I wanted to begin by thanking the Commission [Federal Communications Commission, hereafter FCC] for granting me the opportunity to discuss the transparency and data collection efforts I and others have been engaged in – more recently as a part of the MeasurementLab.net project as well as other a number of other efforts over the preceding years and decades.
Today, I provide expert testimony through my experiences with these efforts and as Director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative (OTI). OTI formulates policy and regulatory reforms that promotes affordable, universal, and ubiquitous communications networks and provides in-depth, objective research, analysis, and findings for policy decision-makers and the general public.
My testimony will bridge the key facets at stake regarding Consumers, Transparency, and the Open Internet and my discussion is supported by our December 14, 2009 comments on Public Notice #24. This 115-page filing contains extensive technological documentation of both real-world options for collecting meaningful information, provides context based on available research literature, and how problems raised by some commentors have already been addressed.
As we enter the second decade of the 21st Century, I am utterly astounded by the level of ignorance presented to the FCC concerning the history of data reporting about the Internet.
The Internet was, first and foremost, a research project. As a research initiative, data-collection and transparency have been at the heart of this endeavor since its inception.
Many of these statements made, that issues are either “too complex” or “technologically infeasible” to address, run contrary to established standard practices that have been around for years, if not decades. The Internet is not a Schrödinger's cat of data transmission, or a network grown beyond opportunities of reasonable or manageable data collection. Let me be clear – almost all of the useful information that we would like to see made public is already being collected by system administrators and ISPs.
For the research and scientific community, the problem is not how to collect information that would be useful to consumers, but why successful public data collection practices stopped in the first place?
This data collection dilemma, this lack of transparency of vital network data, is not a recent concern. On January 9, 1995 – exactly 15 years ago this month, Merit, which ran NSFnet, issued the following statement raising concerns about the changes in data collection as NSFnet was privatized:
“NSFNET performance statistics have been collected, processed, stored, and reported by the Merit Network since 1988. During December 1994, the numbers contained in Merit's statistical reports began to decrease, as NSFNET traffic began to migrate to the new NSF network architecture... Once the new architecture is in place, Merit will be unable to collect the data needed to continue these traffic-based reports. The reports will be discontinued by spring 1995.”
Year after year since this transgression, we have experienced the steady removal of useful information from the public.
Data-collection requirements mandated under NSFnet eroded to voluntary adherence to the prior norms of data collection and transparency with disastrous consequences.
When history explains how the United States went from #1 in broadband service in the early 1990s to our current appalling international standing, a central theme will be this willful ignorance, this dearth of publically available data that has lead to a series of unbelievably shortsighted policy actions and inactions. This loss of useful broadband information has systematically disempowered broadband users and allowed for the creation of increasingly dysfunctional markets.
But I am not testifying to project certain failures but to offer solutions. The FCC has both an opportunity and a responsibility to act to rectify these problems.
I will focus the remainder of my time on two simple solutions to the problems I have described: The Open Technology Initiative’s Broadband Truth-in-Labeling proposal and the MeasurementLab.net initiative.
When OTI proposed a Broadband Truth-in-Labeling model, a “broadband nutrition label”, we were drawing from both the notion that consumers want meaningful information and that they have an increasingly diverse array of needs from their broadband connections.
Our Broadband Truth-in-Labeling proposal would ensure that specific information be made available to consumers (for example, upload and download speed, uptime, latency, and pricing) and that private industry had the opportunity to decide what level of service they would guarantee to their customers.
A similar level of disclosure is currently offered by most Internet service providers to business class customers and include service level agreements and guarantees that enable businesses to compare and contrast among multiple service offerings. We want to mandate these provisions and ensure service transparency to all classes of consumers.
The FCC has the ability to implement these disclosures immediately, but is under substantial pressure to avoid meaningful information to consumers and adopt a “5-star” rating system that could utterly gut the intent of OTI's proposal.
Consumers need meaningful information that differentiates among service providers and the FCC has a responsibility to create clear disclosure rules that ensure consumer have access to fundamental information about their broadband service offerings for both wireline and wireless networks.
A 5-star rating could be the information gateway, but only if the FCC also includes a clear mandate that the useful information underpinning this rating system must also be disclosed and easily accessible to consumers such as the OTI Broadband Truth-in-Labeling model below.
Consumers also need to be able to test and collect information about their data connection. The FCC should lead an extensive effort to measure and collect fundamental data on broadband service capabilities and Internet performance and traffic statistics. This effort should contain both national comparative information as well as a level of granularity that allows customers to compare offerings within their neighborhood.
Within this context the Open Technology Initiative, a global coalition of researchers from PlanetLab, and Google have pioneered a unique broadband measurement platform: Measurement Lab.
The MeasurementLab.net initiative (or M-Lab for short) is an open, distributed server platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. M-Lab's goals are to advance network research and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections.
Every broadband measurement tool on M-Lab is entirely open source – and we encourage anyone with concerns regarding the objectivity of our tests to examine the code and let us know if you find any places for improvement.
Further, M-Lab is open to participation from all quarters – and we request anyone with a tool that they believe would improve the system to contact us.
All data collected as a part of the M-Lab project is made publicly available under a Creative Commons Zero license – so anyone who wants to crunch these numbers can do so.
At its heart, M-Lab is an open, independent, and transparent process for:
Developing a suite of Internet measurement tools;
Collecting data in an objective manner; and,
Ensuring that this useful information is made publicly available in a timely manner.
The FCC has an opportunity to leverage these assets to create the tools and information resources needed to empower consumers.
I respectfully submit a three-part conclusion:
First, systematic data-collection efforts (and the public release of these data) have been a part of the Internet since its inception and only ceased in the mid-1990s when NSFnet was privatized.
Second, the best metrics for the data that need to be collected and the processes for collecting this information have already been identified and a prototype system set up.
And third, the technological and scientific underpinnings are already established, thus this is not a concern of technology but policy, an issue of clear leadership at the FCC.
The FCC has an opportunity to establish clear goals and timelines for establishing broadband measurement and collection processes as well as a responsibility to disseminate this information publicly. With forthright leadership, 2010 should be the year that consumers are finally empowered with meaningful broadband information and the FCC started turning broadband around in the U.S. Thank you.
