Lone Star Iconoclast Interview with Sascha Meinrath.

This is from an interview I did with the Lone Star Iconoclast. I'd meant to post it awhile back, but things got busy...

Interview With
Sascha Meinrath,
Community Wireless Networks Expert

URBANA, Ill. — Last week, the Senate heard testimony from various consumer groups and progressive think tanks on "Network Neutrality," the subject of popular debate as Congress attempts to reform the 1996 Telecommunication Act.

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SASCHA MEINRATH: Basically, network neutrality is about preventing corporate greed. I say that in that there’s always been an assumption on the Internet that you can access any information you want and it will be downloaded to your computer as quickly as possible. What corporations who now own the infrastructure want is to privilege certain information, particularly their own information to download faster than other people’s information.

That’s why you have Ed Whitacre saying, "Oh, AT&T shouldn’t have to allow Google to use it’s services for free." That’s why you have now AT&T as well say, "We shouldn’t have to allow free internet telephoning when we can charge you for these things."

The reason why I say it’s corporate greed is that it’s a way for corporations to leverage their fiber infrastructure, to get more money out of people who want to use specific applications or access specific content. They are trying to commodify new realms, to extract just a little bit more money from customers.

So what you have end up happening is customers being charged once to actually access the Internet and then a second time to actually access content or applications they want to use, which has never been the case previously.

It’s coming to the forefront now because of the lack of structural separation, because of the Brand X Supreme Court case last year, because of the massive conglomerization of such that AT&T now is almost the same size as it was in 1984 when it was broken up because it was doing relatively similar things that it is proposing to do once again in the Internet realm.

It’s a horrible thing for consumers, and it’s relatively an American phenomenon. We see it in the States, and it’s what we’re seeing in other places that have monopolistic powers — telecommunications giants that are overcharging or controlling access to the Internet.

ICONOCLAST: One of the things these corporations are saying is that this money they receive from this new revenue stream will be reinvested in the infrastructure. Do you buy that at all?

MEINRATH: Not at all. Not at all. In fact, you can look at the history of telecommunications and find these sorts of promises are regularly broken. Bruce Kushnik wrote about it in his recent book where he talks about the $200 billion telecom scandal of promises that were made for tax breaks and for right-of-way access that have never been delivered. It’s the equivelant of $200 billion which means that every household in the United States is actually owed $2,000 by the telecom incumbent for services that were contractually promised and never delivered.

So, I mean, it’s not that I don’t buy it. It’s just that the history of telecommunications demonstrates that time and again, these sorts of promises have never been delivered or rarely have been delivered by the telecom companies.

ICONOCLAST: And the money just goes into their pockets and that’s it.

MEINRATH: Money basically goes to their profit margin, so investors receive the money, but really, it’s a resource extraction out of the pocket books of everyday Americans.

ICONOCLAST: Do you fear with what’s going on between the FCC and the NSA? The FCC isn’t going to investigate the USA Today’s claims that these telecoms have handed over consumers’ information to the NSA.

MEIN RATH: The FCC is really ducking its responsibilities in that regard. They’re claiming that state secrets are involved, and therefore, they are not responsible for it, but the state secrets act in fact cannot protect an administration from making blatantly illegal decisions.

It was hilarious to watch as (U.S. Attorney General Alberto) Gonzales was talking, "Well, there’s this law that was passed that allows us to do this, and it’s actually business data." People pointed out that there’s a 1978 law that was passed by Congress. Because of that ‘78 law, it says specifically that you can’t do this, so it’s very, very, very clear. You talk to attorneys around the world at this point in time, and they’re saying that this is a level of surveillence that hasn’t been seen since COINTELPRO. And it’s a level of surveillenace that is blatantly illegal.

The FCC is supposed to prevent illegal actions via our telecommunications system, but it has ducked and refused to actually take responsibility for enforcing our own laws on telecommunications.

ICONOCLAST: So there is no law that is preventing the FCC from investigating these claims.

MEINRATH: What FCC Chairman (Kevin) Martin said was basically that because the administration has said that the surveillance is a state secret, the FCC is not responsible for investigating it, that this state secret trumps the FCC’s authority. Yet the FCC gets it authority from Congress. It is a different branch of the federal government that is not responsible to the White House for this, and now it is declining to investigate the potential illegality of this surveillance system from the executive branch even though their authority comes from the legislative branch.

ICONOCLAST: I want to ask you about how other countries have their telecommunication infrastructures set up. For instance, I understand that Mexico’s is run by a monopoly.

MEINRATH: I’m not too familiar with Mexico either. Most of my experience has been via LPFM stuff and radio stuff, but I’m assuming that it’s probably a large conglomerate that is down there that is dominant in the country just because that’s what we see in a lot of economies of that type.

What we do know is that in the highly industrialized nations, the U.S. is falling rapidly behind in terms of the telecommunications.

ICONOCLAST: Like Japan, for example.

MEINRATH: Not just Japan. Canada. Canada with its severely lower population density compared to the United States is kicking our ass in terms of broadband penetration rates, in terms of costs of services, and in terms of applications available for the average consumer.

The EU (European Union) is poised to really jump ahead of us if they haven’t already. This includes places like Spain or Italy, which are traditionally seen as sort of second-tier industrialized nations. But, of course, Japan and South Korea kicked us to the curb quite a while ago.

ICONOCLAST: Do you have the numbers in front of you as to how much we’re paying for Internet compared to these countries?

MEINRATH: I don’t have the numbers in front of me. Look on my blog (http://www.saschameinrath.com/) and search for "broadband penetration rates." I did do some comparisons of U.S. price per megabite versus Japan, for example.

It’s hard to get really good estimates because the numbers that are getting collected are ridiculous. By that I mean, the FCC claims there’s 99-percent broadband penetration rate in the United States because the way in which they collect numbers is totally screwed up; if there’s a single broadband line, which is defined as 200 kilibites per second in a single direction, a single one of those at any price in an area code, (then) they consider the entire area code covered by broadband connectivity.

So you have the problem both of it’s insane to say that a single line covers an entire area code and 200 kilibites per second is not really broadband. It’s an artificial definition to hide, obviously, a lot of shortcomings in U.S. telecom roll out. And even like OECD data uses 256 kilibites per second as the cut off for broadband.

So they would compare U.S. broadband — which if you’re lucky, you’re getting a couple of megabites download and maybe a half a megabite upload — with Japan which is averaging 42 to 100 megabites per metric line, and they would call them both the same service — broadband — which obviously they are not. That hiding of just how bad things are in the United States compared with other highly industrialized countries is incredibly problematic.

India has just decided to connect 23,000 rural villages with 100 megabit metric lines, and we can’t even manage to get New York City wireless. To me, that is very problematic.

ICONOCLAST: I was reading a story in The Nation in March about Google and Earthlink bidding for San Francisco’s municipal wireless network. What is the status on that?

MEINRATH: Google and Earthlink have received that contract, and they are now in the midst of negotiating with the city exactly what it’s going to look like, and there’s massive local consternation about the lack of privacy that network provides. In fact, it’s sort of a class-based lack of privacy. If you use the free service, then a lot of the information about your usage is collected. But if you pay for the service, then it’s not. There’s all sorts of different problems with that. There’s an article in the Bay State Guardian about some of the shortcomings.

They’ve created a free service for just 300 kilibites per second, and there’s no upgrade capacity for that. So you can imagine, 300 kilibites per second — which is kind of lame even for today — 10 years from now, it’ll just be inane. Totally useless. And yet there’s no requirement over the course of this 10 year contract or whatever it’s going to end up being for them to upgrade that service. In essence, it legalizes the creation of a municipal-wide digital divide.

Again, it comes down to extracting the maximum profit on these systems, and it’s one of the many reasons why a lot of municipalities are building the wrong system. I think they’re also building the wrong architecture. If you actually look at almost every single municipal system created today, it’s about Internet service provision. But if you look at the Pew Center’s report on broadband, they’re showing that what people use the Internet for is more peer-to-peer applications, whether it’s email, voice services, file sharing, etc.

So if you build a network infrastructure that is just providing people connectivity to the Internet and not connecting them directly to each other, I think you’re building the wrong system. You’re building a system that is incredibly inefficient in directly connecting local residents of that community. I think a lot of municipalities 10 years from now are really going to be kicking themselves.

ICONOCLAST: Repeat what you said. I didn’t fully comprehend it.

MEINRATH: Everyone is interested in connecting people from any point on their network to the Internet as a whole. If you can imagine a tree infrastructure where everyone connects through the trunk to the roots to the outside world.

Yet if you look at how people are using the Internet, they’re connecting directly to each other more like a web infrastructure. It’s a peer-to-peer infrastructure, yet no one is building these municipal-wide networks in order to facilitate peer-to-peer connectivity.

For example, in Urbana, Illinois, Central Illinois, if I want to connect 50 feet to my neighbor’s house, and send him an email, or give him a call on my Internet phone, or swap a file, or send him an MP3, I get routed out through my DSL connection up through Chicago 150 miles north of here and then back down and through their DSL connection to get 50 feet.

You’re talking about several hundred miles through maybe 20 hops to get 50 feet, and that is incredibly inefficient because the maximum speed I can send that file is the minimum linkage between them. So if I have an upload speed of 384 K, that’s as fast as I can go versus if I was connected directly with a wireless link, I could go at an 11 megabites or 54 megabites rate.

That former part is what people are building. They’re building a system that has centralized access points to the Internet that everything has to be routed through, so that if I live in San Francisco, and I want to send a file between my home computer and my work computer which happens to be three blocks away, I get routed out through the gateway, out through the Internet, and back into the system. It’s very inefficient and very much slower versus just connecting it directly. We see this with a lot of the mesh systems that are being deployed. It’s a mesh system in order for you to go to the Internet but not connect people directly to one another.

In a large municipal system, if people can connect directly to one another, it’s faster and more efficient because we’re not using these gateway resources, the expensive part which is the outside bandwidth. They are just using the internal resources of the network.

If it sounds a little crazy, think of every single business in the world today that has a local area network. They’re going to link their computers together on their own local network, like to your printer, or to send files or back up things or whatever else because everyone understands in business is this idea of huge efficiencies, speeds, and whatever you want to accomplish with your local area network. This is taking that same idea and saying, "We should be building community wide local area networks that directly connect everyone to one another as opposed to going out through the Internet and back into the network somewhere else."

ICONOCLAST: That would solve the problem of communicating between a local community, so you would still have Internet access outside?

MEINRATH: Absolutely. The Internet is meant to be a peer-to-peer system of communication. But what people are doing is trying to lay over a cellular telephone infrastructure where everyone is connected at a central point. The reason why I can’t call somebody two feet away from me and connect directly to them has to go through this central tower is because the point of these networks was to create as many billable moments as possible, to charge me on the upside and charge you on the down side.

ICONOCLAST: It’s scarcity.

MEINRATH: It’s an artificial scarcity. I find it inane that something as simple as how much "dark fiber" the United States is unknown, and that gaining access to that information is considered a trade secret. You know, somebody built the system, and they are charging us supposedly because it is a scarce resource, but we know that in fact it’s not. There’s huge amounts of dark fiber. Over 90 percent of the fiber is dark in the United States.

ICONOCLAST: Which means that it just goes unused

MEINRATH: That’s right. We’re being charged an arm and a leg for a resource that is as prevalent as dirt. There is no scarcity of bandwidth, and yet in the United States, we’re constantly being told, "There are too many people using the system. We don’t have enough for whoever else."

ICONOCLAST: So politically, do you think net neutrality is going to sail through Congress?

MEINRATH: There’s been a huge backlash. In fact, I’ve been blogging about this. Huge amounts of money are being spent on the anti-neutrality side whether it’s $400,000 in a single day for a single print advertising campaign in D.C., or now nationally there’s a TV for-us group that’s putting out ads on television which costs millions of dollars, or the push-polling where they’re doing across the country to convince them that net neutrality is bad. The AT&Ts of this world are spending millions of dollars to fight net neutrality.

On the other side of that you have "Save The Internet" Coalition. I spoke with them, and at last count, they had just finished spending $6,700 total on the pro-network neutrality side. You’re talking about orders of magnitude more money than being spent in insidious ways, creating these so-called "grassroots coalitions" which are in fact lobbying fronts for corporations. Nothing more. To me that’s sort of misleading.

But I would say that right now things are looking good, but this multi-million dollar advertising campaign just was rolled out last week, so what that will do I don’t know. What happens when 100,000 or 200,000 or 500,000 sign an anti-network neutrality bill because they’re being told that if network neutrality goes through, the prices for their broadband will get more expensive, which is what literally these people are saying now, which is not true at all.

ICONOCLAST: What I find interesting is that you have people who have worked for the Clinton administration but now are working on the telecom side, but then you have Sen. Hilary Clinton coming out and supporting net neutrality. Not too long ago, she was treated to a fundraiser by Rupert Murdoch, the head of NewsCorp, FoxNews, and MySpac.com.

MEINRATH: What you’ll find is that the content providers are very much pro-network neutrality. The network owners are against it. The reason why this happens is because there used to be structural separation between the network owners, the infrastructure owners, and the content providers.

We’ve now dumped that, so now more and more of the content providers are saying, "Wow, we don’t own the network. The network providers are now saying that they’re going to charge us to use the network." I almost feel like it should be on its head. Google should say, "You know what? Our services make your network useful to people; therefore, AT&T should pay us for providing such useful content so people actually use their broadband."

That would be a very interesting debate to see, but as it is, it’s really about the market running things, and that means AT&Ts of this world.

ICONOCLAST: So even with Rupert Murdoch and the wealth of all these content providers, there’s still some doubt as to the life of net neutrality?

MEINRATH: More and more of them are (spending money to save net neutrality), but they’re sort of doing it independently. I think Google finally has some lobbyists in its corporate offices in D.C. But it’s a hodge-podge. Content providers tend to be relatively new firms versus AT&T which has been around for quite a while, so they’re just getting off the ground.

I did hear an interesting story which was that when AT&T and SBC merged, although they laid off a lot of people, they didn’t lay off a single lobbyist between them, which I think is telling.

ICONOCLAST: So it really is a hodge podge of effort among these groups. It’s not focused together.

MEINRATH: Yeah, because you don’t have a trade organization that brings together MoveOn.org and the Christian Coalition. (Laughs) I think that in many ways spells out how diverse this is and how it cuts across traditional political boundaries and differences of opinion, and whatever else. It’s an issue that really ties together an entirely new group who in many cases have never worked together and have been opposed to most issues.

But I do know that 750,000 people signed a petition for network neutrality. That was done with $6,700. This is an issue that resonates with a whole hell of a lot of people. I don’t know of any other major industrialized nation — the ones that are kicking our ass in broadband — that is even considering with doing away with these structural separation issues.

Network neutrality in many ways has come to the front because there’s a new regime in town and they’re saying, "We own the network, and therefore, we should be able to control content and access. But again, it was such a fundamental assumption that the Internet would be free information to anyone, that all information would be provided, and you would be allowed equitable access to all information on the Internet. That assumption still holds in the rest of the world. Well, except for China. So it’s like the United States and China trying to control content. (Laughs) First through economics and then through governmental reasons.

ICONOCLAST: Getting back to what you do connecting municipalities, how many communities have been wired your way through community wireless?

MEINRATH: It’s hard to say because there’s no centralized database, but I just gave a presentation two weeks ago on this very issue. In the United States, there’s at least 300 municipal broadband networks. Many more small scale community networks across the country, whether it’s a couple of people in an apartment building sharing bandwidth or a metro-scale endevour like in St. Cloud, Fla.

Here in Urbana, it’s been doubling every year. Which if you plot it out is phenomenal growth. A coalition of groups — NGOs, individuals, the City of Urbana, the University of Illinois, are all putting up nodes, much like the Internet itself. It’s an ownerless network. We’re sort of retraining that in a different medium — the wireless medium.

There are hundreds of them in the United States, but the huge community wireless networks are in Europe. I just came back from Europe so I’m utterly familiar with a lot of them. In Vienna, Austria, there are 40 nodes (a wireless routing device). That’s going go up way past 100 because the city has given funding to community organizations to build a network. That will cover pretty much the entire Vienna metro area and provide free broadband connectivity.

Berlin, Germany has 282 nodes when I was there a week ago, and they are growing astronomically. Again, it completely decentralized and completely free access. Athens, Greece, has over 2,000 nodes in their network. It’s a huge metro-scale network. The Sursland network in Denmark covers over 1,500 square kilometers. I mean, huge networks. We just don’t hear about them because no community network has the PR ability or funding that a lot of these proprietary businesses have.

The market reports in this realm of municipal network show an increase of 100 percent each year for the next three or four years globally which is about as how far out as anyone wants to project it thus far. It’ll will be a billion dollar industry by 2009.

ICONOCLAST: What about the rest of the electronic spectrum? We’ve heard reports that the U.S. military wants to use the airwaves and the digital realm for combat operations such as psych-ops.

MEINRATH: The vast majority of completely unused spectrum is owned by the U.S. government to the point that every department in the U.S. government has its own spectrum. There’s a nationwide piece of spectrum for the Supreme Court. Now what nine judges are going to do with nationwide spectrum, I have no idea.

But there was a great report at the height of the Republican National Convention in New York City a year or two ago. They did spectrum analysis of usage. This is like when all the public services are on high alert. The Secret Service is there. The NSA is there, and the president is there and all his stuff. They found over the course of the weekend that 19 percent total of the spectrum that they were analyzing was actually being used at any point. That’s in New York City at the height of the RNC.

So again what you have is this massive artificial scarcity, the same as with our fiber, but in this case, it’s a different medium. It’s the airwaves. And this is true throughout the country. Most, a vast majority, a huge super majority of the spectrum is completely unused, and yet here we are with unlicensed devices stuck in this tiny, tiny, tiny little sliver. I mean, it really retards innovation; it slows down closing the digital divide; it ceases much of the potential economic activity. Any economic analysis of the unlicensed spectrum demonstrates that this is huge economic boom to have this spectrum available. It pretty much in all ways is not very good.

If you look at our spectrum licensor regime, the assumptions on it date back to the 1920s and 1930s technology. This idea of a single user getting a single piece of spectrum for solely their own use is ludicrous. It predates such crazy concepts as computers (laughs) or digital and any of that sort of stuff. It’s this massive artificial scarcity that inflates pricing of these technologies greatly and slows our ability to actually use technology that would be available if they would open up, for example, unlicensed spectrum.

Yeah, I mean, I look at what’s going on in the United States and it’s really a shame. It’s a shame because we as residents and customers are really getting the short end of the stick. It’s something that could be changed incredibly quickly by the FCC, but instead we’re allowing these legacy systems and legacy licensor regimes to control the future of this technology. It’s really quite backward. Theoretically, the public airwaves are supposed to serve first and foremost the general public, and yet time and time and time again, we find that they serve corporate interests.

Sascha Meinrath’s Website

www.saschameinrath.com/