December 7, 2017 Title: Gutting Title II net neutrality protections Office of R. William Robinson   Office of the secretary  Ms. Marlene H. Dortch Secretary Federal Communications Commission 445 12th Street, SW Washington, DC 20554 Re: Restoring Internet Freedom, WC Docket No. 17-108 Ex parte Notice Via EFCS Re: Maintain Title II Regulations and oppose repeal of Net Neutrality (NN). Dear FCC Chairman Ajit Pai: Editor Goldberg- EXCLUSIVE TO THE TIMES This project began as a letter to Editor to the times last week triggered by FCC commissioner Rosenworcel’s opinion published last Friday.  The multiple hurricane of important issues swirling about Net Neutrality will interest your readers, advance the public interest, and evolve the debate prior to the Federal Communications Commission’s crucial Dec. 14 meeting. Hope to stop this rapidly developing tragedy in its tracks.   It is unfortunate this hits us while so many readers/voters are distracted by holiday festivities. If Net Neutrality is dead, get ready for slow lanes and higher prices for existing service levels. At 748 words, I’ll hope you can find space for this subject matter.  I am a 6 time elected director of the Upper San Gabriel Municipal Water District and a former Director of Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles (both positions emeritus now, since 2012). Had many letters printed in the Times’ distant past, but THE TIMES has never published my opinion before. William Robinson         1146 East Louisa Avenue   West Covina, CA  91790 =============================================================   Federal Communication commission (FCC) chairmen Agit Pai’s policy to “free the internet “is akin to big pharma’s freedom to screw the American consumer. FCC’s declaratory ruling, report, and order, WC Docket 17-108 looms as a rapidly developing tragedy unfolding while the public is distracted by holiday festivities. The newest public comment period closes on Dec. 7 (absent possible service denial attacks) for the Dec. 14 FCC meeting. Tell Congress this ruling must be delayed. FCC misunderstands the internet or doesn’t care. Faulty FCC “fact” sheet findings are error laden fabrications. For example, “stifled broadband investment” in the two years since net neutrality implementation is mistaken. Existing policy is not hurting investment in broadband networks. The existing analysis is too narrow. A reanalysis for the past five-year period would produce a more useful and relevant result. And an independent analysis would show glaring deficiencies. The republican controlled FCC labors under wrong facts, lobbying group’s interests, and begs getting sued. I’d wager a dozen state attorney’s general will defend American consumers against this public resources giveaway to telecommunication giants. Since “credible allegations that many of the comments were submitted by bots and others using the names of deceased people” have emerged.  Commissioner Rosenworcel’s idea to hold hearings across the country is especially heartening in light of evidence that over 96 percent of net neutrality already submitted comments were bot driven fakes. The grave nature of contemplated changes demand that the commission insure their understanding of public opinion is accurate before triggering radical reform. Additionally, Verizon has purchased a former net neutrality proponent, Tumblr, thus silencing one energetic opponent. Tumblr led the Net-Neutrality fight—then Verizon bought it; skewering yet again public opinion results. Privacy issues the big 3 cable/telcos are ill-equipped to deal with include the “Dot-Net Passport” program to protect user names(s) and password(s) the web has grown to demand; breached databases fraud. Disagree?  Research the Anthem Blue Cross data breach class-action settlement for around $115 million which compromised the most personal identity data of 78 million clients. The silver lining is that this display of corporatocracy greed among the billionaire media owners club will trigger courtroom blow back.  Future court outcomes may restore the first amendment of the US constitution, gravely afflicted for many years. Democracy's demise is inevitable in face of unrestrained billionaire concentrated ownership media outlets impacts’ upon our existing “free” press. The internet represents the last bastion of unfettered and uncontrolled public discourse. Cable/telcos, free to adjust their business plans absent net neutrality and FCC complications, will have a field day as Internet Service provider (ISP) competition declines. Cable/telcos will see endless opportunity: including blocking websites to prioritize their own content, throttling (discrimation), and “pay-to-play” business plans; unconscionable intrusion on existing freedom. Cable bills will rise as consumers purchase premium fast track service. If you love your cable bill these past five years, then you’ll love this latest FCC gambit. Revitalized competition would lower the cost of internet usage for American consumers. Gutting network neutrality by installing fast “toll roads” are unnecessary. Consumers may soon pay by the click or per hour for internet usage. Current free services replaced by fee payments. Obviously Anti-Trust law, besides Robinson-Patman Act, must be applied to regionalize FCC rulings’ proponents: Verizon, AT&T and Comcast. Time is ripe for Congress to intervene on behalf of the public interest. Sadly, Chairmen Pai’s way on Dec. 14 means America’s internet mirrors Mexico, Portugal, and the Peoples Republic of China policy instead of mirroring the Swedish model where digital-pipeline usage in cheap, universal and infinitely diverse. The FCC activity is explicitly giving cable/telcos a big thumbs-up. ISP competition is crucial and must be protected. Like the FCC, the Federal Power Commission (FPC) has the authority to review and reject tariffed rates and practices, Ordering and maintaining interconnectivity in both arenas is vital. A revitalized amended Telecommunications Act of 1996 should favor competition, otherwise specific laws need to be devised to insure the competitive delivery of telecommunications services by competing ISP’s. FCC has been "captured" by a Verizon led oligarchy. FCC should administer the rules of the competitive game. The fact of regulation does not imply a blanket antitrust immunity. But Congress’ consideration for the inadequacy of the current regulatory system to deter anticompetitive behavior must be revisited.  Meanwhile, FCC should do their job. Antitrust enforcement in the Industry must commence. Anyway you choose to look at it. Agit Pai proposal is an unmitigated disaster for American values and economy; Cable/telcos greed prevails. William Robinson West Covina, CA Part II 17-108 continuing comments: Without network neutrality—the ability of individual citizens to get and share the information they want with a modicum of privacy and anonymity—the American Revolution wouldn’t have happened. Maybe that’s why the Trump administration wants to kill net neutrality now. My home phone number noted below is on the FCC do not call list, but that seems not to have even slowed the telemarketers down. The FCC lackadaisical enforcement of that policy is notorious. But perhaps the new policy rules announced Nov. 16, 2017 will fix the problem. Because FCC gave phone companies the green light to offer technologies to block most robo calls and spam text messages. Congratulations. With regard to “Restoring Internet Freedom” a misnomer, because FCC seems to be shedding its responsibility it exercised with the progress noted above and giving away the public resource by placing it under the control of the telcos/cablecos and backbone ISPs, namely Verizon, AT&T and Comcast, wherein the internet resource are at the mercy of the ethical universe of private business—American style. No privacy is possible. Every keystroke is tracked. In the spirit of conserving bandwidth Imagine if the post office charged the sender and the receiver for the same parcel... There'd be outrage. But it's okay for your ISP... I’m an example of the group that demand my privacy be maintained, which becomes more difficult by 17-108.  In light of the numerous well known data breach incidents. One example is the recent Anthem Blue Cross (ABC) class action settlement for about 115 Million, which affected the private data of about 78 million ABC customers. Numerous similar examples exist. telcos/cablecos and backbone ISPs are ill-equipped to maintain account privacy in the face of Corporate business plan(s) that deliver an internet services (absent the ads) including most traditional content and which delivers bandwidth soaked with distracting pop up ads is not what American need or want. Maintaining Net Neutrality (NN) would allow common carrier rules to be maintained and preserve the better quality internet. The quality that Americans demand, that fosters creativity, diversity, and helps maintain our economic growth and health and national vitality. 17-108 degrades the resource, which will degrade first amendment values, handicap freedom of the press and free speech. Hobbling many other important American values in pursuit of strict commercialism. Blocking, throttling, and various forms of hacking, spamming, fraud and discrimination will become more problematic. Including its untoward effect of soaking up bandwidth in non-productive ways. Know your rights in the current context is important, but the new FTC context will lead to degraded rights, absent any serious action by Congress to protect the internet resource by strict application of anti-trust enforcement and foster a competitive marketplace on the internet backbone user population. Congress will not succeed in repairing the damage that will be done on Dec. 14, 2017 and the consumer’s last hope will be with the American judiciary and a positive outcome that will be necessary to maintain American freedom and consumer oriented competitive marketplace. When an ISP sells a consumer a 10 or 50 megabits-per-second Internet package, the consumer should get that rate, minus the ads if they choose that option, no matter where the data is coming from.  Why is this not obvious to ISPs? So is it clear? That net neutrality is no longer about not blocking or throttling services, it’s about actively upgrading interconnects to provide better performance of external entities that want to deliver bytes to your customers? “Net neutrality is a fight between the owners of the pipes and the owners of the data. The internet providers own the pipes and want to control what they own and monetize that asset in the way best to them and their shareholders. Thus they favor going back to how the net was 3 years ago. The data owners/providers (Google, Amazon, Net Flix, etc) want to ensure their data is not throttled or held ransom by the pipe owners. They want unlimited access to the pipes to maximize their monetization (by not needing to buy bandwidth.) So they pushed for and are pushing to keep net neutrality. They "win" in net neutrality because those same small guys it is supposed to support are not able to afford to pay for the infrastructure needed to push the data onto the pipes as fast as google or amazon or ... NN is not about saving the small guys. It is about the gov't picking winners and losers. The small guy cannot 'beat' google heads up with or without NN. Frankly google and a couple of other data owners are much more monopolies than the connection providers. Regardless of what NN pushers claim, nearly every person in the US has at least 3 potential broad band providers. And over 80% have (or will within 2 years) access to 5+ potential BB providers. So which "monopoly" is really scarier?   "The data owners... want to ensure their data is not throttled or held ransom by payola to the pipe owners. They want unlimited access to the pipes to maximize their monetization (by not needing to buy bandwidth.)" This is correct. Net Neutrality wants to treat "pipe" owners (careful, you're getting into "tubes" territory there) as a utility, whereby their role in the system is to provide the means for content to reach its destination, similar to a power or water company. "They "win" in net neutrality because those same small guys it is supposed to support are not able to afford to pay for the infrastructure needed to push the data onto the pipes as fast as google or amazon or …” from an internet NN comment. Increasing enforced anti-Trust enforcement in the communications media in general inclusing common carriers and the internet in particular in an urgent need to provides necessary information need to maintain our democratic relative free way of life. Prevent further market failures 17-108 will produce. “The first market failure results from the fact that large wired broadband providers are bottlenecks between edge providers and households and therefore able to exercise significant market power over edge providers by restricting access to households. The second market failure results from the fact that the large wired broadband providers also own large linear programming providers. The evidence shows that the companies that have common ownership over these related services have the incentives and abilities to harm edge providers that compete with their linear programming businesses. To prevent making these market failures from worsening, the FCC and Justice Department have blocked mergers or imposed conditions on the merging parties. The FCC and Justice Department findings are relevant for considering public policy towards the provision of wired broadband services to households and edge providers”. From Aug 29, 2017 analysis by Dr. David Evans study PDF The whole point with Net Neutrality is that no one (tech giant or self-made enterprise) needs to pay for infrastructure to get their content to consumers. They have even footing, and thus the market is molded by the quality of that content, allowing for innovative new businesses to form by identifying and capitalizing on customer needs without arbitrary restrictions. Without Net Neutrality, yes, Google and Amazon and the other giants will have to pay more, but they will do so (begrudgingly) because they CAN afford it. Whereas smaller businesses will not be able to and thus will be at a disadvantage in the market. So removing Net Neutrality and allowing ISPs to arbitrarily restrict based on who lines their pockets is much more of a stab at smaller businesses than the big ones, and is generally bad for anyone that isn't an ISP. " Just Follow THE MONEY…People keep moaning about the money, the money, my bill will be higher, dollars here dollars there, COMPLETELY missing how the evil in eliminating net neutrality is when WaPost criticizes Comcast in some unacceptable way, Comcast will throttle WaPost out of existence to their customers. Customers won't know why, they'll just see "took too long to respond" messages and blame their laptop. Comcast owns MSNBC and NBC Universal. Which news reports do you think will get all the bandwidth? " As the Justice Department prepares for a legal showdown with AT&T over its $85 billion bid for Time Warner, analysts are debating whether the acquisition has potential harms for consumers and business competition that could sink the deal in court. One central concern at Justice is that AT&T could seek to deny other providers of TV and Internet, such as Comcast and Verizon, access to Time Warner's programming, and that it could prevent the rise of new technologies aimed at delivering content to consumers, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Other programmers have pushed back against the proposed plan, arguing that the deal would raise their costs and force consumers to pay more. One company that has publicly made this argument is Starz, which in July published a study saying AT&T could easily discriminate against the premium cable channel. The Justice Department needs to become more aggressive addressing Anti-Trust in the public media markets and marketplace failures noted approve as it addresses anti-competitive deals in a number of ways. It can propose remedies that wind up changing the behavior of a combined firm. It can propose divestments, or the sale of assets that effectively create new competitors in the marketplace. And it can sue to block an acquisition entirely. In the case of AT&T, the department has pushed for the sale of assets such as Turner Broadcasting or DirecTV. Consumers may be puzzled by commentary about government monitoring and not much mention about corporation monitoring. There are several programs which monitor who is looking at and tracking individual’s internet usage. Can be eye opening if you are unaware. If the government did this there would be outrage but corporations hardly a whimper. Not saying government monitoring is not a concern. Corporation self-monitoring is not acceptable. And FCC needs to become far more aggressive at guarding consumer privacy and defending to network from outside fraud and scammers. Obtain add-on’s for a browser that blocks trackers. Right now it tells me 13 are trying. Sometimes there are almost a hundred. If you block them all, some features of web sites won't work' so I have to allow a few of them. Conclusion— Title II regulation and Network Neutrality must be maintained to protect privacy better, First amendment freedoms, preventing marketplace failures among telcos/cablecos and backbone ISPs. Corporate controlled backbone ISPs are ill-equipped to maintain account privacy in the face of Corporate business plan(s) that deliver an internet services (absent the ads) including most traditional content and which delivers bandwidth soaked with distracting pop up ads. Fraud, data breaches and identity theft will likely increase even faster. And Democratic values will be compromised and eventually destroyed.  Anti Trust and Marketplace failure anti-competitive practices. in the communications media and telecommunication market must be addressed more aggressively. Sincerely, /s/ R. William Robinson 1146 East Louisa Avenue West Covina, CA  91790-1346 H ph. (626) -339-6872 CC: Mignon Clyburn, Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, Commissioner Brendan Carr, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, Commissioner Thomas M. Johnson, Jr., General Counsel David L. Hunt, Inspector General   Format for Ex parte Comment