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The Cost of a Tiered Internet
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu May 25, 2006 04:07 PM
from the have-their-cake-and-eat-it-too dept.
from the have-their-cake-and-eat-it-too dept.
An anonymous reader wrote in to mention a Popular Science article about the money issues involved in a tiered internet. From the article: "With a tiered Internet, such routing technology could be used preferentially to deliver either the telecoms' own services or those of companies who had paid the requisite fees. What does this mean for the rest of us? A stealth Web tax, for one thing. 'Google and Amazon and Yahoo are not going to slice those payments out of their profit margins and eat them,' says Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a nonprofit group that monitors media-related legislation. 'They're going to pass them on to the consumer. So I'll end up paying twice. I'm going to pay my $29.99 a month for access, and then I'm going to pay higher prices for consumer goods all across the economy because these Internet companies will charge more for online advertising.'" Update: 05/26 16:54 GMT by Z : The article is hosted on CNN, but is original material from Popular Science. Post updated to reflect this.
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Technology: U.S. House Rejects Net Neutrality 598 comments
tygerstripes writes "A recent vote in the U.S. House of Representatives has led to a rejection of the principle of Net Neutrality from the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (Cope Act), in spite of massive lobbying from prominent businesses. According to the BBC, the bill '...aims to make it easier for telecoms firms to offer video services around America by replacing 30,000 local franchise boards with a national system overseen by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'. However, according to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, 'telecommunications and cable companies will be able to create toll lanes on the information superhighway... This strikes at the heart of the free and equal nature of the internet.'"
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Fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, the situation already exists, so a simple ban wouldn't be enough. But in Microsoft's antitrust case, they considered splitting them up to fix just such an issue. The ISPs in the US have similar monopolies, right? So cut them up. AOL Internet and AOL Portal, or something.
No way we should pay twice for them to profit twice though. Screw that.
Re:Fix it (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sorry, I don't see the "bad" in this situation.
All kidding aside, that's a spectacularly bad idea. The internet is about freedom. I would just like to see a law saying that if you are prioritizing services, you must disclose this to the customer and potential customer, in addition to telling them what consideration
Re:Fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm still up for gutting AOL though.
Parent
Re:Fix it (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Fix it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fix it (Score:5, Informative)
It may, actually.
I'm the senior engineer for a 9 county fixed wireless operation. We are MPLS-based in our core, run a minimum of DS3 licensed and unlicensed point-to-point links and feed out into our small communities at a minimum of 24 Mbps. We feed with redundant fiber to diverse carriers. We really have tried to deliver a reliable network on quite a bit of a budget. Our competition is companies like Qwest and Mediacom that usually brings at most bonded T1s (3 Mbps) to a community, does not run MPLS, gets burnt alive by P2P abusers, etc.
We have notified our uplink that we will not tolerate tiered Internet offerings (our SLA prohibits it presently and is locked in for four years). I've been around the BGP peering Internet since 1993, so we were careful to make sure this crap doesn't force us into accepting someone's bastard vision of the Internet.
The bottom line is it comes down to consumers. If you are too stupid to know what you're buying, you're screwing all of us. I had a pain in the ass insurance office (virus of the week kind of nightmare customer) leave for Qwest this week - only noticed it since I hadn't heard his weekly "I'm gonna sue everyone if you don't fix my incompetent LAN" call. I finally told him his ISP is not his LAN integrator and 12 hours of comp time by a CISSP/CISA/CCSP was enough.
But if enough clueless users switch to the Qwests and Mediacoms, buying "9 Mbps download" (on a network fed with 3 Mbps - cluestick!) then the small wireless businesses that are emerging to give you all a better choice will wither and die.
Should that happen in our case, my heart won't break. We diversified two years ago into high-end security engineering for the financial industry which pays a hell of a lot more money than rural broadband. But for those of you that do want a choice:
1. quit voting for losers that screw you time after time. That means BOTH parties. Learn that the big corporations own both parties. Quit falling prey to the bait they offer of blindly blaming one party and being a shill for the other. Go take a look at the immigration votes from both parties. Do you know how many Senators from both sides voted the way they did because some $20 million per year fat cat told them they're tired of paying IT people $60K per year? I've dealt with it first-hand. Most of your large corporate CEOs would prefer us all making less than $30K per year and will outsource or illegally hire to make that happen.
2. quit supporting tired, old fat-cat companies. So what if they advertise 9 Mbps? Will they fight for you when the RIAA is coming for you like I do for our customers? Not a chance. They'll sell you out for a dollar. Ethics? Go read about Qwest's financial statement fraud or insider trading that stole from its shareholders and tell me how they're committed to all of us.
Yea, we may not have our act together all the time. Yea we may not have a 24x7 call center in India that will tell you within 2 minutes of your call to reformat your hard drive as a solution and blow you off.
It's up to you all what Internet you'll have by your decisions.
*scoove*
Parent
Re:Fix it (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Solution is simple... (Score:4, Funny)
1 million lawsuits the day after should convince them otherwise.
All you need are lawyers....
Parent
Re:Solution is simple... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Solution is simple... (Score:3, Insightful)
They write the rules.
My letter to my congressman. (Score:5, Informative)
Congressman McCotter:
I am not politically active and have never contacted a federal representative in my life. However, I am taking the time today to write you because I am very deeply concerned about pending legislation intended to counter recent actions by large telecommunication companies that will hugely detrimental effect on the American citizenry, your constituents, and myself personally.
As things currently stand, big phone companies and cable conglomerates have what is called "common carrier [wikipedia.org]" status. Meaning that they are required to treat all phone calls, Internet traffic, etc. identically. In exchange for keeping their hands off, carriers are given special tax breaks and are normally exempt from being liable for the content they carry (Comcast can't be held criminally liable if someone downloads child porn using a Comcast cable modem, for example). This is how things have been since 1934. However, Congress is moving in the direction to give the big phone and cable companies the power to regulate the 'net as they see fit. They will be able to pick favorites and decide who's traffic they carry--or don't carry at all.
December of last year, I founded Bright Idea VoIP [brightideavoip.com] here in Novi, Michigan. We're an Internet-based telephone company that provides voice communication services to small-businesses. I frequently explain it as "Vonage for companies with 5 to 100 employees." This technology is known as "Voice-over-IP" (VoIP) is currently one of the fastest growing segments of the Internet. There are hundreds of companies like mine popping up all over the map. I am not rich by any sense of the word; I am simply a computer geek with a great idea who is trying to earn my piece of the American dream. And it's paying off... The company is growing very quickly. I (and my small, but also growing, group of coworkers) are working hard, but enjoying almost every minute of it. But for us to continue to thrive, or just to survive, we need a level playing field.
If AT&T, Verizon, or another large competitor of ours gains the ability to turn off or slow down areas of the Internet, our service will grind to a halt and I won't be able to do a thing about it. If they start to charge me a special "priority access fee", I'll have to pass that cost onto my subscribers. Suddenly the largest appeal of VoIP is reduced, making it less of a threat to the big telecom companies. The net effect is that I will be out of business within a year. And it's not just me... it's the thousands of other Internet innovators. We'll never know the next Google, eBay, or Amazon.com if the established 800 lb. gorillas get the power to decide who stays and who fails. That's not capitalism and that's not the American way.
With the lifeblood of manufacturing jobs in the metro Detroit area rapidly disappearing, your district desperately needs your help in promoting innovation and job growth in the technology sector. I ask that you please support Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey's "Network Neutrality Act of 2006 [house.gov]", and that you see through the well-funded smoke screen of large telecom lobbyists.
I didn't even get a form letter back in return. Since he's up for relelection this
Re:My letter to my congressman. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:My letter to my congressman. (Score:2)
Re:My letter to my congressman. (Score:4, Funny)
Now tell me how you faxed the wikipedia link, and I'll be really impressed.
Parent
Tiery eyed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Tiery eyed (Score:2)
be fair (Score:5, Funny)
their rates and it will all balance out.
Poor Analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
FTA: "Christopher Yoo, a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, argues that consumers should be willing to pay for faster delivery of content on the Internet, just as many FedEx customers willingly shell out extra for overnight delivery. "A regulatory approach that allows companies to pursue a strategy like FedEx's makes sense," he says.
He's looking at it incorrectly though. Absolutely I should, as a consumer of a service be able to choose different levels of service, for example, dial up, "light" high speed, or torrent-downloading-freak high speed. However, using his Fed-Ex example, since when does the shipper AND the receiver pay for the service.
Re:Poor Analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody knows how the ISPs plan to implement this Tiered Internet from a business perspective. Some people fear ISPs like the Bells will use this to crush the threat VoIP represents to their phone networks. Some people think that it could be used as a competitive advantage for ISPs to enter content markets by giving themselves higest priority reguardless of bids on the table. Some people worry that priority creates a false scarcity and bidding war that leaves the larger players well served and squeezes out the traditionally vital role small new players have had in Internet applications; the consumer ISPs represent such a huge and critical market that companies can't risk losing them, and everyone ends up paying for privledges. Others have said that optimizing the Internet for one particular role (streaming media) deoptimizes it for all others.
Ideally, a Tiered Internet allows us to segregate data transfers that don't require some level of QoS (downloading patches, web traffic, other non-realtime data) from applications that do benefit from it (streaming movies, VoIP, other real-time contrained things). I personally worry that the consumer internet market is not diverse enough to allow a free market to compete for the most optimal solution, nor the average consumer capable of pinpointing the troubles they may find on subtle changes to the network that the ISPs have planned but not advertised.
Parent
Sound familiar? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Accountability for traffic (Score:5, Insightful)
Either be a common carrier, or be charged with a felony every time a kiddy porn image passes through their network. Hold them accountable for criminal digital acts including hacking, DOS attacks, defacement, etc...
Either they are a common carrier, or they aren't. None of this cake having and eating.
-Rick
Re:Accountability for traffic (Score:2)
Re:Accountability for traffic (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean fucking BILLIONS of dollars have been made by people making business deals on the phone.... are you saying the phone company is somehow entitled to a percentage of real estate deals made on the telephone???
I call bullshite on you, and you have ignored the main point of his argument... the service providers have been shielded from prosecution
Re:Accountability for traffic (Score:3, Insightful)
"Stealth Web tax" ? (Score:2)
Not exactly... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, don't get me wrong, tiered internet is still bad, because it squeezes out smaller content providers who can't pay for extra bandwidth. But opposition to a tiered internet isn't about paying less, it is about making sure that Internet isn't like cable TV or radio, or other mediums where a handful of companies or the government control the whole thing. I, as a consumer, want to get the web site that I want, and I want to get it fast, and I don't care if that web site is google or something very obscure.
I don't think the idea is viable (Score:2, Interesting)
That is, as long as there is competition in the Internet bandwidth space. I don't know what it's like now, but back in '99 or so there was quite a bit of competition as these companies were fighting to get the business.
So google.com has a internet connections coming in from AT&T, and AT&T says "You have to pay us extra because you are google". What's google going to do? They're going
Re:I don't think the idea is viable (Score:5, Insightful)
You have the idea completely wrong. Here is the scenario as stated:
1. Google does not use AT&T for its ISP.
2. AT&T calls Google and says "We have 100,000 customers. Pay us $0.01 a packet or we will deliberately slow down or lose packets sent from you to our customers."
3. Google says "..."
This has nothing to do with service providers charging more to their own customers (who happen to be content providers). It has to do with service providers charging independent content providers a sort of "mob tax" to make sure nothing "happens" to their data on its route.
Sure if AT&T does this, AT&T's customers can move to Time Warner. Then what if Time Warner does it, too? Those are the only high-speed internet options I have. And even if there was a third-party ISP (i.e. Earthlink), they probably rent their lines from AT&T or Time Warner, and they would have the same restriction.
The only option I see is this one:
3. Google says "O Rly. Well then, we're going to take our nationwide dark fiber and roll out a low-cost high-speed nationwide ISP. When you've lost 20,000 customers, come back and apologize and we won't take your other 80,000."
Parent
Re:I don't think the idea is viable (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this going to stop them? AT&T will tell me that "in the interest of giving you the best possible service, we have chosen select providers to guarantee high-speed access directly to our customers. For web search, we have chosen MSN Search, which is
Ownership Society 101 (Score:2, Insightful)
The profit potential is too great.
Whatever you thought the Internet is/was, it won't be for long because there are too many players that stand to make way too much money.
-Big ISP's kill the smaller ISP's because they'll pay a "wholesale transit tax." Competition? What competition?
-Companies providing the fiber/cable get to collect more. Someone explain to me how it's possible for there to be any competition in this segment
cost? (Score:2)
Just yet another Government imposed setback. Its things like this that lets the rest of the world simply pass us by.
Depends on implementation details (Score:3, Interesting)
But what if they left the existing infrastructure in place and focused offering on enhanced access to paid sites through selective, local staging and caching (such as leveraging telco-based Yotta Yotta or Akamai implementations)? It seems reasonable to charge for this, it doesn't really impact the rest of the world, and it could enable much faster access.
Ok, it does sound a little bit evil. But certainly far less than deliberately routing non-paying sites through lower bandwidth lines.
Solution: Show Consumers the Tax & ISP's suppo (Score:3, Insightful)
Let the market decide, but ensure that consumers have all the facts and tools to affect the decision.
Two versions of "teired internet" (Score:3, Informative)
Version 2: What will probably happen. Any site can pay for what amounts to a "leased line" from their server to our ISP. This would give them guaranteed bandwidth across the entire trip and eliminate potential bottlenecks.
Another idea (would also fit in #2) I've heard mentioned is that service providers can essentially buy more bandwidth for you, but only to use their site. Say you have a 3 Mb connection. ABC wants to stream HDTV to you and would prefer it be over a 6- or 10 Mb connection. They pay your ISP, your ISP conditionally opens up your bandwidth so you can get the stream flawlessly without having to pay for the higher bandwidth full-time.
I'm all for #2, especially the second part. I'd love to be able to pay a small fee to have my bandwidth opened up for a particular service.
Re:Two versions of "teired internet" (Score:4, Insightful)
The ISP cannot throttle what they've already sold. This is the Big Lie of bandwidth. It's dynamic on the demand side. However, scaling back based on any criteria suddenly places the carrier into a serious category: judge.
Overall, it's a safe bet that the money is going to the ISPs. This is a power play, IMHO. "You like internet? great, today internet is slower, unless you visit my friends' sites, or pay me". Bullshit!
If this goes through, perhaps the only recourse is homegrown networks, with fat links to other homegrowns. Suddenly, the backbone is replaced with a newborn wireless system - which will take a long time to match anything around today. However, the possibility is growing.
Parent
Re:Two versions of "teired internet" (Score:4, Insightful)
The "amounts to a 'leased line'" connection in #2 is the result of the charges in #1. In either case, you get a comparatively degraded connection unless your content provider has paid a negotiated surcharge to the pipes between their service provider and you to guarantee premium access, and you can guarantee that if they are providing a service that your ISP wants to provide (or anyone else in between!), those fees are not going to be reasonable.
Parent
Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act (Score:5, Informative)
2 sides to every story, this is no exception (Score:4, Insightful)
i have been keeping very close track of this story for the past 2 months now. both sides of the argument have valid points.
for example, consider the telecommunications companies' point of view. currently, they sell more access to bandwidth than they have available. which is fine for regular, burst-type internet use.
now, with internet tv, video-on-demand, and movie downloads looming on the horizon, their argument is, "the current infrastructure can't handle everyone watching streaming video or downloading movies at the same time. if your house is on fire, and all your neighbors are downloading the last episode of '24', your VoIP phone call to 911 may not go through."
so their goal is to get the gov't to allow them to run their part of the internet as a private network. where they can partition off portions of their bandwidth that's dedicated to VoIP phone calls and such, while allowing a (perhaps smaller) portion of the pipe to be available for video downloads and such.
but the potention for abuse is there. what's to stop comcast from throttling a customer's bandwidth if they're using vonage so it basically becomes unusable, then forcing that customer to use comcast's VoIP service instead?
then you have the argument of the google's, microsoft's, amazon's, etc. they know that they'll be charged money to guarantee fast delivery of their services on infrastructure of those companies they're not partnered with. for example, if comcast and yahoo partner up, comcast can guarantee yahoo's search page comes up right away, but google's might take a few seconds longer. that would be a disaster for anyone who doesn't pay the 'comcast tax' and relies on their ads being served up.
one thing the telecom companies forget is that, although they've invested billions into this country's infrastructure, joe taxpayer has had a hand in that investment too. look at your phone bill. see those taxes? universal service charge - what's that for? it's to encourage better connectivity to schools, libraries and rural areas. it's collected and distributed back to the telecoms to invest in infrastructure.
the root problem is the current infrastructure won't be able to handle all the new tv/video/movie services that are about to strike. so instead of investing in more bandwidth to handle the load in the manner we currently enjoy (net neutrality), the telecoms want to use the 'tiered' structure instead.
i'm with tim berners-lee on this - provide either service or content, but not both.
Forgotten What the Internet Is All About? (Score:3, Interesting)
Good news! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/ [savetheinternet.com]
Christopher Yoo nailed it in the article (Score:4, Insightful)
Christopher Yoo got it, and his point is what's wrong with the telecomm's ideas. He's right, consumers should be able to pay for better delivery, just like when I order something shipped FedEx I can pay for regular delivery or I can pay more for overnight delivery depending on what I want. But that's not what the telecomms propose. That'd be like the telecomms saying "Consumer, you're using a lot of bandwidth. If you want to download streaming video you're going to have to pay for a higher-capacity link.". What the telecomms propose, though, is to not have the consumer pay for what they want but to have whoever the consumer's asking for stuff from pay. It's like my ordering something and paying for overnight shipping, and FedEx saying to the shipper "Right then. The customer's paid for standard shipping, but unless you pay us for overnight delivery we'll shove your package in the back and deliver it whenever we feel like it. Which may be never. Oh, and the extra just gets you standard delivery, real overnight will be yet more on top of that.". Of course the telecomms don't want to phrase it that way, because people understand FedEx and the extortion attempt's blatantly obvious.
Re:Christopher Yoo nailed it in the article (Score:3, Insightful)
Express delivery with higher fees only works when standard shipping is slower, which can only be guaranteed by deliberatly delaying standard shipped packages.
Also, when customers complain about nondelivery of packages, shipping companies will usually point to extra services they could have offered to reduce the risk.
Customers expect their packages to be delivered (not lost) and be delivered in reasonable time, but when standard delivery would d
Easy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Easy did they say? What planet are they on? Every time a packet crosses a carrier, the priority may or may not be paid equal attention to. I wouldn't think for even a second that AT&T will treat Verizon's prioritized packets with as high a priority as their own customer's prioritized packets.
Even more misunderstood is that the last mile makes much more of a difference than the backbones. If your local ISP doesn't care about the differenciated services settings, all the money Google, Yahoo, and Disney shell out for better streaming video performance won't add up to much. The Disneys of the scene will eventually figure out that they paid for the privilege of slowing everybody down, not speeding themselves up. That should be an interesting fight.
Easy...
not really (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm worried (Score:3, Insightful)
Me: Hello, how may I help you?
Member: I'm having a lot of trouble accessing your Web site through my ISP, BigTelecom, Inc. What gives?
Me: Let me check into it.
[later]
BigTelecom: Hello, how may I help you?
Me: Hi, our members who are your customers are experiencing problems contacting our Web site, and the problem seems to occur at the border to your network.
BigTelecom: May I have your customer number, please?
Me: Uh, I'm not your customer, our members are.
BigTelecom: Sir, without a customer number we can't guarantee connectivity to your site. It's only $300 per month. Would you like me to transfer you to our sales department?
Me: Yeah, $300/month times the number of ISPs our members use, which is essentially all of them! Nuts!
If the telecom companies get what they want, that's the exact scenario I'll be dealing with.
Re:Remove their common carrier status. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:lame (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
hansoff.org FYI (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.kessels.com/whois/whois.php?InputQuery
And came up with "The Mecury Group" as the owner:
http://www.mercgroup.com/ [mercgroup.com]
From the site:
"Proven practitioners of persuasive arts..."
Not that this should come as any surprise.
Parent
Re:This is nothing but a money grab. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think that Google pays much - if anything - in "ISP fees". They don't go out to some ISP and buy a bunch of OC-whatevers. They buy their own fiber, and have non-transit peering arrangements with all of the major ISPs, and many of the smaller ones as well. Because of that, they're able to hand off packets to the destination network without having to pay an upstream "default gateway" ISP.
Now, I'm sure that moving all those packets costs them a pretty penny, but calling them "ISP fees" doesn't quite fit.
steve
Parent
Re:Google does pay transit fees (Score:3, Informative)
It is the optimal way when the two endpoints are an AT&T transit customer and a Level3 transit customer.
No, it really isn't a mystery. Level3 obviously has some sort of connection to AT&T (probably a peering arrangement), and Level3 is advertising to AT&T that they have a route to Google. AT