AT&T CEO Attacks Network Neutrality

Verteiron writes "The former CEO of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, had some interesting remarks to make about Net Neutrality during his parting speech. Choice quotes include his plans for getting anti-neutrality legislation through: "Will Congress let us do it?" Whitacre asks his colleagues. "You bet they will — cuz we don't call it cashin' in. We call it 'deregulation.' " More information on AT&T's attitude problem and a video of the speech are available. There's no sign that his replacement is any better."

Re:Voting time

[Billosaur]

Well, you can certainly fill up your Senator or Congressman's inbox with emails, but you've got to remember that rarely do they actually read all their own email. Usually it's screened by their staff for content first, so they get a sanitized picture of what constituents want. It's better to hunt these people down on the campaign trail and ask them pointed questions before news cameras. Also, even if they do "read" all their email, unless that's followed up by actual votes there's little chance of any great impact. I don't think either party is courting the "Internet voter".

Re:flashbacks to Bush's speeches in F911 anyone?

[1ucius]

Of course he knew . . it was a joke given at a charity event where the speakers traditionally give lighthearted speeches.

Re:Product differentiation is BASIC

[mcisely]

You are not understanding the issue here. Put simply:

This issue isn't about how much I must pay my ISP for decent net connectivity.

This issue is about how much Google must pay my ISP for decent net connectivity.

Google already pays for their own connectivity. My ISP is already paid by me. My "pipe" is already paid for. Why should my ISP be paid twice? What right does my ISP have to individually charge every conceivable web site that I might access?

Re:Devil's Advocate

[KDR_11k]

Let's say that your company spent BILLIONS of dollars rolling out new Fibre across the nation and then you were told that you cannot charge for access to that net?

To be fair usually infrastructure like that gets subsidies from the government and the govt has reason to limit the number of companies building such infrastructure in each area (because it has to pass over land not owned by the company placing it and having 20 wires where one would be sufficient if everyone could use it is a waste of material, space and time). In return the govt gets to say "you have to let everyone use that infrastructure for a reasonable price". Net neutrality isn't even preventing them from charging other companies that rent those lines for their services (e.g. smaller ISPs operating in the same area), it's about preventing them from demanding tolls for traffic routed through their network because the only reason that network makes any economic sense is because anyone on it can interact with anyone on any connected net.

Popular example: Google (and any other web service) is getting rich but not paying every ISP that has customers who access Google. But then again those customers are paying their ISPs to access those web services so the web services DO bring money for the ISPs since noone would want an internet connection if there weren't any useful services on it. Yet the ISPs argue that the web services profit from the ISP customers and as such have to pay the ISPs for those customers. Yeah, go ahead, block any web service that's not paying for access to your customers, see how many of your precious users you keep. If "pay us or we'll use our power to prevent customers from being able to reach you" isn't the reason antitrust (or extortion but that seems to never apply to big companies) laws were written I don't know what is.

I realize you weren't even arguing that position but I felt the need to complete that train of thought :P.

Re:flashbacks to Bush's speeches in F911 anyone?

[Perren]

This sounds like the kind of stuff I'd make up if I wanted to put words in his mouth.

Yeah, if you RTF'n "article", those words WERE put in his mouth. It's some kind of spoof ad. Just something to stir up the netroots rabble. It's even below the level of discourse here at slashdot. ... Wait, who am I kidding? It's perfect!

Re:Welcome to the future.

[arivanov]

Not quite so. Depends on the actual hell location.

If congestion hell is located on the access gear you should expect it to have the three heads of Cerberus - the loss head, the jitter head and the delay head. The reason is that the queues there are deep enough for all of these to occur.

If the hell is distributed across the backbone and the peering points drop is going to be the most likely result (the queue transmission times are not long enough to make a real influence on the other).

By the way, the really nasty hell is the access hell, not the backbone hell. Most backbones are not currently congested enough to make the backbone hell hurt so much. It will take changing capacity planning models, evaluating the new ones for stability and deploying the new models that take advantage of QoS to change this. That is not an easy task even if this is done from the top via an executive order.

Now, access (and to lesser extent peerings) is a completely different matter. There even minor QoS knob tweaking will have a major impact.

Is it April 1st?

[corecaptain]

TFA, looks like a serious article - listing quotes repeated in slashdot story. Curious
about the accompanying video I click on that. Well surprise! That "video" is a PARODY (funny).

Am I missing something here?

Re:We need an appropriate response

[UbuntuDupe]

Well, since you've admitted your biases, it's only fair that I admit I err on the anti-union side. As to your question:

So what's the real scoop on their pension issue, is it just BS or a consequence of poor management or is there something more to it?

This is a very good question. I wanted to know the answer myself for same reason you listed above: why agree to a pension without being able to monitor its funding status, and relying on future profitability? Why allow other creditors to have seniority to pensioners in collecting debt? (Since a pension is deferred compensation, and workers are senior to bondholders in payment of obligations, pensioners should always be senior, and credit ratings and lenders should always assume they'll be behind in line.) How can you assume no competitors will enter the market?

Unfortunately, it's hard to get reliable information on this, and I try as hard as possible to avoid "well they were just stupid"-type conclusions. I also can't read a financial statement from a corporation. But that's what every source confirms: GM promised an unfunded pension, predicated on future profitability, and the failure of GM was considered impossible. My best guess as to why it happened would be:

-stupidity on the part of unions, who refused to accept the possibility that their employer doesn't dictate its own profits.
-malice on the part of management, who was willing to indulge this fantasy in exchange for valuable union concessions, knowing the union would have no leverage when the obligations came due. Likely arrogance about the possibility of competition.

When I first heard about pension problems affecting profitability, I was confused: aren't they funded in advance from a separate account? Well, they aren't.

Hope that helps.

Re:Devil's Advocate

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Can you point me to any references to back those assertions up?

Here is a brief article [muniwireless.com] on the subject. For more in depth information on the current subsidies in place and the economics of them, check out "Internet Economics" By Lee W. Macknight and Joseph P. Bailey. There are a number of other books, but this one has better references and avoids sensationalism.

I was under the impression that the current backbone infrastructure was all privately funded pretty much since NSFNet went out of the picture.

I can assure you, that has not been the case. A whole lot of the dark fiber in the ground was laid by the US government and then sold at much less than cost, to hide the subsidy. In fact, we've paid more per citizen than other countries that completely funded government owned infrastructure and have similar or worse population densities.

This is one of the problems we have in America. Corporate chiefs lean on the cry of the "free market," which is a concept that many Americans (myself included) do embrace. BUT, unfortunately we don't have a *true* free market, we have this bastardized hyrid of government + corporation.

The idea of the free market is a good one and one that works, but extremists take it too far. It is not a panacea and it does not work well in some situations. Healthcare, for example, is a situation where the buyer is under extreme duress with impending death and pain and that does not make for a logical, self-interested transaction between equals. A true free market cannot persist because of the wealth condensation principal. As wealth disparity becomes greater and greater we move to feudalism and eventually most people are born poor and a few are born rich and make money by lending to the poor. This disparity of station due to birth leads to justified anger and eventually violent revolt and the system is destroyed (as it always has been historically).

I do support the free market and generally believe that private companies should not be regulated (much) in how the profit from their investments.

Network operators are a special case. In exchange for being impartial common carriers, they are less regulated than even private citizens (in some ways). If I transmit child porn or make copies of disney films, I'm subject to a lengthy jail sentence, while ISPs are protected from such because they are providing a common good. Without net neutrality, they are no longer providing that common good, so why should they be more protected than I am?

Re:Subject

[vandon]

The "Save The Internet" group, which is for "internet freedom" (that is, it wants net neutrality enshrined in law), has really taken things to a new low. Ed Whitacre, one of the biggest sources of hot air in this debate, stepped down this week at CEO of AT&T. Save The Internet decided to mark the occasion by making a video of what they imagine Whitacre's final pep talk to AT&T execs was like, with all sorts of inflammatory -- and made-up -- quotes. They then put the quotes in a blog post, as if they'd actually come from Whitacre. While they embed the video in the blog post, there's no indication that the quotes aren't actually real. If you watch the video, it's pretty obvious, but few people seem to be noticing.

Take a look at http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070606/105850.s html [techdirt.com] or *gasp* watch the video and notice that NONE of the quotes are in there.

Re:stay on your own side of the pond

[Reo Strong]

I answer both of your challenges with one comment: The news agencies report the news that makes money. How many of our fellow Americans do you think would turn the channel or skip the news article about someone on the hill breaking the law and getting away with it? The answer is most. I'm not defending it, I'm just postulating. As further proof of my theory, I offer the common occurrence in the US of a story being run to death. Every bit of it being reported in sensational ways to get more ratings and sell more papers, even though nothing new is being said.

If Americans took more interest in what actually happened in D.C., more news agencies would report it. Unfortunately, they don't. I don't know, but is it any different in the UK (with the glut of tabloid magazines vs legitimate news outlets)? In the US we have crap like Entertainment Tonight and the National Enquirer because people watch/read it. The consumers support what they want (whether is is worth while news or not). This is true throughout the US news systems, even your beloved blog-sphere. Repeat after me: someone reporting something doesn't (1) make it true or (2) make it news.

I'm not saying that it is better than any other system or time, but this is how I see it from here (in Nebraska, of all places). You do have to admit that reporting just about anything (real or fake, important or not) is protected in the US. You may face a civil case afterwards, but the government does not stop you from reporting it.