The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will today hold a public meeting to discuss its draft of new internet rules and regulations.  The proposal, drafted by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, represents a relatively moderate approach and thus may draw fire from both strong net neutrality advocates and industry officials alike.

I. What's in the Draft

The draft is all about protecting an "open" internet.  It forbids internet service providers, such as Comcast or Time Warner, from throttling (slowing) legal traffic.  It also would likely outlaw plans, such as the pay-per-site scheme unveiled by wireless providers this week.

The rules have a number of exceptions, though.  Wireless carriers are allowed to throttle certain kinds of traffic (e.g. video), assuming they are not using that as a tool to promote their services in an anticompetitive fashion (i.e. the proposal permits them to "reasonably" manage traffic).  And while they may have to prove it's illegal, wired and wireless operators are allowed to throttle illicit traffic, such as P2P or bittorrent traffic of pirated materials.

Those limitations may bother some net neutrality advocates.  The mobile provision is particularly worrisome to companies like Google who are becoming increasingly reliant on mobile advertising and peddle a variety of high-bandwidth products (like YouTube).

While the outlook is good for video and voice services (e.g. Skype, YouTube, and Hulu) in the wired domain, trouble could show its face their as well.  The proposal permits wired carriers to adopt usage-based pricing, as many are eager to do.

Usage-based pricing is a mixed bag for the public.  For "low tech" internet users, who only check their email and read text-heavy pages like Wikipedia or The New York Times, their bills will likely be reduced.  But for "high-tech" users who video chat on Skype, stream movies from Netflix, or play online games they may soon see their bills skyrocket.

The FCC promises to monitor the markets for what it sees as abuses.  But the question is whether the Commission will act in time to prevent such abuses before they happen and whether its rulings will even hold up in court, given the fact that they're loosely defined in existing and pending regulation guidelines.

II.  Rise of the Collective Monopoly

i. The Past

Between 1934 and 1996 the internet popped up, cell phones became fashionable, and the telephone marketplace radically changed.  However, there was precious little new regulation to guide this new market.

And the root of the problem began long before that, even.

In the 1880s and 1890s, the Bell Telephone Company enjoyed a monopoly on telephone services in the U.S., thanks in part to the the United States defending its patent on the phone.  Those hoping to construct their own systems of phone lines first had to pay to license the Bell patent , and then had to navigate through a myriad of government restrictions designed to help Bell.

Under the system few legitimate competitors to Bell arose, and those that did were quickly acquired by Bell before they came a nuisance.

In 1899 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) acquired, Bell.  The net effect was to assign a new name and owners to the national monopoly.

A similar monopoly was developing in the wireless industry, with wireless giant RCA stomping out the competition.  Together RCA and AT&T held the critical patents on vacuum tubes.  And in the 1920s they agreed to a cross-licensing agreement that would essentially make them America's exclusive source of transmitted information over the next three decades.

In the 1960s and 1970s court rulings slowly chipped away at AT&T's domination of the market, by allowing third party devices and their ilk to connect.  And then a landmark decision in 1974 -- the United States v. AT&T -- force the AT&T monopoly to split into smaller companies.

Slowly many of these telephone companies began to merge back together, reducing the total number of options.

At the same time as all this was occurring, a handful of cable television companies (Cox, Time Warner, and Comcast) emerged and cornered the small, but increasingly lucrative paid television market.  Eventually some of these firms would be acquired by the telecoms and vice versa.

In 1996 U.S. President Bill Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act, the first major telecommunications legislation since the Communications Act of 1934, which established the FCC.  Among other things, the new law required telecoms to interconnect their wired networks (wireless networks could still operate independently).

ii. Today

Today a handful of companies largely control the wired and wireless internet in the U.S.  There are only four major wireless carriers, and only eight cable networks with a million subscribers or more.

Cable services tend to be what economists refer to as an inelastic good.  While providers make their decisions "independently" they tend to adopt common pricing in a particular region, and have in effect an unlimited supply.  

The cost of market entry is prohibitively high for small competitors to emerge.  Even with the ability to connect to their competitors wired lines, the infrastructure costs associated with launching a cable network to cover over a million people make it virtually infeasible for all but the biggest financial powers.

The question becomes how to regulate a competition-devoid industry that's essentially behaving as a collective monopoly and ever looking for ways to milk more money from customers.  That FCC has largely been saddled with that responsibility.

Many today, however, are unhappy with this state of affairs.  After all, they say, the government put us in this mess by promoting early cable, telephone, and wireless monopolies -- so what makes us think that they will get us out of it with more regulation?

Adding to the difficulty faced by the FCC and pro-regulation members of Congress, is a wealth of campaign donations from the industry's biggest players.  These donations have helped convinced some states to propose laws to effectively ban cheaper municipal Wi-Fi offerings -- an emerging alternative to big cable.  They also have lead politicians on the national scale to fight against new regulation on net neutrality and other topics.

The question, however, becomes -- if Congress and the FCC can't (or are unwilling to) extract the nation from the service providers ever tightening web of rising prices, who can?

III.  The Outlook for the New Rules

The FCC faced contention in its own ranks, when debating Chairman Genachowski's proposal.  Commission members Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn only reluctantly gave their approval to the draft, while expressing misgivings about its exemptions for the wireless industry and various loopholes.  Mr. Copps commented, "While I cannot vote wholeheartedly to approve the item, I will not block it by voting against it."

The two votes from Mr. Copps and Ms. Clyburn gave the Commission a 3-2 vote, clearly split along party lines.  The two Republicans have both opposed the bill.  Commissioner Robert McDowell, one of the two Republican members of the Commission commented in a WSJ interview, "Nothing is broken and needs fixing.  Ample laws to protect consumers already exist."

Some industry analysts have praised the draft.  States Daniel Ernst, an analyst at Hudson Square Research, in an interview with Reuters, "Without regulation, rates could go up and up and up and emerging providers like Netflix and Hulu could have problems attracting users."

However, the proposal, as mentioned, is drawing the ire of some net neutrality groups as being too weak.  Craig Aaron, managing director of Free Press, criticized the bill's many loopholes and lax restrictions on the wireless industry, stating, "These rules appear to be flush with giant loopholes."

These advocates argue the FCC is abandoning its responsibility to protect the public and bowing to corporate influence.

While the bill clearly won't fully satisfy everyone, it does provide some barriers towards the anticompetitive/anti-consumer behavior that the telecommunications market has increasingly been experimenting with.  Thus some see it as a modest step towards preventing telecoms from abusing their artificially dominant position.