In Net Neutrality, It's Jeffersonet Vs. Edisonet

PetManimal writes "Curt Monash has a middle way on the Net neutrality debate. He writes that the classic 'Jeffersonet' — which includes e-mail, instant messaging, much e-commerce, and most websites created in the first 13 or so years of the Web — is 'the greatest tool in human history to communicate research, teaching, news, and political ideas, or to let tiny businesses compete worldwide,' and cannot be compromised by a tiered Internet. On the other hand, a reliable, tiered scheme is required for what he calls the 'Edisonet' — which consists of 'communication-rich applications such as entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings of all kinds.' Commenting on Monash's proposal, blogger Richi Jennings points to a lack of investment in Internet infrastructure and IPv6 technologies at the root of the problem: '...if an application writer makes assumptions that ignore realities such as the speed of light or temporary congestion, their application's going to behave badly. But no premium QoS in the world is going to help that. My sense is still that the ISPs that are complaining about net neutrality are simply being greedy and don't want to invest money to cope with the growth in usage.'"

All I know is...

...Jefferson was a hit with the ladies. Obviously his solution must be superior.

The lack of IPv6 deployment is your clue

It would make total sense to deploy all of the high bandwidth
applications such as video on IPv6, and keep the existing
e-mail and web applications on IPv4.

Total sense.

But, the darkside has frozen IPv6 deployment because
they want to control it all!

It really is that simple.

IPv6 isn't really relevant

Leaving aside the parent article's sense of humor on the topic, Richi's blog article doesn't really add up technically. IPv6 will eventually be necessary to handle the IPv4 address shortage, and maybe some of the mobile IP work in IPv6 won't get ported to IPv4, but probably anything useful will.

IPv4 has several flavors of priority marking, including TOS and DSCP; most of the MPLS (private routed IP) carriers out there are using DSCP to provide 3 to 6 priority levels, which their customers typically use to give high priority to VOIP, maybe high priority to video, medium priority to corporate data applications, and low priority to things like email, web, and ftp that aren't latency-sensitive. Some ISPs support these markings on their public internet service as well, at least on some of their services (e.g. higher-speed corporate-priced circuits, but not necessarily on DSL where the routers don't always support it.) The real limitation there is getting ISPs to agree with each other on which of the 64 available markings to use, how many values, and of course, how to charge (preferably a flat rate.)

As far as peering infrastructure investment goes, the big carriers are spending madly on this to prevent bottlenecks. It's a bit different in the US, where ~20-25 big carriers peer with each other, than in the UK, where everybody peers at LINX, but the problem for Richi should be whether his ISP buys enough LINX bandwidth to keep up with their users. Last I heard LINX and AMSIX were doing mostly ok on keeping up with demand, as long as the ISPs kept up.

Static IP addresses are really a critical issue, and NAT traversal problems are closely related. IPv6 may make this a bit easier, but basically it's an ISP administrative convenience issue (so they don't have to help customers configure PCs) and a firewalling issue (NAT's a cheap beginning on real firewalls, so everybody uses it), and the various flavors of IPv6 autoconfig may eventually replace some of it.

IPv6's big problems for now are router performance, chicken&egg issues with content providers and lack of motivation until the big addressing crunch hits.

Am I not getting it?

This net neutrality argument has been going on for quite awhile, is there something I'm not getting? From what I know (not much), protocols like MPLS have QoS features to distinguish between types of traffic, and they supposedly do a decent job of it. What more is needed then?
Is it not sufficient that packets be differentiated according to the Class of Service? Why do those that argue against Net neutrality seem to imply that differentiating among ISPs is somehow going to make an improvement?

It's sorta like this

It's sorta like this: it's not about what protocols you implement, but about who you allow on "your" network, and at what price or at what speed.

What protocols don't solve is being able to say, "ok, if you want high speed access on _my_ network, you have to pay extra." That's the problem. From just a neutral protocol's point of view, for example VOIP is VOIP is VOIP. A non-neutral approach could say, for example, "ok, you can use VOIP with our client and our paid service, but Skype users can eat shit and die... or at least get their pipe throttled until they have an incentive to switch to ours." Or, "you can play WoW on our network because Blizzard gave up and paid the tax, but you might notice a lot of latency and disconnects in SWG because Sony wanted to play hardball." Or viceversa, although it would probably count as a crime against humanity to make people play SWG ;) Or "you can get high speed access to MSN Search, because Steve Balmer was more than happy to pay to 'fucking kill Google', but you might have problems using Google or getting your site indexed by Google."

It's all about walled gardens and monopolistic practices. You only make so much money with just one interchangeable product or service, so you'll want some kind of trade obstacles that give you some kind of a (semi)captive market. You'll want that people who want your product or service X, also have the incentive/FUD/lack-of-choice to also buy the less competitively priced Y and Z from you. That's where the money is.

If you look around you, that's how most people who make money, make it.

E.g., take iTunes. Not the worst case of shearing penned sheep, to be sure, but nevertheless an example of how it works. ITunes itself doesn't make Apple much money, and it actually caused the music companies to make a lot less money than with a CD. The companies wanted to kill the single, but iTunes made them kill the album. Previously they'd sell you a whole CD, now you just buy 1-2 tracks at 1$ each, and they don't even get the whole dollar. ITunes is basically priced not to make Apple or the music companies a profit, but to keep any possible competitor unable to make a profit.

However, iTunes just happens to have this proprietary DRM that works only on an iPod. (Yes, as Steve Jobs is quite happy to tell you, the DRM is there because the RIAA wanted DRM. But, no, they didn't ask for a DRM that works only on his players. The lock in is _not_ RIAA's demand.) The iPod is quite a bit overpriced. If you want to use iTunes, you pretty much need an iPod. And IIRC, Apple sells around 1 iPod for every 10 songs sold on iTunes. So iTunes doesn't make Apple much money, in fact, it barely makes enough to keep the servers running, but makes you buy another product from them.

The key to making money there is the whole not being neutral.

The big ISP's now would like to get in the same kind of position. They have a service which doesn't make a fortune, and as long as they stay neutral, they have no way to coax/coerce you into buying an overpriced product to go with it. They'd like to be able to do something like that, because that's where the money is.

Re:It's sorta like this

Another way of putting it (with limitation as always): are ISP like public roads? If not, then highway owners can block certain brands of cars or limit them to 1 lane. Or free to choose to interface with an undesirable highway competitor by limiting the interconnection to 1 lane on they side vs the 4 lanes that are required (and that the competitor has already built). Which highway will have more leverage, and be able to force their terms on all other highway contractors? And when that happens, the will be a lot of great roads to certain places, and incredible traffic (or no connection at all) to other unfavored locations (like certain cinemas, certain plants, certain cities, certain car dealers, etc).

WOuld that make the economy great? Wow, we'll have great roads to places we wouldn't have gone in the first place, and crappy roads to very promising and desirable places. If you contro, here people can go easily, you control the economy.

Re:It's sorta like this

I think the best comparison (and the one that historically goes with my point of view on the matter) is to compare ISPs to the telephone companies when the telephone first started out. In the beginning of the 20th Century, after the Edison patent expired and when the telephone network was recognized as the most important part of the system, marketing types would come to your front door and say "Join our network! Your good friend, Mr. Google is on our network, if you'd like to call him, you should join us!" So you would. The next day, another salesperson would come and say "Join our network! Your doctor, Dr. Kaspersky is on our network, if you'd like to call him, you should join us!" Not wanting to make Mr. Google sad, you'd just get the second phone installed. The next day, another salesman would come by and say, "Join our network! Your furniture mover, Mr. Ballmer is in our network, if you'd like to call him, you should join us!" Not wanting to make Mr. Google or Dr. Kaspersky sad, you'd join the new network as well. Pretty soon, you'd have 10 telephones in your living room. So the government stepped in and made the public telephone system, which coincidentally works almost exactly the same (fundamentally) as the internet does today.

This is exactly the same as net neutrality. Both networks provide a means of remote communication. The internet may move a lot more information and may be growing at an ever-increasing rate, but it was built a century later. The internet is still a relatively new system - we're still learning just how big the enormous amounts of data we can transport, but the ISPs are still complaining about laying new lines. Phone networks are old technology, but all the telephone companies switched to digital telephony in the 60s to allow the massive amount of people getting phone services.

It costs money to keep a public network running, but once the the public telephone system was established, nobody was calling to bring back the old system. The problem is that the internet is a little bit more complicated than telephones and so the politicians don't fully understand the repercussions of their actions. We need somebody in Washington to stand up and explain that the series of tubes that make up the internet is the same as the series of tubes that make up the telephone network (and with VoIP are becoming the same tubes) and that they've already made legislation regarding it that works and they don't need to waste their time.

Re:It's sorta like this

That depends. If they say "the internet is going down a series of tubes", we should laugh and agree.

Phone network neutrality?

This is exactly the same as net neutrality. Both networks provide a means of remote communication.

The telephone network is not neutral and I don't think it has been, since perhaps the earliest days. Two words: Peak Rate.

The phone networks use variable charging to discourage people from using the resources when they're in demand -- peak time -- so that the resources are available to those who need them; it's called demand management, and it's more efficient than increasing supply ad infinitum. Mobile networks in the UK have a longer peak period than fixed line, because while fixed-line phones peak during office hours, mobile peak usage continues throughout the commute period.

Fixed-line performance traditionally didn't degrade gracefully under strain -- in general connections were simply refused. (digital exchanges are changing this though) Mobile networks slice up traffic and degrade "gracefully", but will let it get to the point where neither party can hear the other due to lack of granularity.

In these cases, demand limits itself -- people put the phone down. The claim is that the same thing happens with the internet -- people will only connect when they have a useful speed. However, if I'm at work, I don't care what response I get on my home PC if I choose to download DVD images of Linux builds, service packs for Windows, HD video etc etc for later use.

Net neutrality, inasmuch as it advocates no peak rate, turns things upside-down: it discourages people who need to use it during peak demand from using it. The downloaders don't need to -- they can run overnight -- but it's more convenient for them.

HAL.

Re:It's sorta like this

What protocols don't solve is being able to say, "ok, if you want high speed access on _my_ network, you have to pay extra." That's the problem.

I understand what you mean, but it's not quite described right, so I'll clarify for others.

What you are trying to say is that the ISPs are in a way trying to sell access to their customer base to the internet services. They are asking the sellers of video, VOIP and other services to pay money to the ISP that the customer is using. Basically they want both sides to pay for access through the "last mile". The customer is already paying for the service over the last mile, but the ISP wants the sender of those services to pay too, otherwise they might get unsatisfactory service. At least, that's the popular interpretation around here, and I think it's the most plausible.

The ISPs might say that they would be offering a premium improved service to Google, iTunes and such, but in reality, I would expect that they would just degrade service for customers of services that don't pay. I just don't think the big ISPs can be trusted to be honest about this.

Re:Am I not getting it?

There is certainly one thing that you do get, that many other people are missing, and the ISPs and others with a big financial stake would dearly love everyone else to miss.

That is that when people talk about net neutrality there are two different things they might be talking about:

1. Differentiating between packets based on packet type/protocol. This is already done and most people think it is a good thing.

2. Differentiating between packets based on where they came from, or where they are going to.

The big companies who argue against net neutrality say that we can't have net neutrality, because (1) is absolutely essential to keep your VOIP calls glitch-free when capacity is limited.

What they don't like to mention is that actually the reason they don't like net neutrality is because they want to make deals with selected networks and content providers to extract money from them in return for giving their data higher priority.

He got it right

Greed is the root of these problems- eliminate it and everyone will do better (including the ISPs!)

Infrastructure

It's like I've always said, the internet is one humongous frontier in which lawlessness and disarray abound. We've tried to deal with the lawlessness of the net - just take a look at how well security firms are doing - but the disarray, the poor infrastructure, is something the normal user never thinks about. They'll care about where their credit card numbers go, sure, but not how long it takes to get to a particular web page (unless they run a 56k modem).

But since I long for the day of rich communication apps and online gaming, I'd like an improved infrastructure so heavy applications can get their work done smoothly. How would somebody (or a group of people, for that matter) go about organizing infrastructure?

They have it backwards

A system with guaranteed bandwidth aka "net neutrality" aka "truth in advertising" would allow you to spend your bandwidth however you want. This seams like it would foster adoption of high bandwidth service such as "entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings". A tiered system would probably let you use low bandwidth things like email, web, and text chat at your full speed, but would charge you extra or throttle you for high bandwidth items. A tiered Internet is the enemy of newer multimedia services.

Re:They have it backwards

A system with guaranteed bandwidth aka "net neutrality" aka "truth in advertising" would allow you to spend your bandwidth however you want. This seams like it would foster adoption of high bandwidth service such as "entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings". A tiered system would probably let you use low bandwidth things like email, web, and text chat at your full speed, but would charge you extra or throttle you for high bandwidth items. A tiered Internet is the enemy of newer multimedia services.

In short, no. You're right, but that's not the point.

You're falling victim to the common misconception that this is all about charging consumers more for 'premium content'. That is a straw man constructed by those who want to destroy net neutrality.

This is all about toll roads. The telcos want to charge everyone who uses their network, every time, and they want to do so prejudicially, letting their friends through cheaply, and charging killing rates to others. As things stand right now, Google pays one price to access the Internet, and everyone who has paid to access the Internet can access them. The price determines the quality of the service, but they only pay it once.

What the net neutrality 'debate' is about is that the Telco A wants to charge every bit of traffic that passes onto its network from Telco B, regardless of the fact that Telco B has already been paid for Internet access. In other words, Telco A is setting up a toll booth, and charging companies for something they've already paid for.

(There are numerous permutations to this scenario, but that's the simplest way I can express it.)

This practice is the precise antithesis of the end-to-end network that we like to call the Internet. Net Neutrality is not about consumer choice, it's not about quality of service, and it's not about new business opportunities. It's about whether we still want an Internet. If you do, then you must support Net Neutrality.

NO

Some sort of synthesis of both sides, while always useful in bullshitting high school and college papers, is not always the right way in the real world. Freedom is to be favored over commercial interests in an arena like the internet, which provides massive public good but not QUITE enough profit for the companies to be happy.

Communications over the internet work pretty well now, despite the drain that youtube &co have put on the system. Sure, there could always be better infrastructure, but letting the wealthy and businesses insulate themselves from internet-wide problems will only decrease the impetus to improve the infrastructure by letting the most powerful market forces sidestep all the problems. This is the same reason that health care for so many Americans sucks: the rich decision makers are not forced to use the same system. Don't let that happen to internet service.

What about...

Hamiltonet and Teslanet?

Re:What about...

I'm still waiting to see "Less-filling-net" vs "Tastes-Great-net"

Work vs. Play

Interesting comparison. Not to belittle the likes of telemedicine, but when it comes to the vast majority of users/uses, the jeffersonet has been used to do real work -- communicate, sell, buy, co-ordinate. The edisonet, on the other hand, touting quality video, and other high-bandwidth options are not truly profitable at this time.

I suppose video meetings would build telecommuting, but that brings up the usual video-phone problem. Today, high-bandwidth and video is used for fun. 14 year-old girls may love watching videos of my sister's cat, but neither of them profits by it. Until such edisonet features are adopted by a substantial number of truly worth-while endeavours, this edisonet is totally useless. like cell phone faceplates.

The value of standards

"a reliable, tiered scheme is required for what he calls the 'Edisonet' -- which consists of 'communication-rich applications such as entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings of all kinds.'"

Why shouldn't we consider "communication-rich" applications to be a fundamental part of the internet in the same way that email and web browsing already are?

Standards for voice applications, meeting applications and graphics applications have already been developed, published and endorsed by the W3C, 3GPP and ITU. Let's use them.

Obligatory legal reminder

Photon speed limit: 299,792,458 meters per second [wikipedia.org]

More anti-neutrality fud from monash.

monash is just another one of these anti-neutrality people pushing the same exact "rationing" of existing resources these telcos were trying to push off in the first place. only hes calling it a compromise.. (in much the same way the RIAA asks for the moon and stars.. then asks for carte blach regulation as a "compromise")

its very simple.. the "jefferson" net would be perfectly applicable for all these media intensive applications if they upgraded the freaking infrastructure like they were supposed to in the first place

they were given grants and local monopoly contracts on the promise of laying new fiber, they didnt and are now wanting to "ration" crowded lines in order to shoehorn in applications which would have had room to spare if they had upheld their part of the bargain.

Warren Buffet paved the way

You make it big by buying things overpriced, gobble up the competition at the expense of the consumer, charge for your lack of efficiency, pay whatever is necessary to get the competition to sell out, charge even more as you become one of two competitors in your market, then you sell everything and let it all tumble down, later to repurchase it and resume your domination. And its all done on bare bones, used Pentium III crap machines because he's too cheap to buy the machines new. And you operate your empire out of a run down office building while using the lowest possible output light bulbs because you don't want to pay too much overhead. Overhead eats profit you know. What does this have to do with the topic? Everything. Its penny pinchers like this that destroy America's competitiveness at the expense of joe public. The same types of elitist people run big telephone. The same types elitists run big entertainment. There is no room for fluff or overhead when profit is everything.

Think about the business

Before you cry afoul in agreement that the ISP's don't want to invest in new infrastructure and are greedy bastards, remember for one second that in telecommunications terms, the Internet is still very young. Before this, the last major jumps in the sector were television and satellites, 50 years ago. Before that was the radio a half century earlier, and another half century back gets us the telegraph. The Internet in its current form is barely 15 years old, and at most you could peg it at 20.

Much of the infrastructure was laid down during the dot-com boom days of the late 1990's, so much of the hardware itself is only a decade old, and at the time was quite expensive - there's a reason that Cisco is huge. The ISP's just have not seen the return on hardware investment in the Internet that they had in the phone business before undertaking any massive overhaul of the underlying network, as a transition to IPv6 would be.

The whole tiered internet system is (surprise!) purely motivated by the money to be made, of course. Yes, it might end up sucking balls for the home user, but then again, maybe they'll have the monetary incentive (or when it becomes viable, perhaps some startup company will) to upgrade the network, which is good for everybody - after all, they do need some kind of bandwidth to push more digital HD channels.

Personally, I would dislike my packets being lower priority than somebody else's. I'm just saying that you need to think about it from a utilities business perspective, not a technology business perspective - their business is a service, not a product as such.

duh

"My sense is still that the ISPs that are complaining about net neutrality are simply being greedy and don't want to invest money to cope with the growth in usage."

Ya think?

U.S. Problem?

Is it just my perceptions, or is this mostly a U.S. problem? I'm prepping to move from living just outside of Tokyo to Texas in a month -- and I'm not looking forward to it.

U.S.: Paying $60+ for 5mb/768kb cable/dsl -- with possibilities to have my service terminated for over-using an "unlimited use" service
Japan: Paying $60 for 100mb/100mb fiber -- no hidden catches

I don't know how things are across the EU, but I know that the U.S. has a sorry, outdated infrastructure in place and it's like pulling teeth to have companies upgrade their already oversold lines.

Before just crying "greed!", read this

I'm sure some people already have as it's quite old a paper, but those who simply attribute all these problems to greed should understand it's just not so simple. Read The Broadband Incentive Problem [mit.edu] white paper from MIT. After that, read a bit more [telco2.net] on the current situation.

The Edison Bit

Now all we need is a way to distinguish these packets. How about a new bit?

'Jeffersonet' ?!?

That finally explains the missing part of the etymology of the 'Jefferies tubes [wikipedia.org]'! :-D

Worst buzzword of the day award:

Its almost a tie between "teleteaching" and "telemedicine", but I think "teleteaching" wins.

At least it wasn't "e-teaching", or, (the horror, the horror...) e-teleteaching.

Packet priorities yes but no extra fees

What we need are 3 or so packet priorities, universally defined across the (ipv6 I guess) net,
to handle traffic with different latency requirements,
but just charge the end user as usual for bandwidth, or for classes of bandwidth
usage (peak and sustained), as part of their ISP package. If they want more movies or lots of voip,
both of which would use high-priority packets, then more bandwidth would be used up, so more
bandwidth charges would accrue. There is absolutely no need to charge any of the players more
for sending or recieving high-priority packet streams, because they automatically (send) get more packets
per second or per hour so their bandwidth charges will cover their increased net utilization.

This seems really simple to me. What's complicated?

Just more Pro Net-Neutrality Spin

Edison-Net my ass.

What it comes down to, is that net neutrality makes the internet a network of thousands of toll bridges where every ISP and backbone provider can dip into the pockets of monied dotcoms and extort money from them to play ona level field on their block of the internet.

This is double dipping. It should be their customers who pay for the Bandwidtdh and QoS they get, not the sites the user frequents.
If the user wants to watch streaming video all day and talk to all his buddies on skype with fast bitrates, then let him pay for it.

The issue here is simple. Create tiered internet packages for different types of users and MARKET those packages to your current users.
I decided to get rid of AT&T and found that speakeasy et al offer many more types of packages with different levels of QoS.
Funny how AT&T can't be bothered to do what the little guys do and instead want to lobby the hell out of Congress to essentially force Google ad others to pay them exorbanant fees.

The bottom line is double dipping for a single service is wrong and lobbying congress to force lage dotcoms is anti-competitive and flies in the face of free markets. If it costs too much to provide broadband service to your nusiness and residential customers, then increase the rates.
Let the market decide if it wants that service or not.

Telcos

Since when has any proposal from a telecommunications company, especially the companies who own the broadly-installed infrastructure, ever encouraged competition or innovation? It just doesn't happen. The only possible way to make a "third way" happen is if the government put in some basic and strict groundrules... eg. that prevent telcos from using packet shaping to give their own services a significant advantage over competitors. Unfortunately, government performance on this in the past has been spotty, especially under Republican leadership.

Middle Way? Bah!

Net neutrality is both necessary and workable for what I call Jeffersonet, which comprises the "classical", bandwidth-light parts of the Internet.

I read that as, "if your application uses so little bandwidth as to be negligible, then net neutrality is ok. But if you want to actually use some of that broadband bandwidth that you're already paying for, then I want to charge you extra".

Or in other words Let's compromise - do it my way.

to bellsouth, now AT&T

don't be gettin uppity with me boy!

you provide the network, you don't tax its use.

Making a guess

But when walmart, microsoft, netflix, etc allow downloadable movies/games, broadband is going to be much in demand that ISP's might start offering faster services for prefered providers.

I think that we will see people buying faster QoS for some services, and companies like google providing the infrastructure equipment/software to make it happen.

And most ISP's offer better QoS for the enterprise customers, nice big fat virtual pipes for companies needing speed for medical, industrial, (voip), etc.. Also the phone companies don't own that last mile to the base station, so if you need 3G, the ISP's are selling the bandwidth.

Plus with lawsuits, let a national ISP intentionally slowdown a competitor that doesn't pay some sort of net tax. I bet there are a dozen laws to cover that.

If your software is too slow...

...just wait for the hardware to catch up.

Farnsworth: These are the dark matter engines I invented. They allow my starship to travel between galaxies in mere hours.

Cubert: That's impossible. You can't go faster than the speed of light.

Farnsworth: Of course not. That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.

Terrible English

OK, this might seem like a nitpick, but I can't let it pass; I had to read this sentence a few times before I understood the true meaning, and I only did because I'm a native English speaker:

He writes that the classic 'Jeffersonet' -- which includes e-mail, instant messaging, much e-commerce, and most websites created in the first 13 or so years of the Web -- is 'the greatest tool in human history to communicate research, teaching, news, and political ideas, or to let tiny businesses compete worldwide,' and cannot be compromised by a tiered Internet.

What you mean (or he means) is that it must not be compromised. 'Cannot' pretty much means the opposite.

Socialism creeping in

My sense is still that the ISPs that are complaining about net neutrality are simply being greedy and don't want to invest money to cope with the growth in usage.

Unless the ownership is secure, there will not be much investment — that's so obvious, it is a truism. Yet these people expect companies to invest in infrastructure, while, at the same time, trying to reduce the companies' control of same:

• Oh, you built a new pipe? Great! No, we are not going to let you charge a premium for using it, no sir, net-neutrality and all... Don't be greedy, we want to trade our warez and to hold high-res video-conferences over it.
• Well, screw you, Commies, we are not building new pipes...

Next you'll see some creeps argue, that the free market is failing [wikipedia.org], and that the government thus needs to take over the Internet service provision, much like it currently is responsible for highways (is not that a roaring success)...

Re:Socialism creeping in

Unless the ownership is secure, there will not be much investment -- that's so obvious, it is a truism. Yet these people expect companies to invest in infrastructure, while, at the same time, trying to reduce the companies' control of same:

But the ownership is secure.

They build a new pipe. The rules are that you pay $x/Mbyte. So, duplicating the capacity will let you make twice the amount of money you made last year (in the case of flat rate, it is seen as being capable of selling to twice the customers than last year).

The point of net neutrality is not whether you're going to charge me for downloading warez or whatever. The point is why should you charge more for downloading from TPB instead of yourtelcowarez.com service. After all, the pipes don't care (for the argument's sake, let's assume both sites are equally far away).

Obviously there is a problem of oversold bandwidth, and now that people is starting to use it, they bitch about it. Basically they want to raise prices without saying so (pay $5 to telcowarez.com subscription + ISP subscription = ISP subscription + make TPB pay $5 for "premium content" = ISP subscription + make me pay $5 for "TPB premium content access" = telco makes 5 extra bucks).

The problem is that they'll overdo it and they will eventually demand $5 for each site. That kind of Internet would definitely suck.

Re:Socialism creeping in

You're about the fifth person today i've seen make the "ooo, socialism!" argument. This isn't particularly targeting you or your version of it, but the whole class of argument.

Am I the only one who finds it more than a little ironic (not to mention short-sighted and grating), considering the internet is the result of socialist practices in the first place? I realize we're largely an American audience here, but is our sense of history really that short that we can't even make it 20-30 years back? Do we not remember our origins with the ARPANET, a project nurtured in and entirely funded by America's favorite crypto-socialist organization, the Department of Defense? This is a project funded by tax dollars which fall well outside the core capitalist/libertarian conception of what the government should be doing, and while it's certainly got problems, it's worked out pretty well. While the technology wasn't necessarily the best around at the time (personally, I think we missed out on better things with datakit from Bell Labs), it was plenty good enough to facilitate growth.

But the most important aspect of all leading to the creation of the modern internet wasn't technical at all. Rather, it was the fact that its form and structure was decided outside the realm of commercial interests. The free interchange was facilitated by a design which had no interest in "walled gardens" of any kind. Wondering what the corporate, capitalist world would have come up with instead, if left to their own devices? We needn't wonder: look at AOL, or most of the national mobile networks (especially those on the CDMA side). Closed, tiered networks... all of which inhibit growth of services. Users, who're now accustomed to the wealth of readily-available (and frequently free, although that's secondary) resources on the Internet, have no interest in restricted choice, leading to (well, among the things leading to) very limited uptake of advanced mobile services. "The market" has told us that what "the market" comes up with on its own is, by its own measure, inferior to what the DoD's socialist practices came up with.

It's not a question of arguing "the free market is failing" - the Internet's very existence is thanks to the government realizing "the market" had no way of getting where it wanted to be.

Today, every mobile (and many fixed) network operator in America (and many internationally, although the dynamics are very different in other places) is struggling with the same conflict which ate AOL's business model: they want to be the walled garden, to be the guardian of the user's experience and to get paid for access to those users (walls work both ways). But the users just want the internet. Verizon want's to provide (or choose who provides, and get kickbacks from) my weather service, my news service, my search service, my photo sharing service, and so on. I, as a user, don't care what Verizon wants; I want to pick which ones I'm using. Fundamentally, that's what this whole net neutrality debate is about: the market you're so fond of drives network providers to be dumb pipes, or to at least divorce the content they do provide from their dumb pipes, but that's exactly what network operators are scared to death of. They don't want to compete in a commodity market.

A large part of me blames this whole mess on the McCarthyism-induced confusion between socialism and communism in America. We've given ourselves just the right kind of collective brain damage to be unable to tell the difference.

Re:Socialism creeping in

Unless the ownership is secure, there will not be much investment -- that's so obvious, it is a truism. Yet these people expect companies to invest in infrastructure, while, at the same time, trying to reduce the companies' control of same:

I think its a little late for the ISPs to be complaining about socialism, seeing as the taxpayers have subsidized their infrastructure they now own to the tune of billions of dollars. In any case, all investment has risks, the ISPs are simply looking for a way to make money by investing in politicians instead of hardware. "You know, if not for these common carrier provisions the FCC requires, we could extort a lot more money without actually providing any more benefit, lets buy us some congresscritters!"

Oh, you built a new pipe? Great! No, we are not going to let you charge a premium for using it, no sir, net-neutrality and all... Don't be greedy, we want to trade our warez and to hold high-res video-conferences over it.

Do you even know what you're talking about? Net neutrality does not say that an ISP can't charge a premium for a faster pipe or even for running a given type of traffic faster. Net neutrality does not ban QoS, that is FUD they have been spreading that has always been shown to be false. Net neutrality is about insuring all traffic of the same type is treated the same, regardless of the source and destination. If the ISPs want to charge their customers a premium for use of some new pipe, they are free to do so. What net neutrality stops is them from charging people who are not their customers a fee for not waylaying any transit traffic from them that happens to cross their network (in violation of their peering agreements). They can charge 10 times as much for video conference traffic as they do for Web traffic and use QoS to ensure the video conference runs fast enough. What net neutrality stops them from doing is looking at traffic they are paid by peers to have cross their network, and intentionally slowing down traffic from say, Google, so that Google searches are extra slow, because either Google (who is not their direct customer) did not pay extortion, or because MS paid more than Google.

ISPs are given immunity to certain laws under the assumption that they are common carriers. They can transport child pornography without going to jail because they just carry all traffic impartially. They can carry slanderous remarks without fear of lawsuit because they just impartially carry traffic. If they decide not to impartially carry traffic, but instead to discriminate among different people sending and receiving, what benefit to society does it bring to continue providing them with special immunity to the laws?

Next you'll see some creeps argue, that the free market is failing, and that the government thus needs to take over the Internet service provision, much like it currently is responsible for highways (is not that a roaring success)...

There is not now and never has been a "free market" for internet. The government highly subsidized the infrastructure from day one, provided special legal protections to ISPs, and allowed only two in most geographical areas to run lines in the public right of ways creating government enforced monopolies. Because of those public right of ways and the geographic realities, internet service lends itself to being a natural monopoly, which never obeys free market rules anyway. Claiming then, that one given act of government interference is the cause of all problems is absurd.

I build tools for ISPs and I can tell you the ones outside the US are a lot less fucked up and are investing a lot more in improved infrastructure and bringing real value to customers as a way to make money. In a lot of Europe and even in some of south america you can buy internet pipes that allow you to filter our DDoS attacks at your ISPs peering border, not once it has hosed your network completely. People pay a premium for those pipes, but in the

Akamai?

Isn't there already a tiered internet? I know that the company I work for is paying a small fortune for Akamai to serve pages via their network.

Craponet, shitonet, stupidonet

.. NOT.

there is one 'net'. and it is the INTERNET.

so quit crapping around and make due pressure for shitty telco companies to actually INVEST the unearned money they have got from OVERSELLING connectivity subscriptions.

by joining or jumping in every crappy debate they are funding, like this "edisowhatcamacallitnet" & "2nd internet" "othermorecrapolanet" debate, you are, without knowing, supporting their attempts to get out of their predicament without paying for it themselves.

Pure, unadulterated greed

I don't understand why net neutrality is even an issue.

I pay for my net connection. In fact, I'm already dealing with tiered pricing- if I want a faster connection I have to pay more for it. And if I were to transfer more than a certain amount of data I'd have to pay more for that too.

And sites that I go to pay for THEIR bandwidth.

So when I hit google apps, or nasioc, or wherever... it's already being paid for . Twice.

Is this about peering? ISP A feels like they should be compensated for shuffling a disproportionate amount of traffic between ISP B and C?

Or is this purely QoS? On top of charging more for bigger/faster pipes, they want to charge more in exchange for... not slowing things down? Through the pipes we're already paying for? Twice?

Downloaded Movies

Last night I watched my first movie via download. I have 4MB/s cable and I took 2MB/s for about 2.5 hours to watch my 90 minute movie. I can see that as soon as my neighbors find out how wonderful this is, my web surfing, IM, and other real Internet activities will suffer. Not to mention, I doubt that movies will be rewarding in the slightest unless I choose to download at some practical hour, like 3AM.

I am currently only thinking about my local cable provider, it doesn't include the interconnection which accumulates a lot more users than my neighbors. If I had to pay a transit fee for every download, I am pretty sure I wouldn't and would just get a DVD and watch it. After all, my station wagon full of DVDs has one heck of a lot of bandwidth. So, as in all really tough problems, we have the tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org] to deal with. IMHO, I would rather see some sort of surcharge for spurious internet usage like movie downloads and let the commons support what they do best which is the web and associated traditional applications.

If you want bandwidth, pay for it. If not, don't use it. Maybe if everybody paid per GB for bandwidth usage it would solve the problem. I would still be able to download my linux distros occasionally and surf the web.

Let's review: This is a pipe.

Very simple explanation.

The history of communications has been very simple up until now; one pipe = one method of communication.

Telegraph lines = telegraphs
Broadcast radio = sound
Broadcast televison = sound + pictures
Cable television = sound + pictures (originally) diced up into "channels" with one channel per signal.
Phone lines = speech (originally) + telefaxes (secondary) diced up into specific numbers

One pipe = one medium
"I have a pipe, all of my media must be streamed."

You're keeping up, right?

Enter the Internet. One pipe = unlimited media. That's bad from a content provider's perspective. The more media you can stuff down that single pipe, the less money the content providers make. The CPs have no real way of shuting off content. If they can't shut it off and turn it on, where's the easy profit?

Ignore for a moment that we are running out of pipes (IPv6 vs IPv4) and ignore that some media might be best offered over some other pipe (Internet1 vs Internet2 vs cable vs ?). The fact is that the content providers desperatly NEED their old ways of providing content or they might need to devlope new business plans. That's risky. Historically new business plans have a high rate of failure and anyone can copy you and get it right before you can.

So, this is where we are. Content providers make money by selling us a stream of content (radio and TV in channels (via advertisments)and cable and telephone in channels/numbers(via channels signal blockers)) Content providers need to cut the Internet into pipes in order ro make money with their old business plans.

Unless we are VERY carefull, we WILL end up with an internet cut up into pipes. One for each provider and one for each media.

On the other hand, if you invest in Comcast now, you may become VERY rich indeed.

Screw the Edison net

Not to take the analogy too far, but I want to go from Jeffersonianet to Tesla-net.

I.E. Wireless, worldwide broadband which is cheap, ubiquitous and enabling of communication by anyone to anyone at any scale for any content.

Quite frankly, once you blanket everything in fiber, and deploy WiMax in all metropolitan areas, we'll be 90% of the way there. Switch to IPv6, and keep researching better iterations of Wireless data transmission, and these concerns we currently have about bandwidth won't make any sense to future generations. The internet is not like the road system. You don't have to displace thousands of home owners or businesses to expand capacity 10% (build more lanes). Deploying fiber everywhere increases capacity by two orders of magnitude; and there isn't any reason you can't realistically run bundles of fiber.

Combine that with increasingly better encoding schemes, and one can imagine ubiquitous, two-way gigabit connections; bandwidth which vastly exceeds current local system throughput for most users AND servers.

Even in terms of frequency spectrum, we've got plenty of space there. Elimination of the analog channels, and switching spectrum over to next-gen technologies like Flarion's OFDM, or the latter revisions of EVDO and WCDMA, and we'll see internet connections, both mobile and fixed, which exceed our expectations for local speeds.

Building an "Edison" net, AT&T style, will kill this. AT&T believes that 6 Mbps is enough for anyone, and they are working their damndest to bring back micropayments for data access. There's no reason for this, and there's no reason for service-based QoS and tiered connections. The technology exists, now, to swamp everyone in more bandwidth than you could possibly use; and building out "Edison" style literally means figuring out how NOT to do that, and restricting bandwidth (and IP space) to generate monopoly profits.

I suspect this article is written by someone with ties to AT&T, as AT&T is trying to figure out how to rebuild its monopoly position in order to slow down communication and increase rates to boot.

Down with limited broadband! Up with speeds! ;-)

ideaology vs. corporate reality

I think there are two separate issues confounding this discussion.

The first is that at a philosophical capitalistic level, a tiered (but not sensored) network may or may not be advantageous.

The second is that at a real capitalistic level, the telecos are making arguments for all the wrong reasons, following the general sense of a greedy capitalistic oligopoly double dipping into utilities at every chance possible.

I find the latter incites an emotional response to the former, affecting the ability to speak logically about the former. I feel like the debate is better addressed when one is conscious of these two separate sub-debates, so that one can address the source of one's position.

For example, while I don't thing it's a good idea to demand neutral networks, following from my studies on similar liberal 'neutral controls' over television, I also don't think that the telecos should be double dipping simply to increase profits. If the companies do use a tiered system, it should be only to curtail economic demand on the systems enough to ensure realtime services for those applications which require it. Logically, garunteeing speed should be pretty expensive for those services which claim they can and will provide them.

Policy seems to reflect this division of ideology. For example while there is no law currently enforcing net neutrality, the US Gov't forbade AT&T from implementing an unneutral IP network for 2 years as terms of their Oligopic merger. Thus while ideologically the neutral model is not enforced, the corporate implementation of a tiered network is curtailed to directly stifle the company, and not to violate an ideology.

Just meter it

This proposal is waaaay too confusing and complicated. Why not price the internet like electricity? Charge everyone a minor (about $5 / month) connection fee, and then charge a flat rate per gigabyte downloaded. Heavy bandwidth users will end up footing the bill for their usage, and market forces will push ISPs to continually lower their price per gigabyte. This will also mitigate problems with uncapped cable modems, as customers who abuse it will end up paying large usage fees. In addition, light internet users might be tempted to connect to broadband as their total bill could be something like $10 a month.

Re:Stupid

paid astroturfer alert!

the government funded the development of and generously subsidized the internet we have today, the telco input was minimal at best.

basic economics says the concept of moral hazard always applies, in this case removing a monopoly's minimum quality requirements will result in terrible service.

They have to actually upgrade their infrastructure, and they wont do that if you allow them to "ration" based on sender/recipient and/or content type.

Re:C'mon, it's just a series of tubes.

"Switzerland"?