In the ongoing battle between net neutrality advocates and the ISPs, one of the hot-button issues that’s emerged is whether or not ISPs should be regulated as common carriers. Such regulation under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 would require that carriers share access to their lines and fiber networks. Now, Google has weighed in on the issue, reminding the FCC that reclassifying companies like Comcast would serve the public interest and advance the deployment of high speed Internet.

What common carrier classification does and does not do

It may be helpful at this point to revisit what a common carrier is. The concept is ancient, dating back at least as far as the Roman Empire. At various points, governments have placed limits and strictures on professions that were deemed to act in the public interest. An innkeeper might be ordered to serve all customers, as were other individuals with public customers as opposed to private patrons. Common carriage laws were widely applied to railways and other transportation/distribution mediums.

Common carriers were historically understood to provide many benefits, including substantial economic ones. One of the most common complaints from the telcos and cable companies is that the cost of building fiber networks (or, in the case of the proposed T-Mobile/AT&T merger, 4G LTE networks), is that it costs too much to be economically viable. AT&T has made and broken repeated promises about network rollouts, often citing cost (Ars Technica has a summary of the shenanigans there over the years). Verizon stopped deploying FiOS citing construction costs and the difficulty of ramping the service in new markets.

Two years ago, an excellent piece by Bruce Kushnik skewered these claims by showing that Verizon’s total construction costs were dropping year-by-year, even as it claimed that FiOS was costing it more and more money. Despite securing additional money specifically for FiOS upgrades, the company never spent more cash in real dollars — it just used the state funding it received to pay for fiber, then cut the money it would’ve spent on other networks to allow them to degrade. In Verizon’s case, it actively turned to tearing them out.





This kind of bait-and-switch is what makes complaints that regulation represents unfair intrusion into the free market so damned egregious. For decades, the telecommunications industry has collectively gone running to Congress, crying about the need for a greater slice of the tax revenue and service fee pie, yet simultaneously resisting oversight. It has paid for legislation in nearly half the states that prevents municipalities from building or funding their own broadband services, even in areas the carriers themselves don’t want to service. Comcast saw nothing wrong in telling Congress it had to buy NBC to protect itself from Time-Warner in 2009, only to argue five years later that no, it didn’t compete with Time Warner Cable at all. In fact, the two were actually complementary providers.

Requiring that broadband internet access (BIAS) providers register as common carriers would actually help defray some of the capital costs that the telcos and cable companies whine about on a regular basis. Line sharing makes it easier for new competitors to emerge by reducing barriers to entry. Recent actions, like Comcast’s decision to arbitrarily charge more for modem rentals, illustrates the alternative scenario — this is what happens when consumers are locked into systems that they can’t opt out of, because there’s one (two at the most) games in town.

Google’s argument essentially rests on the idea that as a would-be competitor itself, access to these pre-existing networks would allow it to deliver substantially better rates and lower prices to its customers. Historically, that’s been the case — and the currently situation in which America faces a dwindling number of carriers and even fewer opt ions is serving no one. Tech companies are lining up on both sides of this one, with other major firms standing against the FCC’s proposed plan.

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