Sometimes, I wonder about who is reading this blog.

There are various webtools that count hits on the blog website, subscribers to my RSS feed, Twitter followers, or whatever. I have noticed that while there are a lot of you reading, there are not a lot of comments. Perhaps I have attracted a shy demographic readership. Or, so many of you are in positions of influence in corporations or government and, while you may want to shout criticisms or platitudes, your pension-influenced discipline holds you back.

In the early days of my blog, I was told that this medium enables a public conversation. Often, it seems more like a radio talk show – anyone can be a host and no one screens the callers.

A recent tweet from one of the people I follow asks:

Can reasonable debate occur online if people kick back from anonymous posts. its not like we live in Iran

He expounded further on his blog

So is this is what the fight for net neutrality is all about? The right to opine in 140 characters or less and to boil down complex debate into nuggets like “you suck”. Great. With all the opportunity for enlightenment that the Internet offers we get”Pounder” and his ilk instead.

A few years ago, I wrote about “4 degrees of impersonal communications“. The four degrees were: face-to-face; telephone; email; and web-based.

The Progress & Freedom Foundation has released a submission by its president, Kenneth Ferree, to the FCC [pdf, 345KB] that makes for an entertaining read. C’mon, how many regulatory submissions are able to squeeze in a citation for Nietzsche by the top of the second page?

I found that many of the arguments are as applicable to Canada as the US market for which it was targetted. As the press release states:

Ferree takes issue with claims that a duopoly in landline broadband markets would necessarily be, by nature, market failure. Instead, because of the high fixed costs associated with networked industries, price competition between too many providers could impair investment.

How many competitors should there be? We hear similar complaints in Canada.

As Ferree’s paper observes, a failed market might observe excessive returns by market participants. But, as the paper observes for the US (and equally applicable in Canada), the supposed duopolists aren’t making excessive profits. Margins for network providers are consistent with other companies. Other so-called duopolies exist in other sectors without the same calls for government intervention, such as Coke and Pepsi; or, Lowes and Home Depot.

By far, my favourite line from the submission deals with the issue of broadband adoption among people that have access to competitive supply of services:

As hard as it is for some in Washington to believe, there may be a large swath of middle-America that would rather sit on the front porch, sip lemonade, and chat with their neighbors than update their profiles on Facebook.

I have written about this phenomenon in Canada [here and here]. What we define as affordable, universal access isn’t enough to get people to subscribe.

The submission is a great contribution to the debate about the role of government in intervening in the marketplace for broadband services. Lines like “When confronted with actual facts, the advocates of heavy-handed regulation are forced to retreat to rhetoric” serve as a challenge to move beyond sound-bites into genuine analysis.

The Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights has launched a campaign to get the public to “Send A Letter To Ottawa To Stop The Canadian DMCA“.

This is the group that wants to enable greater copying rights and I just thought it was funny that they couldn’t even depend on their supporters to create their own letters.

At least it is consistent for them to be sending copies of the same letters.

Globalive founder Tony Lacavera was on BNN last night praising the CRTC’s revised timetable for its ownership review, as we updated yesterday. The CRTC has indicated that it will have the review wrapped up within 30 days of the hearing concluding.

I’m fully supportive of the CRTC review, and as we were with the Industry Canada review. We were fully compliant with the Industry Canada review and received the licenses earlier this year and now the CRTC is conducting its control and ownership review. So, we don’t anticipate any show stopping issues with this.

In the interview, he expressed his support of the CRTC and the process.

He told BNN that the competitive landscape is shaping up quite nicely for consumers, even in advance of the launch of the new competitors.

In summing up the internet network management hearing, Michael Geist makes an observation that may inadvertently make the case as to why no regulatory intervention is required:

Days of testimony revealed the issue is far more complicated than the rhetoric might suggest. First, there is a wide variation in the use of traffic management tools with a different approach for pretty much every major ISP. Some throttle all the time (Cogeco), some during large chunks of the day (Bell), some only during congested periods (Shaw), and some not at all (Telus, Videotron).

In other words, consumers have choice. We should be concerned if every ISP uses the same, government-mandated network management techniques, without competition driving innovation, evolution, differentiation and consumer choice.

Barrett Xplore’s oral comments summarized 3 principles that should be at the core of the CRTC’s decision: (i) transparency; (ii) non-discriminatory treatment; and (iii) non-interference with content. Items (ii) and (iii) are handled by legislation; the first is largely covered by companies responding to competition. The CRTC should deal with internet traffic management complaints in response to specific complaints and resist the calls for ex-ante regulation.

The marketplace is working.