Senate Bill To Prohibit Extra Charges For Internet

xoip writes "A report in the The New York Times states that 'Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, will introduce new legislation today that would prohibit Internet network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content to consumers or favoring some content providers over others.'"

Say goodbye to QoS on the Internet

[cfulmer]

TCP/IP has a native capacity to distinguish between different types of traffic so network routers can treat different packets differently. This is a good thing -- some applications are much more real-time intensive than other applications.

Unfortunately, the Quality of Service flags are generally ignored on the public Internet. The reason why isn't particularly hard to discern: there's no way to agree on what should have priority and what shouldn't. If everybody used it in the current environment, then every content provider would flag its own traffic as being high-priority. And, as a result, nothing would be high priority since it's a relative concept.

Money is the way to separate the wheat from the chaff: if your content actually depends on a high QoS, then you should pay for that. If your content doesn't, then there's no reason to.

Re:Fantastic!

[conJunk]

i'm not usually an 'email-your-congress-critter' sort, but your pleas were heard. here's the text of the emails i sent to my (CA) senators:

Hi. I'm writing about Sen. Ron Wyden's Internet Non-Discrimination Act, which I've read is expected to be introduced today. I support this measure in the strongest possible terms. Prohibiting service providers from engaging in pay-to-play shemes with content providers is the only sensible course. Computer technology has at its core an idealized notion of equality and accessibility, and allowing companies to add increased charges for the deliver of certain content is not only anti competitive, but locks many users out of equal use of the internet. If pay-to-play schemes like those Sen. Wyden's bill aims to prohibit had been in place in 2000, the internet certainly would not be where it is today, and companies like Amazon and Google, which are now household names, may have never been able to get off the ground.

Re:It's a shame

[zxnos]

A corporation is a legal construct with the rights of a person and none of the morality, a construct whose sole purpose is to make money.

eh? my wife has a corporation and i have a corporation so we can safely run our home businesses. the idea behind it, the sole reason in my eyes, is that should i get sued for some reason i dont lose my car, house, watch, cat, dog, retirement savings, etc. and people will sue for anything. ever heard of the 'shotgun approach'? if it wasnt for people suing for the smallest things we might not need such a construct.

the problem is morally bankrupt people. capitalism, socialism, communism all fail becuase of bad people.

mod parent up please!!!!!

[porkThreeWays]

Everyone, please understand how extremely easy it is to contact your senator to voice your opinion regarding this. http://www.senate.gov/ [senate.gov]

In the upper right hand corner is a "Senator search". Click the state you live in and your two senators websites will be listed. Most (if not all) of the senators are available via email. Voice your opinion in a calm professional manner.

Too many people sit back and watch democracy happen around them. If every single person who read this story voiced their opinion about it to their senator (whether they agree or disagree), there would be tens of thousands of emails (as oppossed to maybe a couple hundred).

It's just to easy to voice your opinion to your senator these days. You would be throwing away a huge opportunity if you didn't.

Re:It's a shame

[ObiWanKenblowme]

Except you didn't read the contract you signed with your pipeline, which probably had a clause in it that said what they were really agreeing to was up to 600 gallons/hour of water in and up to 75/hour out...at least that's how the cable companies do it with their broadband subscriptions, so you or I can't sue them because we couldn't hit the max advertised download speed during peak time. I'm not saying this is a "good" practice, just that your metaphor is a bit flawed.

Re:Ah, Somalia

[Valdrax]

Telecommunication is the one of the only industries to profit significantly due to the ability of wireless providers to establish locally protected towers that don't need lots of unprotected infrastructure (i.e. wires) to communicate between them. Power is also generated locally for the towers due to the lack of ability to create an infrastructure for power transmission.

The money exchange system that you're talking of is hawala, the same system that has been under severe scrutiny for its use by terrorists due to its complete lack of accountability and traceability. It also typically charges a 4-5% transaction fee for transfers. That's good bit more than my bank charges, by the way. As for the markets, well as long as Mogadishu has access to goods, I guess the rest of the country doesn't matter much, huh?

You choose to focus on the success stories where obviously a free market does work well. Congratulations! I haven't argued that government intervention always produces the best result, which is the typical black-and-white straw man argument that free market fundies and other minarchists love to believe that those of us who are not "one of the body" fervently believe.

By only focusing on the successes, you miss out on the lack of a water infrastructure and of sewage treatment. You miss out on the thuggery and rule of violence both on checkpoints on the roads (where only those who can afford bodyguards can pass unmolested by khat-chewing thugs) and on the high seas (where piracy and kidnapping is rampant). You miss out on the toxic waste being dumped off-shore. You miss out on the looting and destruction of their industry to be sold off as scrap metal. You miss out on the fact that only 15% of Somalia's kids go to school as compared to over 75% back when they were under the cruel hand of a dictator.

You miss out on the fact that the vast majority of Somalis cannot afford the $3 for a clinic visit under the country's completely private healthcare system. This is one of many reasons that the life expetancy there is only 48 years, ranking it 203 out 225 nations. This isn't aided by the lack of a sustainable agricultural system that is wholly dependent on each year's rainfall.

A few successes in a pure lawless state are praiseworthy, but they do not mean that failures have not occured or that the people are better off without laws.