WCA MAY 2015

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Wire & Cable ASIA – May/June 2015
From the Americas
Yet, as soon as Mr Wheeler announced plans for strong
net-neutrality rules, on 4th February, broadband stocks
jumped, and they have stayed buoyant.
One baffled telecom analyst told the New Yorker: “I think it
just shows you that the market doesn’t really understand
these issues.”
 Mr Wu suspects otherwise. He wrote: “The theory of
the wisdom of crowds suggests that the markets have
noticed something. The broadband industry hates
net neutrality, but its existence has always had a huge
and unnoticed upside: selling broadband is a great
business.”
In fact, according to the analyst at a loss for an
explanation, the margins are north of 97 per cent. Stated
simply, a strong net-neutrality rule locks in the status
quo for the most profitable segment of cable industry
business.
 As for the future, the Columbia law professor is dubious
about the assumption that the new rules will be met with
fierce and protracted litigation- “perhaps decades of it,
warn the greatest doomsayers.”
It is true that most serious regulation is immediately
challenged in court. And Verizon and AT&T have both
already threatened to sue.
But Mr Wu noted that, given the jump in stock prices,
filing a lawsuit will technically be suing to invalidate
rules that seem to have created billions of dollars of
shareholder value for the broadband providers.
Again, suing the FCC tends to annoy the agency, before
which both AT&T and Comcast have mergers pending.
Sprint has already said that it doesn’t mind net-neutrality
regulation.
And, wrote Mr Wu: “It is hard to imagine a smaller
company really wanting to bother.”
Getting real, a British fake-news
comedian prods Americans into
taking a side – his – in the net
neutrality debate
A scant year before the Federal Communications
Commission acted on net neutrality few outside the
telecom community had ever heard of it, despite extensive
news coverage.
Tom Wheeler, appointed to lead the FCC by President
Obama in 2013, was mulling over new rules to allow
broadband companies to provide “fast lanes” that would
enable content providers to offer streamlined Internet
connections to customers willing to pay.
Mr Wheeler, a former top lobbyist for the cable and
wireless industries, seemed favourably disposed to the
idea. But the policy debate, which exercised the agency and
the telecom industry, left the American public unmoved to
the point of indifference.
Then, last June, the host of HBO’s ‘Last Week Tonight
with John Oliver’ took an interest. In a segment that has
been viewed over eight million times on YouTube, the
Birmingham-born comedian, now based in New York,
accomplished something extraordinary.
Making abstruse subject matter entirely intelligible and ably
arguing his own pro-neutrality position, he also contrived
to actively engage the general public in a topic that he
pronounced, “boring even by C-SPAN standards.”
The reference is to the Washington-based cable and
satellite TV network that covers proceedings of the
federal government in real time. But Mr Oliver’s approach
was anything but static. He drew first blood from
Mr Wheeler:
“Yes, the guy who used to run the cable industry’s
lobbying arm is now running the agency tasked with
regulating it. That is the equivalent of needing a babysitter
and hiring a dingo. ‘Make sure they’re in bed by eight,
there’s 20 bucks on the table for kibbles, so please don’t eat
my baby.’”
‘I am not a dingo’
The Cambridge-educated Mr Oliver urged his viewers
to contact the FCC. They did, by the tens of thousands
over the next few days, flooding the agency with comments
and crashing its website. Millions followed suit, the vast
majority demanding net neutrality.
What Time magazine termed “the Oliver effect” was not lost
on Mr Wheeler, who told reporters: “I would like to state for
the record that I am not a dingo.”
Writing just before the FCC decision was announced, the
New York editor of the Christian Science Monitor, Harry
Bruinius, recalled that the agency was poised to pass – with
Mr Wheeler’s yea vote – “what seemed unthinkable” less
than a year before.
 It is incontrovertible that Mr Oliver’s performance
contributed importantly to stopping the ‘fast lanes’ long
sought by the companies in command of USA Internet
infrastructure.
Aram Sinnreich, a professor of communication and
information at Rutgers University (New Jersey), told
Mr Bruinius: “John Oliver absolutely helped turn the
tide in the net-neutrality debate.” (“Net Neutrality’s
Stunning Reversal of Fortune: Is It John Oliver’s Doing?,”
26th February)
 What that tide brought in was the reclassification of
high-speed broadband service as a basic public utility:
a common service akin to phone lines, water pipes or
the energy grid, and therefore a kind of protected and
regulated public good.
It was a stunning victory for the advocates of net
neutrality – and an incidental acknowledgment of the
influence that can be wielded by a brilliant funnyman
with a cause.
Dorothy Fabian
Features Editor