companies figure that subjecting powerful broadcasters to anti-free speech rules will shift the political momentum in the FCC and among the public away from net neutrality. But cable’s anti-free speech arguments play right into the hands of the net-neutrality crowd. They want to place the entire Internet ecosystem, physical networks, content and apps, in the hands of federal bureaucrats.

While cable providers have generally opposed net neutrality regulation, there is, apparently, some support among them for regulations that would apply to the edge. The Rockefeller/Thune proposal is just a replay of this constraint — this time by forcing programmers to allow retransmission of broadcast content under terms set by Congress. While “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” sounds appealing in theory, here it is simply doubling down on a terrible idea.

What it reveals most of all is that true neutrality advocates don’t want government control to be limited to ISPs — rather, progressives like Rockefeller (and apparently some conservatives, like Thune) want to subject the whole apparatus — distribution and content alike — to intrusive government oversight in order to “protect” consumers (a point Fred Campbell deftly expands upon here and here).

You can be sure that, if the GOP supports broadcast a la carte, it will pave the way for Democrats (and moderates like McCain who back a la carte) to expand anti-consumer unbundling requirements to cable next. Nearly every economic analysis has concluded that mandated a la carte pricing of cable programming would be harmful to consumers. There is no reason to think that applying it to broadcast channels would be any different.

What’s more, the logical extension of the bill is to apply unbundling to all MVPD channels and to saddle them with contract restraints, as well — and while we’re at it, why not unbundle House of Cards from Orange is the New Black? The Rockefeller bill may have started in part as an effort to “protect” OVDs, but there’ll be no limiting this camel once its nose is under the tent. Like it or not, channel unbundling is arbitrary — why not unbundle by program, episode, studio, production company, etc.?

There is simply no principled basis for the restraints in this bill, and thus there will be no limit to its reach. Indeed, “free market” defenders of the Rockefeller/Thune approach may well be supporting a bill that ultimately leads to something like compulsory, a la carte licensing of all video programming. As I noted in my testimony last year before the House Commerce Committee on the satellite video bill:

Unless we are prepared to bear the consumer harm from reduced variety, weakened competition and possibly even higher prices (and absolutely higher prices for some content), there is no economic justification for interfering in these business decisions.

So much for property rights — and so much for vibrant video programming.

That there is something wrong with the current system is evident to anyone who looks at it. As Gus Hurwitz noted in recent testimony on Rockefeller’s original bill,

The problems with the existing regulatory regime cannot be understated. It involves multiple statutes implemented by multiple agencies to govern technologies developed in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, according to policy goals from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. We are no longer living in a world where the Rube Goldberg of compulsory licenses, must carry and retransmission consent, financial interest and syndication exclusivity rules, and the panoply of Federal, state, and local regulations makes sense – yet these are the rules that govern the video industry.

While video regulation is in need of reform, this bill is not an improvement. In the short run it may ameliorate some carriage disputes, but it will do so at the expense of continued programming vibrancy and distribution innovations. The better way to effect change would be to abolish the Byzantine regulations that simultaneously attempt to place thumbs of both sides of the scale, and to rely on free market negotiations with a copyright baseline and antitrust review for actual abuses.

But STAVRA/Local Choice is about as far from that as you can get.

Cross-posted from Truth on the Market

The Wall Street Journal dropped an FCC bombshell last week, although I’m not sure anyone noticed. In an article ostensibly about the possible role that MFNs might play in the Comcast/Time-Warner Cable merger, the Journal noted that…

Read the full piece here.

While the Comcast/TWC merger is significant in size, it doesn’t give rise to any plausible theory of anticompetitive harm under modern antitrust analysis.

Comcast and TWC don’t compete directly for subscribers in any relevant market; in terms of concentration and horizontal effects, the transaction will neither reduce competition nor restrict consumer choice.

Critics repeatedly assert that the combined entity will gain bargaining leverage against content providers from the merger, resulting in lower content prices to programmers. But after the transaction, Comcast will serve fewer than 30 percent of total MVPD subscribers — a share insufficient to give it market power over sellers of video programming. Moreover, recent exponential growth in OVDs gives content providers even more ways to distribute their programming. Programmers with valuable content have significant bargaining power, and have been able to extract the prices to prove it.

The argument that the merger will increase Comcast’s incentive and ability to impair online video content or other edge providers is similarly without merit. On a national level, the combined firm would have only about 40 percent of broadband customers, at most. This leaves at least 60 percent of customers available to purchase content and support edge providers reaching minimum viable scale, even if Comcast were to attempt to foreclose access.

Some have also argued that because Comcast has a monopoly on access to its customers, transit providers are beholden to it. But edge providers can access Comcast’s network through multiple channels, undermining Comcast’s ability to deny access or degrade service to such providers.

Finally, critics have alleged that the vertically integrated Comcast may withhold its content from MVPDs or OVDs, or deny carriage to unaffiliated programming. But the transaction has no effect on Comcast’s share of national programming, and a trivial effect on its share of national distribution. Comcast already has no ownership interest in the overwhelming majority of content it distributes. This will not measurably change post-transaction.

At the same time, the transaction will bring significant scale efficiencies in a marketplace that requires large, fixed-cost investments in network infrastructure and technology. And bringing a more vertical structure to TWC will likely be beneficial, as well.

Download: Beneficence Is Beside the Point

The International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) and TechFreedom filed two joint comments with the FCC today, explaining why the FCC has no sound legal basis for micromanaging the Internet and why “net neutrality” regulation would actually prove counter-productive for consumers.

The Policy Comments are available here, and the Legal Comments are here. See our previous post, Net Neutrality Regulation Is Bad for Consumers and Probably Illegal, for a distillation of many of the key points made in the comments.

Read the full piece here.