Trump hires very best, greatest net neut haters to head FCC transition President-elect Donald Trump has hired two strong opponents of net neutrality rules to head up his transition team for the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Economist Jeff Eisenach, who worked in the Reagan Administration at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and does a lot of corporate work for Verizon, and Mark …
Neither Mark Jamison nor Jeff Eisenach has ever been a lobbyist, and Jeff does not do "a lot of corporate work for Verizon". A NYT reporter declared Jeff a Verizon lobbyist because he wrote a paper for GSMA, a group that counts Verizon among its membership, but that's stretching the truth.
Kindly correct your copy.
PS: I'm a former co-worker of Mark and Jeff and a former Register writer.
Looking a little bit deeper, it seems Jamison worked on Sprints lobbyist team, which makes him "a former lobbyist", regardless of how you might want to spin that particular datum. All the copy I've seen for Eisenach says he's "worked for Verizon and others", which seems accurate. He's been paid, and paid well, to support the interests of his clients. Both might not be the legal definition of lobbyist, but it certainly meets the general definition of "getting paid to win favour from politicians". Calling them lobbyists seems fair and balanced.
"Eisenach called net neutrality "crony capitalism" ... "
Can anyone explain the logic behind that sound bite? I mean technical and linguistic logic, not political logic.
"... and claimed it would cause terrible damage; ..."
Since we have (more or less, almost) net neutrality at the moment then I don't see how potential net neutrality rules could cause damage; unless the ISPs and telcos are planning to make lots of money in the future by breaking the principles of net neutrality in a big way. Would an economist who worked at the FTC and now does work for the ISPs and telcos know anything about that?
Damage to what and to who?
SeeTed Dziuba 8 years ago, "Net neutrality" is an argument about capitalism masquerading as a civil rights issue:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/22/dziuba_net_neut/
Do have a read.
"Net Neutrality" (sic )has only ever been about one thing: who pays for infrastructure in the future. Common sense suggest that since both telcos and OTT services benefit, they should both pay for the capex, and can do so through private agreements, ie cost sharing. Silicon Valley wants to load the costs onto telcos. Telcos argue that since Google and friends capture the value, they should pay too.
So it's crony capitalism to take one side and handicap the other. Pipes need services and services need pipes. A regulatory regime that inhibits market experimentation (eg Binge On or low latency networks) or inhibits investment is probably not a good thing.
Net neutrality has one other happy consequence for Silicon Valley: they get to buy the referee. It weakens antitrust legislation. I don't think it's unreasonable if you have an oligopoly of ISPs in your area, that they should be exempt from competition law. Do you?
The problem here comes when you get out into the sticks, where infrastructure costs are too high for private enterprise to enter it willingly without strings attached (eg. exclusivity agreements), meaning these communities end up in the Internet version of a vicious cycle. Republicans can be very Spartan in that regard: if you can't make it, move aside for those who can and so on. While Democrats don't want to see these people left behind (after all, what if it's your kid or your mother being left behind).
It's all fine and dandy pointing out other countries that have better Internet infrastructure, but it also helps to point out that geography matters. The most wired nations are also almost universally the smallest, too. The two countries bigger than us (Canada and Russia) tend to have worse Internet than us.
@redpawn
I’m not an American, and I don’t know much about American politics - but it seems to me that with initiatives like Obamacare and a reduced deficit (looking at the figures, reduced deficits seem to come with Democrat presidents, increased deficits with Republican presidents), middle America (and poorest America) was benefitting from a Democrat, liberal, government. The problem is that less well educated people don’t seem to percieve benefit unless it’s a big flashy change like a new car on their drive, a big house, and a brand new TV - things that no government can provide, so they might as well wish for unicorns. Ol’ Trumpy seemed quite happy to infer that he could provide though, simply by driving out all them for’ners, muzlims and rapis mex’cans, and putting the niggra back to work (yee-haw), and by doing that all the wealth would go to those who deserve it. The poor, downtrodden, white male. Those with an education know that this is just a racist pipe-dream. Ironically, the people who will probably suffer the second-most (after those he will outright opress - black men, asians, women, hispanics, lgbt, anyone who disagrees with him) are the people who voted him in in the first place.
All of which is a long way of saying that I disagree. The status-quo, whether Democrat or centrist Republican, did help middle-America. But it did it quietly, and honestly. The new status quo, the status quo of Trump, Pence, Farage, Le Pen, Putin and so forth is to shaft anyone who stands in their way whilst shouting loudly about how you’re really better off.
That wasn't what won Trump the Rust Belt. What people want more than anything is jobs—breadwinning jobs where people can make an honest living again. A reduced deficit is nothing if it isn't going to the average Joe, and it isn't. They feel the 1% are starting to close the walled garden and the proles are being left to the wolves. All the money's staying up top where it never comes back down (because you don't need to feed the proles if you use machines and foreign workers). They're SO desperate that they'll roll the dice with an unknown because it's pretty much their last hope. If Trump can't deliver prosperity for them, that'll be the last straw, and things will start getting really ugly really fast.
People do want jobs, but Trump saying that he can bring back manufacturing to Ohio or coal jobs to West Virginia is simply not possible. Coal plants are being closed because natural gas is cheaper and easier than trainloads of coal. Manufacturing is not coming back to Ohio (or anywhere else) in any recognizable form because of how many fewer people it takes to make anything these days.
I completely agree that they are going to be pissed. It does a tremendous disservice to these folks (ie it's a lie) and the disappointment will be terrible. All he's got to offer is a lot of road construction jobs and no way to pay for them, which is pretty much the Democratic plan they would have gotten from Clinton.
@Cris E and AC
Coal has had it, and natural gas and oil are next on the list. Clinton was offering retraining for sustainable jobs (i.e. a future). Granted, Clinton's offer may have been a pack of lies too - but, looking at the analytics, lyin' Hillary was a lot more honest and a lot less inclined to exaggeration and bullshit than the president elect.
And let's face it, Trump is no stranger to offshoring in order to prop up his own bank balance. Hell, even when Trump does employ American labour he's been known to declare bankruptcy in order to avoid paying his workers. He's an abusin', lyin', cheatin', racist, misogynist bully - and he still got the vote?
What a weird world we live in. Turkeys voting for Christmas.
They feel the 1% are starting to close the walled garden and the proles are being left to the wolves.
Ironically, the blue-collar rust belters idolize the 1%. [...] see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. --Steinbeck
@thomn8r
What an excellent quote. Pithy. And with, I suspect, more than a grain of truth. But it isn't Steinbeck - Steinbeck said (rather less succinctly) "I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist."
Still, I prefer the Ronald Wright version (your version) - so have an upvote!
On net neutrality. Does anyone believe for one minute Google or any other large outlet don't pay for their access ? Carriers , carry. That's their job ,they lay down the infrastructure and charge customers for their use of their pipes. Whatever is carried is none of their business. They got pipes and rent pipes. Whatever the pipe carries is none of their business period. The claim that they carry stuff that is valuable to others is not a valid argument. They rent pipes and charge for their use. That's the job of a carrier.
Anything else is argumentative bullshit trying to steal value from other companies who's job is content and do well at it.
But when they want to increase what people can do in their homes they are at the mercy of whatever the last mile can bear, and if Grandma Bell hasn't tended to her knitting that was a bottleneck. That's why they went into those towns with giant rolls of fiber: to goose the industry into modernization. The problem is Google doesn't want to be a carrier, but they want the carriers to step up their game. I like me some net neutrality, but sometimes I wish the kids would play together nicely and work some of this out on their own.
They don't want to be a carrier because there's strings attached. Thing is, those strings are also what are keeping everyone else from the sticks. Basically, unless they're near trunk lines, the sticks are sinks. That's why they're the sticks in the first place, essentially. It's all a very complicated tug of war between moving to where the goods are versus drawing the goods to you.
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