Longtime Domain Registrar Tucows Buys A Small ISP, Wants To Refocus Broadband Industry On Giving A Damn About The Consumer

from the baby-steps dept

As we've been noting, Google's arrival into the broadband space has resulted in a flood of other companies proclaiming that they too will soon be offering 1 Gbps services over fiber. While some of these announcements (particularly from sluggish, larger companies like AT&T and CenturyLink) are little more than fiber to the press release (development community deployments dressed up to appear more substantive than they are), some of them are genuine, grassroots efforts to rescue the U.S. broadband industry from the clutches of our beloved cable and phone duopoly.

As a hopeful example of the latter, longtime domain registrar Tucows has announced it's jumping into the 1 Gbps fiber game under its wireless MVNO brand name, Ting. In a blog post, Ting notes it has purchased a small Charlottesville, Virginia, ISP called Blue Ridge InternetWorks (BRI). BRI, Ting claims, will be the company's beachhead in an attempt to disrupt the U.S. broadband market one small bite at a time. Ting didn't release pricing details, but told me in an e-mail it will offer symmetrical 1 Gbps speeds at a "sub-$100 price point." It also promises to make respecting consumers and net neutrality a priority:

"Tucows believes very strongly in the open Internet. Up until now, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do but educate, agitate and contribute. Getting into fixed access, owning our own pipe, is an opportunity for us to practice what we preach when it comes to the open Internet and net neutrality."

Ting says it was inspired by Google Fiber, but claims that as a smaller company Ting can deliver a more personal, human touch:

"We admire what Google is doing with and for gigabit fiber Internet access, but for the Internet giant, access is more of a side project. Also, Google is a lot of great things but human scale isn’t one of them. If a smaller, more customer-focused company player like Ting can pull off a win-win in a community like Charlottesville, it bodes really well for small towns and providers all over the country. For the record, we’re confident we can pull off just that, otherwise we wouldn’t start down the path."

While the fact that Google's "human scale" is waning (like oh, forgetting about net neutrality to court GOP lawmakers) is certainly true, it's unclear if Ting can truly disrupt on any serious scale. The company is coming off of the launch of a consumer-friendly wireless MVNO that has done some very interesting things in regards to simple, freemium pricing, though actual consumer interest has been modest so far. If most broadband industry customer satisfaction studies are any indication, there's certainly room for smaller ISPs that actually value consumer relationships, as opposed to treating their own users with disdain.

That said, the U.S broadband market certainly isn't free, and if you've paid attention over the years, we've watched an endless stream of small, consumer-friendly disruptors (does anyone remember ISPs like Speakeasy?) run face-first into a regulatory capture brick wall erected by the nation's biggest carriers. AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Comcast have worked long and hard at writing state laws that make competing with them difficult if not impossible. If Tucow/Ting is going to enter the fray -- even on a small scale -- it's going to need oodles of cash, plenty of lawyers, and some damn good lobbyists.

Google Fiber has succeeded (if we're going to define success as three partially-constructed fiber cities) in large part because it has oodles of cash to throw at the problem. But even with Google's deep pockets, it's unlikely that Google Fiber will ever really impact more than a handful of cities. In that case, Ting's right in that if U.S. broadband competition is ever going to improve, it's certainly not going to happen via a dysfunctional Congress and timid/beholden regulators. It's going to need to be clawed out of the very earth, town by town, piecemeal, by the communities themselves.

Filed Under: broadband, charlottesville, fiber, small town isps, virgninia
Companies: blue ridge internetworks, bri, ting, tucows

Senator Ron Wyden Calls 'Baloney' On Claim That Title II Will Increase Taxes On Your Internet Bill: 'I Wrote The Law'

from the i'm-guessing-baloney-was-something-else-before-that... dept

We recently wrote about a very questionable study that argued that if the FCC does, in fact, reclassify broadband under Title II, it would lead to "$15 billion in new taxes" on your broadband bill. That number was bullshit. It conflated a bunch of different and totally unrelated things, and pretended that they were connected to reclassifying under Title II. In fact, most of the "taxes" in the report were attributed to the expiration of the Internet Tax Freedom Act (which put a moratorium on internet access taxes at the local level) which was set to expire this month(no matter what happened with the FCC). And, as part of the Cromnibus agreement, Congress agreed to extend the moratorium on taxes until late next year (when it will almost certainly be extended again). And with that, poof, almost the entire claimed $15 billion disappeared -- having absolutely nothing to do with the Title II decision.

To put an exclamation point on this, Senator Ron Wyden (also, an occasional Techdirt contributor) released one of the best statements you'll see from a politician, literally calling "baloney" on the tax claim, and noting that he wrote the damn law, so he knows what it covers -- and pointing out that the moratorium applies whether or not broadband is classified under Title II:

I wrote the Internet Tax Freedom Act. So I want to set the record straight about the false claim being peddled by opponents of net neutrality. They are saying things that aren’t true to try to stop the FCC from acting to protect the free and open Internet.

The claim: If the FCC reclassifies broadband Internet access as a “common carrier” under Title II, consumers could be stuck with new taxes by state and local governments.

In a word: Baloney.

The facts:

1. Net Neutrality is not going to invalidate the Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA).
   My colleagues and I knew people would try to tax the Internet if they could. So in ITFA Congress broadly defined the term “Internet access.” It is illegal to tax the internet. Under Title II or otherwise. The FCC could define the Internet as a series of tubes and ITFA would still prohibit taxes.
2. The “grandfather clause” in ITFA will not allow cities to suddenly open the Internet up to telecom taxes. If the FCC reclassifies broadband Internet, it will not change if states taxed Internet access before 1998. The FCC has broad authority, but it cannot rewrite history.

The bottom line: The Internet Tax Freedom Act will protect the Internet from taxes regardless of how the FCC defines Internet access.

The opponents of the open Internet aren’t quitting. But the good news: neither are we.

And yet, somehow, don't be surprised if this ridiculous tax myth lives on...

Filed Under: net neutrality, taxes, title ii