Comcast: Common Carrier or "Information Service?"

In an attempt to grease the skids for its merger with Time Warner Cable, Comcast is expanding its Internet Essentials program. This allows poor families (defined as having kids eligible for free lunch) to get basic Internet for $10 a month. This is an implicit acknowledgment that the Internet is now a basic requirement for modern living, a public utility like phone service, clean water and electricity.

There's been a lot of discussion on the role of the Internet recently, with the recent court decision on net neutrality. Back when the Internet started taking off, there was an argument to be made about how it should be free from niggling regulations while it got off the ground (from Forbes).

The Clinton Administration’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 sorted this mess out and launched the age of modern Internet policy – trusting market forces and technological innovation to the maximum extent. It was an act of incredible political maturity. Its authors knew something remarkable was about to happen and that government could best serve it by stepping back and letting private investment happen.

So the 1996 Act drew a line – the old phone system would remain regulated as a “common carrier,” but the emerging new world of “information services” would be allowed to develop on its own free from utility-style requirements such as government oversight of prices, forced sharing of infrastructure with competitors, or rigid traffic management rules. As a result, we have seen over $1.2 trillion in investment since the 1996 Act, and the innovation, growth and new services the Act’s framers imagined.

It's been almost 20 years now, and things have shaken out. It's now clear now that the Internet is a utility, and that Comcast is a common carrier like any telephone company. Want proof? Millions of people get their telephone service over Comcast's cables. It's one of the big selling points in Comcast's marketing: they have their "Triple Play:" for $89/month in my area you can get (up to) 50 mps Internet, 140 cable channels and nationwide long-distance telephone service.

It's a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment that Comcast is completely unregulated and can jack up the cost of its phone service any time, while CenturyLink, the phone company that provides my DSL through essentially the same kind of network, is subject to intense scrutiny every time they want to change their rates.

Back when the Internet consisted of 2400 baud modems dialing up through the phone system it made sense to see how things would work out. Now we know: Comcast charges their customers ever more while charging content providers like Netflix for sending you data over the line you already paid for. That means you pay Comcast twice: once for the line, and again through your Netflix subscription, because Netflix has to pay blood money to keep Comcast from slowing their data stream to a crawl.

Cable companies have been raising their rates at four times the rate of inflation. They excuse it by telling us that they're adding new channels and hardware -- but all the new channels are basically useless repetitions of the same nonsense, which I don't want anyway, and our house has been hooked up with the the same coax cable for almost 40 years.

But I have no choices: unlike the phone company, which lets me pick which features I want to pay extra for, Comcast changes its channel line up constantly, making me pay for channels I will never watch. That's the power of the monopoly: Comcast is the only cable company in my city, and it's the only way I can get reliable local television service -- satellite doesn't work very well with things called "rain," "trees" and "hills."

It's nice that Comcast is making Internet affordable for poor people with kids. But what about poor people without kids? And the rest of us?

Clearly, the FCC should reclassify Comcast as a common carrier and not an "information service," since it provides telephone and telecommunications services such as email and Facebook, which is a glorified party line.