Paul Kapustka's Blog

I mean, it's perfectly fine and perhaps expected that when FCC chairman Kevin Martin shows up at the TIA-sponsored Globalcomm show, or at the USTA-sponsored TelecomNext show, the lobbying group head tools are going to lob softballs and flowery bouquets in his lap so he can just recite meaningless, predictable statements.

Hey, they are lobbyists. That is what they are paid to do.

But why does McCullagh give Verizon's Tauke the slobbery treatment, with questions that carry all the weight of wet tissue? Not that I'm any Jim Grey, but I'd like to think that just because Tauke is some hotshot legal dude, it doesn't mean I can't call him out for making stupid comments (scroll down to the bit where he compares net neutrality with the Iraq war), or call B.S. on his using the China card to advance his arguments.

McCullagh, however, seems overjoyed to call Tauke "the winner" in the net neutrality debate, and saddles the lobbyist with tough questions like this exchange:

(McCullagh:)But if Net neutrality covered the Internet section of your fiber offering, you might have reduced incentive to invest and upgrade it in the future. Is that a fair statement?

Tauke: That doesn't compute for us. The reality today is that we have three primary services: video, voice and Internet access. What we do with Internet access is that we provide it, and consumers use it as they see fit. That's the world today. We're building a network that has more capabilities. We see Internet access as critical to the customer's communication experience for the foreseeable future, and we want to enhance that.

Suggesting that we would somehow reduce and impair the customer experience in that area makes absolutely no sense to us.

Whoa! Incentive to invest! Careful, Declan, you're in danger of becoming part of the Walt McCormick drinking game. (to which we have never published all the rules, but they are emerging, along the lines of: Take one sip for whenever Walt says "incentive to invest" in any public speech. Finish your drink whenever he says "recoup our investment" or something along those lines.)

McCullagh follows up his please-say-incentive-to-invest-for-me-again question with this query line, which can only be seen as bizarre:

(McCullagh:)What do you think of the tone of the debate, and the appearance of pro-Net neutrality spokespeople like Moby and Alyssa Milano?

Tauke: I think it's one of the stranger debates I've ever been involved in. It's almost like we're debating what is beauty and how do we define it and regulate it? The problem is that everyone has a different definition of Net neutrality. If you look at the four major companies that are supporting the Net neutrality arguments, there are three distinct definitions of what Net neutrality should mean.

The question becomes which way do you think the market will better develop? If government sets policy today that dictates how the market develops? We think it should develop in the free market space, and government regulation should come in when a problem becomes apparent.

(McCullagh:)So why doesn't Verizon hire a famous spokes-model? Or -actor?

Tauke: For us that would be a real change in the way we do business. We continue to have this view that if you try to present the arguments and walk through the issues, at the end of the day they'll do the right thing.

Our sense is that's pretty much what happened in the House of Representatives.

Yes, it WOULD be a change in the way Verizon does business -- hiring somebody who uses their real name, instead of the astroturf groups the phone companies are using to advance their arguments. Um, Declan, got any proof there that Alyssa and Moby were "hired?" Or is that something your editors missed?

There's other strange bits to the Q&A -- like some of Tauke's replies being in parentheses. How do you talk in parentheses? Unless there was some cut-and-paste from email... sent by whom? Like I said, it's hard to tell where and how this was all composed, which could be taken many ways by conspiracy theorists.

We won't go there. Today. But we will say it's certainly not the best thing we've seen on C/Net's pages.

There's lots more badness to this one, but I'm pretty much done here. I will leave you with one more exchange, which shows a somewhat questionable level of net expertise from McCullagh, and a non-answer answer from Tauke (the parentheses in Tauke's response are from the story, not any insert of mine like this one):

(McCullagh:)You've said that there will be no degradation of service for any content provider, but that enhanced-service options will be available for a fee. But what about content providers like Google and Yahoo, which put relatively large demands on the network? What if they decide they don't want to buy into your tiered-service offerings--would they still get the same level of service they have been getting all along?

Tauke: Let's take that a piece at a time. When we look at the Internet--a connection between, say, you and Google--there's three pieces: your access to the Internet, the Internet itself and Google's access to the Internet.

(You control your access to the Internet.) On the Internet itself, there is no company that controls access--it's a best effort, conglomeration system. The third piece is the Google connection. Google decides how many DS1s or DS3s or whatever other connections they're going to buy.

It's a long way of saying that (a) we believe the decision today is made by the consumer about what the level of access should be, and (b) we at Verizon at the current time don't make a decision in either case. It's the purchaser of network access that makes that decision. The question itself is not reflective of what we believe the network function to be.

Unless, of course, the purchaser of network access actually wants to USE all that bandwidth they are paying for. That also isn't allowed, according to a Tauke quote in a previous AP story:

Oversubscription doesn't present a problem as long as people are using the Internet for Web surfing, e-mail and the occasional file download. But if everyone in a neighborhood is trying to download the evening news at the same time, it's not going to work.

"The plain truth is that today's access and backbone networks simply do not have the capacity to deliver all that customers expect," according to Tom Tauke, Verizon Communications Inc.'s top lobbyist.

Bottom line? A Q and A that raises more Qs than provides As gets D bad smackdown score: 0.75 (combined) for McCullagh and Tauke. Can't wait to see what they offer us after the Senate hearings Tuesday!