isen.blog

Transcribing FCC Chairman Powell's remarks at the FCC TAC Meeting on October 20, 2003, is helping me understand what Powell is thinking -- and what he's not thinking.

Below, Vint Cerf asserts that providing services under IP is a solved problem -- that the problem is transport -- and asks for Powell's reaction. Powell acknowledges that "everything is an application over IP", and dances around the edges of the transport problem. He briefly addresses anti-competitive tying of transport and service, but he fails to address the Paradox of the Best Network (or any of the really big problems with competing by offering pure commodity transport under IP), he doesn't touch the idea of "natural monopoly", and he doesn't mention the Common Carrier concept, pro or con. Towards the end of his answer, Powell gets positively tangled up in regulator-speak. In the video, he looks almost apologetic -- or maybe a bit bewildered -- by the end of his answer. Is this because Powell isn't saying what he's thinking, or because he doesn't have a good theory of how to address these issues?

3:26:40
Vint Cerf:

One of the discussion points that came up today talked about a different theory for looking at these kinds of services, separating service from infrastructure in the belief that if all the services were transported through IP, the real issue is is not the service anymore. It has been decoupled. The questions are: How is the transport accessible? How is it available? How is it used? How is it constrained if at all?

Powell:

Absolutely. Those would be the next set of immediate questions. But you'd be surprised. It won't be as easy as it seems to this enlightened group to reach the first conclusion, that it's all an application over IP. Well the Minnesota Commission doesn't think so, the California Commission doesn't think so, and I think that's a potentially important war to win.

Secondly, with respect to the question of infrastructure and access, absolutely that's the next set of important questions. There's two sets of emerging views that could be pursued individually or in some combination, which are the telephone notion of infrastructure access, which is the physical access to pipes on behalf of competitors. This issue takes the form of open access (forced access if you're the cable company) and how does that work. How is it actually managed? What are the rules that get applied? It gets pretty complicated quickly.

[In contrast] there's Microsoft running around talking about net neutrality. The interesting thing when you're talking about IP Protocol based stuff is that in some wasy by its very nature pipes become less the means to routing, because routing is done by packetized architecture that is very different than we're accustomed to in the point to point telephone world and if any publisher or any service provider is guaranteed or some ways protected in its ability to reach any consumer, that's another way and perhaps one of the more fruitful ways to try to protect the end-to-end nature of reaching a consumer through products and services by guaranteeing that applications and services short of needing to protect some level of quality and security can go through whoever calls for it to be commanded. That's what makes this question so much more unique than in the telephone context, where the pipe was such a critical part of establishing the connection and the relationship. If you couldn't own the pipe, or actually plug into the pipe, you absolutely had no way of reaching the consumer.

But Yahoo has a way of reaching the consumer, [to] anybody who has broadband, as long as there's something that doesn't allow somebody to strip bits or alter bits in some way. So at least we have another set of tools or variables to deal with the anticompetitive concerns that are always raised that will make this harder but also in some ways easier because I think we have some tools to find the balance to making sure that there's a competitive service sector for consumers.

3:30:03