Blue Scream of Jeff: March 2015

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Making Internet access a public utility is a Net gain for us all

The recent two winters’ rash of harsh weather and their associated scattered power outages have got me thinking about how much of our 21st-century lifestyle is largely dependant on a late 19th century technology – the electrical grid.

With memories of my five-day trip back to the pre-electrified past – courtesy of Hurricane Sandy – still fresh in mind, I have watched in amazement how the Northeast had to again cope with a series of blackouts brought on by severe winter storms.

As I walked my dog each freezing cold night, I kept looking up at the ice hanging down from the overhead wires wondering why we still run power lines above ground. After more than 100 years of storms, accidents and even sabotage taking down power lines, you’d think that by now we would have come up with a more efficient and less failure-prone way of distributing our power.

But human short-sightedness never ceases to amaze me. Sure it’s expensive to convert overhead lines to an underground distribution system, but electricity is no longer a novelty that just powers a few light bulbs. Unlike our grandparents or great grandparents, we can’t just carry on our lives as usual if the lights go out. We’ve grown dependant on electricity. It powers just about everything in our homes and businesses and when the power goes out, pretty much everything comes to a crashing stop.

This is why companies that produce and distribute electricity are regulated as public utilities. No one argues about the need for this, so I don’t understand all the hullabaloo about ’Net Neutrality.

Just as our modern society can no longer operate without electricity, it’s now getting to the point where our economy won’t be able to function without fair and equal access to high-speed Internet.

Hey, Washington! This ain’t the 1980s anymore! It’s not even the ’90s, where Internet access was a novelty and the domain of geeks like me and a few really forward-looking entrepreneurs. In less than 20 years, it has become so thoroughly integrated into our lives that I bet most people can’t go more than five minutes without tweeting, e-mailing, Googling, or doing something on an Internet connected device. (Go ahead. I dare you to try to see how long you can go without the Internet. I’ll wait….)

I’d even be willing to bet that at least half of our economy is somehow dependant on Internet access. And that’s only likely to grow in the future. So yes, Internet access absolutely needs to be regulated as a public utility.

The case for this couldn’t have been made any clearer after I read this article on gawker.com: Man Forced to Sell His New House Because Comcast Lied to Him

For those who don’t feel like reading the story, it’s a tale about a software engineer who checked with Comcast, one of the county’s biggest Internet Service Providers, too see if they could provide high-speed Internet access to a home he was thinking about purchasing. After repeatedly checking with them and getting their assurance they could, this software engineer, who makes his living from home, bought the house. Then after three months of trying to get Comcast to come out and hook him up, the company basically told him, they can’t service that area and never could. He even volunteered to pay someone to lay a cable from Comcast’s nearest connection point to his house – at a cost to him of around $56,000 and $60,000 – and Comcast still refused.

The point of this story is not how bad Comcast’s customer service is – just about anyone familiar with the company already knows it – it’s that this incident could have been avoided if Comcast and other ISPs were regulated like the electrical companies.

By law, public utilities must report to the government exactly where their power, gas and/or water lines are. Had Comcast been forced to report the location of their lines, this poor software engineer could have called 811, gone online to www.call811.com, or even checked with the local municipality’s call before you dig program and found out that Comcast’s line stopped some 2,500 feet from his house.

Now you may be thinking most people don’t work from home, and this is not a problem that’s going to affect many people. And you’re right – for now.

But more and more of us are beginning to have the ability to work from home. With the advent of cell phones, tablets and laptops, the workforce is becoming increasingly mobile, and employers are beginning to take notice.

Mine certainly has.

As I stated up top, the last two winters here in the Northeast have been kind of brutal. But during these recent snow emergencies, I was able to work as just as efficiently from home as I could have from my office – all without having to get into my car and risk life and limb trying to get to in, like I had to do so often in the past.

And it wasn’t just our IT staff that had that advantage. Many people in our accounting and sales departments were able to do the same thing, as were our reporters. The upshot is we got our paper out the door and posted online just as if it were any other day.

I suspect many people at other companies in my area had the same experience these past two winters. None of this would have been possible if some company like Comcast or Verizon or Time Warner had put us in some Internet slow lane.

So don’t you believe it when they tell you regulating them as a utility and forcing all Internet traffic to move at the same speed will stifle innovation.

Without Internet fast lines, web developers still figured out a way for folks to share files and videos online, create successful on-demand streaming movie sites which effectively put the neighborhood video rental store out of business, and create cloud services where we can quickly backup and store gigabytes-worth of our personal data.

In fact, it’s more than likely that had we had the premium-priced “fast lanes” that ISPs want, companies like Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, Dropbox and Carbonite would have died while still startups, because they wouldn’t have been able to afford access to the “fast lane” that made their services possible.

In fact if it’s anyone who wants to stifle innovation, it’s the big ISPs like Comcast, Verizon and Time-Warner. They’ve become fat and lazy from their virtual monopolies and are now panicking at the thought that a tiny startup could upset their apple-carts and do to them what Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu did to the Blockbuster and Suncoast video store chains.

So don’t let the big ISPs turn out the lights on future innovators. The power to stop them is in our hands.