Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age

Everyone in the USA should read this book before we no longer have any choice as to what the speed of our broadband is,
what channels we pay for and what service we get for cable, broadband and broadband speed. It's a great book.

I started reading 'Captive Audience' earlier this week after checking it out from the public library.

Two recent news events made me want to read the book. The recent ruling by the Federal government against the FCC network neutrality laws. Attempts in Kansas and Utah (maybe elsewhere, too?) by politicians loyal to private ISPs (internet service providers) to prevent local municipalities offering broadband internet service to citizens.
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I think the author is a pessimist, but she has many salient points regarding internet service in the U.S. However, I am starting to believe that Ms. Crawford may not be far from the target.

Read the book!

My anger increased after each page. It's truly amazing...no...it's criminal the way all the telecomm companies operate in the US, and it's shameful our government allows it. The comparison to what is available elsewhere in the world is truly eye-opening; it's no wonder the US is slipping in general on the world's stage when our "leading" technology companies focus on a single metric: profit.

Blood pressure increasing...must stop now... Please keep up the good work, Susan.

Susan Crawford is the most articulate person on these critical issues of telecom policy and democracy. This is a Must Read for every concerned citizen.

The subject is how we got ourselves into this telecommunications mess where most people depend on a monopolistic cable pay tv provider for their (overpriced) high-speed Internet connection, despite the fact that those very cable companies (yes, Comcast, I am talking about you) are capable of, and have in the past engaged in, anti-competitive practices. The beginning of the book compares the telecom mess with earlier ones (railroads, in particular), making clear that anti-trust and competition law was crucial to the develop of a competitive world-class transportation system. Then it focuses on the rise of cable television, and the growing dependence of the country on a very small number of firms for digital infrastructure. In the 1990s, the head of the Federal Communications Commission believed, erroneously, that the future of high-speed broadband Internet access would be assured if the telephone, cable, satellite, and wireless companies would compete with one another. But because the telephone companies opted for copper wire with digital subscriber line (DSL) modems, while the cable companies created a fiber optics backbone with local connections based on cable modems, most consumers would opt for cable modems over DSL modems. In addition, the cable companies unlike the telephone companies were not subjected to the "common carriage" provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Neither felt the need to invest in fiber to the home systems that countries like Finland, Japan, and South Korea have. Meanwhile, services like Comcast's Xfinity everywhere may assure the cable companies the ability to dominate the mobile Internet way into the future. Susan Crawford is clear about what needs to be done to remedy this situation, but also clear-eyed about the difficulty of getting it done. To summarize, this is a great and very readable book about something that is important for every U.S. citizen to understand. If you are worried about net neutrality, and you should be, this book gets at the root of the problem. We need more legislators who "get it" like Herb Kohl, Al Franken, Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren, and Ron Wyden in Congress to prevent things from getting even worse.

"Captive audience" is good analysis of a very aggravating and possibly unsolvable problem.
Crawford is showing us that some problems just cannot be solved in the U.S. with our form
of government. When the Federal government can be bought, or at least rented, by sources
of concentrated wealth, wealthy individuals and the corporations in Crawford's analysis in
particular, you will get decisions and regulations that work for them, not for the rest of
us, and not in the best interests of all. "Captive audience" is a detailed description of
this problem.

Crawford makes it sound very grim. Not only are we getting sub-standard service, but
we're paying higher prices. And, because, she claims, Comcast is effectively a monopoly
in many regions, the likelihood is that Internet service will not improve and lag further
behind other developed countries. worse.

Crawford's proposed remedy is regulation. But, we have a government by and for
corporations. Lobbying works with our Federal government. Therefore, it is very much in
the interest of large corporations to invest heavily in lobbying. The returns on that
investment are too large to be ignored. Regulative capture of Federal agencies by
corporations is endemic in the U.S. So, why would Crawford think that regulation, which
she claims has failed to stop Comcast's abuses so far, would help in the future?
Deregulation is and has been the trend. Crawford is fighting against the wind.

And, of course, we all love to hate our TV service and Internet service providers.
Perhaps that's just part of what it means to be human. If it weren't for that antipathy,
Crawford's book would not have near as much bite as it does. In part, that's because the
real negative aspects await us in the future, when other developed nations move far beyond
the U.S. with respect to broadband Internet service.

So, that's another worry to Crawford's book: If these trends and tendencies continue, that
is if Internet service and access in the U.S. continues to be regulated for the benefit of
the corporations that provide it, rather than for users of that service, then the quality
of that service (our ability to access it from different locations and devices, its
reliability, its speed, and its cost) will lag increasingly further behind that available
in other developed countries. And, because of that, technological progress in the U.S.
will slow down. And, since so many goods and services depend on the Internet, that will
mean lower productivity and poorer service for all of us in the U.S. Further, this lag
probably entails lower paying jobs and a lower standard of living.

Crawford describes an alternative strategy in the last chapter of "Captive audience".
It's called fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), and it can be done at a local level by the utility
system. What Crawford seems to be advocating is that Internet access and service should
be viewed in the same way that we view electric service: it should be available to all; it
should be regulated; it should *not* be run by an unregulated private company that
provides it where, when, and how for it's own benefit. Crawford wants high-speed Internet
service defined as a "public, and publicly overseen good", which she claims is more common
in other developed countries.

It's this last chapter where Crawford argues for a "publicly supervised infrastructure
that should be made available to everyone and provided on a wholesale basis to last-mile
competitors. This approach, she believes, will keep speeds high and prices low. Crawford
believes that "vertically integrated incumbent monopoly communications providers" will
fight this. The existing incentives make doing so the smart thing to do. A good
proportion of "Captive audience" is spend on the detail of this struggle, which she claims
corporations are winning and the public is losing.

If you're interested in this strategy, you might want to look at one organization that is
dedicated to pushing for it -- The Fiber to the Home Council Americas:
http://www.ftthcouncil.org/. Perhaps it's the start of a movement. And, it would
certainly be interesting to get Crawford's opinion about it.

I'm not so much complaining about the present as I am worried about the future. Currently
I have adequate high-speed Internet service, but can grumble a bit about slow upload
speeds and relatively high cost. But, several years from now, I'm likely to *still* have
a 20 Mbps (download) connection, while in other parts of the world most citizens have
symmetric (down as well as up) speeds of 100 Mbps. When the technology world find uses
for that kind of speed, I'll be living in a backward region of the world.

Crawford is worried about that backward future, too, and the last few pages of "Captive
audience", especially, show that. And what she proposes in order to avoid it is a
"massive national infrastructure project". That work and investment would stimulate that
economy and it would produce infrastructure of incredible value to the country (the U.S.).
Yes, but, ... the political likelihood of that project and the regulation needed to
enforce that broad public access that Crawford recommends is next to zero. It's in
Crawford's discussion of the political requirements during that last several pages that
she conveys how dismal the chances are for this kind of leadership in the U.S. Federal
government. Read that section only if you are feeling emotionally strong enough to handle
it.

And, if media monopolies fascinate you, look at "Master switch", by Tim Wu.

"Net neutrality" is in the news these days as activists denounce some mysterious threat to the Internet, society's main conduit of information. Since information is the currency of democracy, this sounds important. But the Internet is complex and arcane--how can a concerned citizen form an educated opinion?

Captive Audience, by Dr. Susan Crawford, is a well researched and thoughtful look at oligopoly and monopoly in the telecom industry, and of their harms to American society. Comcast and Time Warner dominate the wired Internet, while Verizon and AT&T dominate the wireless Internet. Comcast and Time Warner (which will soon merge) divide the country rather than compete, and the same is true of Verizon and AT&T.

The wired Internet is fast and the wireless Internet is mobile. Since each has an advantage the other cannot match, the two services complement rather than compete. The result is that abuses by the big Internet service providers are unconstrained by competition.

Monopoly may be tolerable if it is regulated as a public utility. However, as Crawford explains, our current Internet is very weakly regulated. Thanks to a recent court decision, NO rules prevent ISPs from blocking lawful content or from favoring traffic that they have a financial interest in. The FCC is trying to remedy these defects (the "net neutrality" battle), but its effort looks feeble.

Because of our policies, America lags behind most industrialized countries in Internet performance, access, and cost. Our copper wire telephone network degenerates, our ISPs abandon their obligations to serve everyone, our competitiveness suffers, and large parts of the country lack fast Internet access.

If corporations with a poor public image (General Motors, BP, Monsanto, Time Warner) decide that suppressing criticism is easier than changing their ways, they may convince the ISPs to help them. If activists on many issues (global warming, abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, the War on Drugs, Obamacare, spying by the NSA, political use of the IRS) decide to suppress their opponents' views, they may convince the ISPs to help them. No enforceable rule prevents any of this.

Captive Audience covers many subjects: the Internet as a natural monopoly, Comcast's use of sports programming to dominate the Internet, the difficulty in blocking vertical mergers, anti-competitive practices by Comcast and other ISPs, Comcast's lobbying methods, the revolving door between regulators and the regulated, and laws in 19 states that prevent municipalities from creating their own broadband networks. This book is an excellent place to begin for Americans wishing to understand this issue that is so important to our democracy.

Well written history of the telecom industry and the challenges of monopolies. Not just for telecom or policy junkies. Susan Crawford gives a fair and rational telling of the story.

She writes with authority and makes great arguments. I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone who wants to know why our media system is failing, and also why we pay such high bills to companies like Comcast but have such lousy service and increasingly boring program choices.

Purchased for work