Que viva Roberto de Posada y la Coalicion Latina!

Writing about net neutrality in today’s New York Sun, Don Roberto, president of the non-profit Latino Counsel, explains:

“Today, only 29% of Latino adults subscribe to broadband at home, compared to 43% of white America. That statistical difference represents thousands of potential Hispanic leaders and entrepreneurs that are being left behind when it comes to acquiring the online skills necessary to succeed in tomorrow’s world.”

As for net neutrality, Don Roberto is clear:

“An open Internet is good and we should oppose any effort by broadband providers to balkanize it. But the necessities of competition have proven the best antidote for bad behavior by broadband companies, and the net neutrality campaign may be a case where the cure is far worse than the poison.”

His oped makes a key point about net neutrality and the Digital Divide: By shifting deployment costs onto consumers, Net neutrality hits hardest at the most price-sensitive consumers. They include the millions of Hispanic Americans in underserved communities – a point that LULAC also made to Congress prior to last June’s stinging floor defeat for net neutrality.

Indeed, proponents of net neutrality don’t argue the central point about price hikes hitting the poor and underserved the worst. Instead, they try to dress up their argument for net neutrality with rhetoric about unspecified doom for everyone sometime in the future.

It’s a reach. Or as the old Spanish proverb puts it, “Aunque la mona se vista de seda, mona se queda.”

In the new Legal Times, Bruce Fein offers us the highly insightful article,

How to Block Broadband: If you want to stall the network, please pass a host of state net neutrality laws.

Bruce argues that local neutrality laws would be not only detrimental to development and innovation but also unconstitutional. As he says:

These attacks are clearly pre-empted by the Constitution, federal statutes, and the open-market broadband policies of the Federal Communications Commission. They should also be pre-empted by wise policy and common sense: By balkanizing the regulation of national broadband service, these efforts risk either arresting important technological innovation or saddling subscribers with the costs of expanding the broadband network.

You can read Bruce’s entire article (and we suggest you do) at LegalTimes.com.

Yesterday, Rep. Ed Markey held the latest of his series of hearings into the future of the Internet, titled “Digital Future of the United States.” The first one was a mild disappointment, with World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee as the lone guest. The latest hearing was something else altogether, with representatives from YouTube, TiVo, Disney and HDNet — and the subject of “net neutrality” was on everyone’s minds.

The hearing was a big deal in the blogosphere. Because the theme for yesterday’s hearing was “The Future of Video,” Markey held up a digital video camera to capture the first-ever YouTube video taken from the perspective of a House committee chairman:

Things like this are a lot of fun, and another reminder of how far the Internet has come in the past decade. However, the rapid growth of YouTube and other video-sharing services should put us in mind of expanding broadband capacity.

Yesterday, in the video below, Cuban lamented the fight over “net neutrality” issue, which he rightly sees as a distraction from the truly important goal — bringing the United States’s broadband speeds up to the level of our trading partners in Europe and along the Pacific Rim.

As he said yesterday:

This issue goes away completely if bandwidth constraints go away.

Unlike Mr. Cuban, we don’t think that the need for QoS necessarily will go away – guaranteed packet delivery will always have its place – but we agree the “net neutrality” cause could disappear tomorrow and the world would be the better for it, so long as there was much greater broadband capacity and greater competition for providing that broadband for the consumer.

With 100 million views per day and counting, YouTube takes up much more of the limited capacity than AOL chat rooms ever did — and this is especially an issue that Mark Cuban raised over a year ago, in a post at his Blog Maverick site, “Hey Baby Bells & Cable, We need multiple tiers of service.”

And now with TV-like online video services like Joost coming online, it makes even more sense to make last-mile fiber a priority. We’re not at the moment of crisis yet, but considering the ever-growing demands on our nation’s broadband networks, we should be investing now.

That includes making the broadband market more attractive — which also means putting hypothetical worries about “neutrality” aside and building the capacity that will prove it irrelevant.

As students around the country are leaving behind their studies and moving on to summer jobs, backpacking trips around Europe or auditions for the next installment of Survivor, we here at Hands Off the Internet are getting back to our studies — or in this case, a study by the American Consumer Institute called “Net Neutrality and the Effects on Consumers.” You can read the whole thing in PDF format.

The bottom line: “restrictions on price, product and service differentiation would result in higher prices for lower income broadband consumers, which would result in significantly lower industry demand and revenue, deterring investments in next generation network and reducing consumer welfare.”

In short, net neutrality regulations would have a negative impact on the average Internet user. Here are other findings from the summary:

This study also finds that restrictions on multi-sided market pricing would mean that consumers lose $69 billion in potential benefits over the next 10 years. In effect, net neutrality regulations would require consumers to pay all of the upgrade costs of the next generation Internet and prohibit voluntary commercial agreements that would lower consumer broadband prices.

Net Neutrality regulations would also increase the price of broadband services, because it increases the cost of the network that provides those services. Because broadband services are very price sensitive, just a $5 increase in price could lead to a 15% drop in total broadband subscribership and a 60% decline in demand for lower-income, price sensitive consumers. In summary, this study finds that Internet regulations would harm consumers and agrees with an earlier finding by the FCC1 – namely, that Internet regulations would impede investment, reduce broadband demand and raise consumer prices. In summary, net neutrality is not, by all accounts, about helping consumers.

More numbers and charts in the full study itself — unless you’re heading out to the lake or the movie theater, check it out. In fact, bring it along — it can’t be any worse than this.

There’s a new working paper from AEI-Brookings Joint Center making the rounds. The title? “Economists’ Statement on Network Neutrality Policy.” The authors are 16 academic economists from the United States, United Kingdom and France, including Robert Litan from AEI-Brookings and Thomas W. Hazlett from George Mason.

But don’t let that scare you: It’s concise, written in plain English, and offers policy proposals that aim to both protect the online experience as we know it today and foster an environment under which the U.S. Internet can flourish. Click here to download it free as a PDF. Here are their key recommendations:

Recommendation 1: The antitrust enforcement agencies should be directed to investigate and, if the evidence warrants, file actions to prevent abuses by Internet service providers with market power that distort competition on the Internet.

Recommendation 2: Firms should be allowed to experiment with different pricing schemes for providing Internet access.

Recommendation 3: Congress and federal regulators should promote policies that increase the opportunities for competition and foster Internet innovation. One such policy would be spectrum liberalization.

The first two points should be familiar enough to regular readers, but the third point is an interesting one that we haven’t really covered here. But the point is much the same: freeing up the wireless spectrum so they can be put to the most efficient use is a good, hands-off way to let the Internet grow.

As they say in their summary, “flexibility is likely to be the best way to insure efficient innovation on the information superhighway.”

If you haven’t heard of Robert Pepper, he is a former chief of policy development at the FCC, and a highly influential one at that. Today he’s a senior director at Cisco. And wouldn’t you know it — he’s just the latest respected Internet expert to question the wisdom of a far-reaching net neutrality law.

In a column for TechNewsWorld this week, he makes a compelling and consumer-centric case for letting the Internet develop without governmental interference:

Unfortunately, one key constituency often seems left out of this heated debate: the Internet consumer. This oversight is striking since it is end users who, each day, rely on the Internet to conduct their work and personal lives. What policies should be enacted to ensure their maximum choice and flexibility? Consumer empowerment is where the debate should begin — and end. … The supporters of net neutrality regulation believe that more rules are necessary. In their view, without greater regulation, service providers might parcel out bandwidth or services, creating a bifurcated world in which the wealthy enjoy first-class Internet access, while everyone else is left with slow connections and degraded content.

That scenario, however, is a false paradigm. Such an all-or-nothing world doesn’t exist today, nor will it exist in the future. Without additional regulation, service providers are likely to continue doing what they are doing. They will continue to offer a variety of broadband service plans at a variety of price points to suit every type of consumer.

In realty, the fears of those pushing for regulation have no real basis. Indeed, the regulation they seek could itself cause serious unintended consequences and harm to the Internet. Pepper explains:

Current policy further empowers consumers by encouraging maximum industry innovation in terms of service plans, packages, applications and other products. It does not set terms, price or conditions — or issue other dictates regarding services and devices connected to the Internet — which is a good thing. … In contrast, new net neutrality regulation could have the perverse effect of degrading all levels of service or freezing in place the current state of providers and services. Companies would find it more difficult to differentiate themselves, offer new services, and enter new markets, a situation that would be anti-competitive and counterproductive for consumers.

Like Hands Off the Internet, he endorses the four principles of the Internet as a “consumer bill of rights.” And he should, after all — he helped develop them.

We were surprised to see TechDirt’s over-the-top reaction to one of our posts this week, “Hands Off the Wireless Spectrum.” If our characterization of their position as “reluctant” was wrong, we apologize. But we have nothing to apologize for in terms of our legitimate and substantive role in this important public policy debate.

Our focus is on the nation’s broadband needs and on the facts. Facts are neither honest nor dishonest — they are the facts — and people can reach their own conclusions over what the facts mean in terms of whether we need new laws on net neutrality. We happen to think we don’t need new laws, because the facts we have been pointing out for some time are these:

• There is no problem to solve. Nobody has shown that there have been any meaningful breaches of basic neutrality on the web. Pro-regulation activists have tried to make case studies out of AOL, Cox and a Canadian telecom firm, and none of those bore out. (This may have something to do with why you never hear about those situations anymore). Broadband providers are committed to a robust, uncensored Internet and also aware of the consumer outcry if they provide anything less.

• Nobody has effectively argued that current laws are insufficient to deal with any possible market abuses that could potentially arise in the future.

• More fathers of the Internet, including Dave Farber and Robert Kahn, have come forward to express their reservations about imposing net neutrality laws than have come forward to support such laws. That is because regulation has the real potential of adverse unintended consequences.

• It is probable and even likely that in the not-too-distant-future, worldwide demand for broadband will exceed existing capacity. A massive new build-out to handle that capacity is needed, and net neutrality would effectively require broadband providers to pass the cost of that build-out on to consumers exclusively.

• The Internet has never been “neutral” in the way that net neutrality activists claim. There is no utopia to return to; the Net has always been a mishmash of “best effort delivery” networks and loose agreements. Having smart networks, which net neutrality regulation would prohibit, will help to rationalize and improve the existing situation.

• In Canada, where a similar debate is occurring, their CTC bureaucracy is so mired in red tape they can’t even remove online death threats against human rights attorney Richard Warman.

• Dorgan-Snowe’s first effect would be to freeze the broadband marketplace exactly where it is, disallowing not just theoretical abuses but new innovations, too.

• The United States ranks 16th worldwide in access to broadband Internet.

• Hands Off the Internet has always endorsed the four principles of net neutrality: Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice; Consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement; Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network; Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.” We even took out a print ad last year to say so.

TechDirt, maybe we’re not so different. If we agree that the basic ideas of net neutrality are inoffensive but mandating them into law could be a disastrous move, then there’s more to agree on than disagree