BellSouth Wants to Rig the Internet 559
PlayfullyClever writes "A senior telecommunications executive at BellSouth, said yesterday that Internet service providers should be allowed to strike deals to give certain Web sites or services priority in reaching computer users, a controversial system that would significantly change how the Internet operates. Some say Small Firms Could Be Shut Out of Market Championed by BellSouth Officer. William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc." Next up, well dressed men go door to door collecting their monthly "protection money". 'It sure would be tragic if your users started getting 1500ms ping times, wouldn't it mister dot com?'
Except.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Bell south you are looking a lot like Sony and SCO. Not a good thing.
out of context (Score:1, Insightful)
They don't seem to be talking about simple websites at all
Go ahead, be liable for it (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as they do this, then they should become legally responsible for all content that crosses their network.
Either ISPs are passive conduits, or they are not. If they can easily differentiate between packets from different sources, and filter those packets for different handling procedures, then they can take responsibility for not allowing 'illegal' packets on their network.
Re:They just never quit (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical thought process for high-end executives who are used to bullying and paying through the nose to get what they want NOW.
Re:They just never quit (Score:5, Insightful)
If consumers had a choice (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's not be too worried.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only real danger is the growing monopolization of Internet access, through cable and DSL, but yet we watch as wifi-based Internet access spreads and their market crumbles beneith their feet.
More fuel on the fire, BellSouth, it'll only help speed your own destruction.
Re:They just never quit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They just never quit (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but for an extra $500 we won't make you wait an extra half hour to deplane....
Idiot doesn't even know who his customer is (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly what happens when governments grant monopolies. BellSouth has been taking their customers for granted since they spun away from the AT&T motnership, which also took us for granted. After all, where can we really go? Like most regions of the US with broadband, we have government monopoly A (BellSouth) or government monopoly B (Cox) and while they can be played off one another just a little, they co-own the Louisiana Public Service Commission that makes the rules and aren't above conspiring together to keep their cost down and the users downtrodden.
The baby bells must be broken again. They can keep the monpoly on the copper or fiber but must NOT be permitted to own or operate any of the higher level protocols or have any business entanglements with anyone who does. I'm serious, we need a seperate company that JUST owns and maintains the physical plant and leases space on a totally non-discrimnatory basis in the CO to as many companies that want to install voice switches, DSLAMS, etc. as can fit into the building.... and have rules so a carrier can even pay to make the building bigger.
Monopolosaurus Rex (Score:5, Insightful)
It's obvious that these telcos are jealous of Google and the big bucks connected with it. They want their cut, not by competing to provide better products, but by threatening to make their products worse unless their extortion money is paid. Back in the 1990s, they tried to force extra fees on dialup customers, on ISPs, based on lies about phone switch capacity. They tried selling ISDN from clueless salespeople for ripoff prices after unpredictable and interminable installation delays. Then they screwed up DSL deployment on a bigger scale. All along they succeeded in buying up and regulating out the competition, while everyone said they didn't understand the Internet. Which diverted investment to companies like Google, as well as the smart entrepreneurs. Now that they've consolidated American bandwidth into the bottlenecks that they monopolize, these old dinosaurs are moving in for the kill. If there's not enough competition to let Google and mom/pop choose an equitable Internet like the one we've built these last 10-20 years, we need to snap the neck of their new monopolies with legislation. There's no reason we have to let their loophole victories over past monopoly remedies and market corrections choke off the developments that have happened despite their vile presence in the landscape.
Re:Rotten companies lose eventually... (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean all the time our cable company and phone company take shots at each other in their TV ads. If a provider is dumb enough to do this, the rest will just eat them alive.
Re:They just never quit (Score:1, Insightful)
Same sentence?
The mob analogy fits for monopolies (Score:3, Insightful)
Within 100 miles of where I live, there are places where the ONLY high-speed, low-latency, affordable internet option is DSL. ALL DSL must go through the local phone company directly or indirectly.
In other words, the phone company has the "independent" DSL providers by the balls, which means they have you by the balls. If they get abusive a la the Mafia, you are stuck.
Unless of course you choose to go without high-speed internet at all. Even the Mafia would stop bothering small businessmen if they "chose" to close their businesses rather than pay the mob.
Re:They just never quit (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't complain to Congress, the SEC, the CUB, the UN. Just don't use the service.
If Bell is your only provider, you're to blame. Many States and cities made it a mess to compete, and the voters wanted it that way.
Nothing to see here. With competition, these things don't matter.
Re:Corporatism is the new Fascism (Score:4, Insightful)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
This is probably the most eloquant justification of antitrust law I have ever seen (despite the fact that I largely detest FDR for his shameless manipulation of the legal system).
But back on topic, this does sound to be shady in a large number of ways. I personally doubt it will fly any better than a pig.
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Insightful)
QoS, priorities and ToS have been known for more then a decade. The fact is, till recently they have been used mostly in third world and beyond where the bandwidth is scarce, fiber is unheard of and you have to use something like this to achieve a competitive edge. I have used it myself as far back as late nighties. Similarly, we had customer facing web based helldesk, customer facing link statistics, customer facing web ordering system for extras and specials etc as far back as late nineties.
None of these were widely used around the civilized world till recently because it was cheaper to invest in more hardware and bandwidth to achieve similar results.
This is no longer the case.
Very few if any new fiber is layed in the ground and the router CPUs/ASICs are finally catching up for the bandwidths used in telco land. Further to this, the players are few and largely evened up so they have no choice, but to look into network intelligence as means of gaining a competitive edge. Some have already rolled it out. Many laughed at the first ones like Level3 which at the time had a rather primitive QoS system with 4 queues and 4 types of traffic. Nobody is laughing any more and network policy devices are the most looked at item in labs trials for all new roll outs.
Our QoS overlords are coming and will here to stay.
And once you have provided a MaBell telcohead with the tool expecting them not to use it is rather silly. From there on it is only a matter of how much do they use it. If they overuse it they risk getting smacked by a threat to lose their common carrier status as well as a few anticompetitive investigations. How do they consider this risk is a different matter.
This is the total opposite of how it should be (Score:3, Insightful)
If the Internet was similar to the real world, all Internet Providers would be paying content producers money for the information the Internet Provider's customers use.
Unfortuately, with the Internet - it is opposite. Say you have a really good site and you gather quite a bit of traffic, unfortunately you pay your Internet provider by the megabytes of traffic your visitors use. A good slashdotting could bankrupt you - all because your providing good information.
If you want to listen to an excellent interview of how the Internet came to be how it is today, Nerd TV's interview with Brester Kahle (Internet Archive Founder) is definately worth a listen.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/player/?show=0
The boycott would be hilarious (Score:3, Insightful)
If a major ISP ever did this, I don't think it would take long for popular sites to start filtering for their IP space and redirecting to an informative page about the lousy ISP.
Picturing the bedlam in the call center is making me smile.
Re:Customers already extra (Score:2, Insightful)
So a Yahoo or Google shouldn't be allowed to pay extra to have their site load faster? Isn't that what they're doing everytime they add a new leased line, or improve the intelligence in their routing tables? The criticism of this plan just doesn't make any sense.
Look at this way: you own a highway. The highway can handle a certain amount of traffic. Some people, who need to get where they're going sooner, are willing to pay a premium to do so. So, you section off one lane from your four lane superhighway to be a toll lane. If someone wants to use that lane, they have to pay, and the more people who use it the more you charge. But if someone doesn't want to pay extra, they just use the three lanes left over.
Prioritizing traffic based on source or destination is done by ISPs and Websites all the time to help deliver content faster. Hell, there are companies out there who's sole purpose is to provide a specialized form of routing intelligence, to find the quickest route from your site to your visitor(s). And companies pay through the nose for that service. How is this any different?
I'm all for it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They just never quit (Score:5, Insightful)
This story reminds me of a funny dispute between CNN and the Amsterdam cable TV company:
Cable co. "We will start charging you for providing access to your viewers"
- CNN: "Well, actually you should really pay us, for providing content for your cable network"
Cable co: "Pay or we will remove CNN from our lineup"
- CNN: "Fine, we'll take our content elsewhere"
The cable TV model worked quite well: customers pay the cable company for physical access to various stations. These stations provide content for free, supported by ads, or at an extra charge to the customers. In this case, some idiot exec got greedy and tried to charge both sides of the network. Fortunately, neither side wasn't having any of that. CNN didn't play ball, and customers didn't exactly relish the idea of paying twice for content, and threatened to buy satellite dishes and ditch cable. After a few weeks, CNN was put back onto the network, for free.
This case is much the same. Over here, we have a choice of backbone networks and ISPs re-selling access to those backbones. Any ISP trying to pull a stunt like this will see their customers melt away. After all, people have gotten used to the idea of flat rate Internet access, in facr that's what ISPs used to lure people over to ADSL.
However, in cases were there is a monopoly of one or a few companies working together, they can and will get away with it.
Lets Take Back the Lines (Score:3, Insightful)
It would need to be clear that this is a critical national infrastructure and was critical that it be maintained and upgraded. There would be grants from an appropriate Federal agency to assist with this, much like they assist with highway and other projects today.
This would even the playing field between providers of all types and remove all of the conflicts of interest. Heck, while we are at it, lets take back the power lines too, let the government be responsible for distribution of power and let power companies actually compete on supply and service.
But the SEC.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They just never quit (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm real happy for you that you run ethical businesses. My wife and I, newly in business for ourselves, try to be as ethical as possible without putting ourselves in the poorhouse, but a few examples do not an axiom make, particularly when your idea of "Big Business" is Ben and fucking Jerrys.
If this is such a good idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Hello, Coca-Cola? Yeah, listen, I just wanted you to know that we just cut a new deal with Pepsi, that gives their phone calls priority on our systems. Yeah, it's an exclusive deal and all. Basically my engineers tell me that any call of yours routed through our systems will receive a 10% degredation in signal quality and experience approximately a 3 second delay in connection. I'm sure you understand, just the cost of doing business and all. If you're interested, perhaps I can tell you about our new Super Platinum plan, which would give your calls Level 2 High Priority, ensuring that....hello?"
Re:They just never quit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:out of context (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats just it, they're not bottlenecking this on the server side. They're threatening content providers by telling them that if they don't pay extra directly to them, then Bell South customers will have to wait longer for their content. You could operate off of 10 OC3s directly from 3 different Tier-1 companies, but if you don't pay up to Bell, their DSL customers will be wondering just where the hell you got that 28.8 modem from in this day and age.
Let 'em (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't be evil on consecutive days (Score:3, Insightful)
Try this:
A Most business' main goal is to maximize profit for its shareholders, [snip]
I think it is possible for profit to be the priority, and yet have ethics inform ones path to profits. If your code of business was taken to the extreme, then we'd see Steve Balmer literarily put hits on Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Think Moscow just after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
If a publicly held company states their commitment to ethics and what exactly those ethics are on it's prospectus, there really need not be a conflict.
Re:They just never quit (Score:5, Insightful)
Careful there. You might find yourself confused with the kettle, pot.
A Business' sole goal is to maximize profit for its shareholders, and nothing else.
False.
The goal that a business must keep as a top-level goal is to maximize shareholder value. This is not the same as "this quarter's profit" or even "profit" over any time frame (though they eventually become related).
Further, many companies interpret "shareholder value" as stock value over the long-term, which is often at odds with actions that would increase stock value in the short-term.
As a conclusive counter-example, check out Johnson & Johnson's credo [jnj.com]. Shareholder value is fourth on that list and it's been below other goals for the past 60 years.
Regards,
Ross
Re:They just never quit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They just never quit (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps, but then again I wish Bellsouth were more competent with their basic telephone service before they start mucking about with something as complex as this.
Let's not forget that the telcos haven't exactly been leading the charge on the technology fronts for quite some time. In fact, about the only time I hear of any "innovative" ideas from a telco, it usually involves a) discovering creative new ways to over-inflate a basic service bill, or b) screwing over customers that are early adopters of a technology the telcos happen to hate.
Re:They just never quit (Score:5, Insightful)
So, my last roommate moved out. The phone was in his name. BellSouth (BS) wants $40 to get it in my name. So I say fine, disconnect it, I'm going to VoIP. VoIP doesn't work well with the cable internet due to latency issues. BS is running ad campaigns here about $25/mo. DSL service. So I call them from work to order it. The Customer Rep. wants to know the phone #. I say I don't have one. I go round and round about the advertisement. I cannot get DSL without first getting POTS. I don't want POTS. Customer Rep: doesn't compute, must have POTS. The house is wired, it is within DSL range, but BS will not hook up DSL without POTS. The rep says that I can get POTS from another provider, and then get DSL. All other POTS providers cost more. Solution: Landlord, who lives below me, is willing to let me get my DLS thru her. She pays for POTS, I pay for DSL and share with her.
My main compaint is that BS runs deceptive ads (there is fine print, but I cannot read it quickly enough) and doesn't spell out in clear language to the customer reps that the customer cannot get DSL without POTS.
I believe that in Georgia, you can get "naked" DSL due to a state law that forces BS to unbundle. They are headquarted in Georgia. Don't they understand that what customers want in Georgia might be the same thing that customers in Alabama might also want? Do I have to get a politician to pass a law for me to get unbundled DSL?
The short answer: the cable company and the phone companies both suck when it comes to internet service. They both have big cash cows that are not directly related to internet service other than the fact that they have infrastructure to your house which can be used to provide broadband.
Re:Let's not be too worried.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They just never quit (Score:3, Insightful)
And yet, when it comes to cleaning up their mess in India (they bought Union Carbide), they certainly have NOT lived by that credo. In fact, quite the opposite- they managed that crises specifically to minimize shareholder cost.
Re:Don't be evil on consecutive days (Score:2, Insightful)
That is incorrect. The parent is right, Maximise profit for its shareholders is the definition of a business. What you missed is that there is a corollary to it: by any means you can get away with.
That is because there is this thing in which the businesses operate called "the society" which has its own rules of conduct. Businesses are amoral by nature. Profit is their only god. All other "ethical" and "moral" considerations are imposed on them externally.
If your code of business was taken to the extreme, then we'd see Steve Balmer literarily put hits on Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Think Moscow just after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
If Balmer thought he could get away with it (that is if the US experiences thought him it was possible, and his pals were doing the same) he would have done it without a second thought.
Re:They just never quit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Go ahead, be liable for it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They just never quit (Score:3, Insightful)
Or this is similar to giving large media corps an advantage over P2P (and other independant) traffic. Hollywood will probably love BellSouth for this.
Someone should spell it out:
If a server has paid for a certain upstream bandwidth, then end-user ISPs need to ferry that data as quickly as possible. The more ISP customers demand from that originating site, the more traffic that ISP needs to ferry from that site to its customers. Simple as that. And that's the way it is now. Putting artificial restrictions on the receiving end just means the serving site has to pay a whole range of ISPs in addition to their own!
Imagine if Sprint demanded payment from every end-user that a Sprint customer called.
Someone wants to get paid TWICE to traffic a data packet.