Hardware Firms Go Against Crowd on Net Neutrality 292
An anonymous reader writes "Some of the largest hardware firms in the world, like Cisco and 3M, have sent a letter to U.S. policymakers asking them not to be too hasty on mandated net neutrality laws." From the News.com article: "'It is premature to attempt to enact some sort of network neutrality principles into law now,' says the letter, which was signed by 34 companies and sent to House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. 'Legislating in the absence of real understanding of the issue risks both solving the wrong problem and hobbling the rapidly developing new technologies and business models of the Internet with rigid, potentially stultifying rules.'"
well, what would you write... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:WHATS NET NEUTRALITY (Score:2, Informative)
Re:WHATS NET NEUTRALITY (Score:5, Informative)
The two basic arguments are:
net neutraility laws good) Here the thinking and the reason they want net neutrality laws, is that large ISP and the companies that own the trunks and large communication segments would charge companies extra money to carry thier traffic. So for instance your ISP may require Google, since they are the big named one, to pay the ISP a certain amount per year in order that you as the customer can use Google at the same speed you could reach some unknown search engine. Google does not pay and you as the customer get a slow connection on your ISP equipment to the Google servers.
net neutraility laws are bad) It removes the abaility of companies to provide quaility of service packages. So if your ISP wanted to provide an extra service where packets that are marked as comeing from a gaming server would be given higher priority then other packets. With net neutrality laws that would be forbidden.
Re:WHATS NET NEUTRALITY (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:5, Informative)
I read three tomes by Robert A. Caro on Lyndon Johnson. At some point in time electricity company was forced to sell electricity at a lower rate, which the company strongly opposed to. The government won, and later the company had to admit that they made much more profit. This story is not to demonstrate that government always knows best, but to demonstrate that free market also doesn't always know best. Your popular belief is as wrong as the opposite. The only valid point is, look at each issue individually.
Other points not discussed in your contribution: Inertia from consumers to change provider (with all the concommitant hassle, especially now you can't take your e-mail address with you).
Another casse in point: Here in the Netherlands we have to pay for all kinds of banking services, each with their own rates. Only boring IT guys got happy because of this. I think it is completely in line with current behaviour of companies to start inventing all different kinds of things to charge for. xyz packets will be more expensive than pqr packets. You see the same thing (at least over here) with Internet over your phone. One pays megabucks per megabyte. SMS the same thing. Compared to the number of bytes required for voice it is nothing, but they are charged at a premium.
There is also the contagious nature of the behaviour. If one provider does it, and charges another provider, then the other provider has to pass on the cost, and will start doing the same. And on it goes.
I'm perfectly happy with laws that require ISPs to pass thru any packet irrespective of its type.
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of this discussion ignores how transport really works in the Internet. Having dealt with backbone issues since 1993 (ack! that's like... 200 dog years or something), let me share some perspective (apologies for length and anonymous - have a slashdot stalker/former employee who's off his meds to contend with):
How transport works
Contrary to a constant misnomer, there is not "a" backbone. There are numerous private networks operated by companies at various lower levels of the OSI model. Some own their own fiber and cable, while others lease IRUs (irrevokable right of use) - sort of like having a 15-year lease on a condo. Some have used the model Bob Collet (original senior executive of Sprintlink and CIX board chairman) was believed to have coined of "tier 1/2/3" providers. In this model, a tier 1 provider is sufficiently geographically diverse and connects to others via multilateral and more commonly (these days) bilateral connections to other tier ones. Traffic traveling between tier 1 networks is usually handled without settlement if there is not significant disparity between networks. Settlement is a nice word for fee, incidentally. Tier 2 networks are those that predominantly connect to tier 1s for their transport, and they pay the tier 1 for it. Tier 3 in the model connect to tier 2 for their transport and also pay.
Google transport
Google buys transport from several tier 1 networks. These networks have agreements with other networks to exchange traffic with each other, each bearing their own cost to get to the place where they meet up. These networks also have lots of tier 2 and 3 customers who pay them money for access since these 2 and 3 tier networks cannot afford the cost of an international high-capacity backbone which is pretty much the requirement before someone will enter into a bilateral (I'm horribly oversimplifying). Google has paid for its transport and probably has service level guarantees of traffic performance through the tier 1 networks it pays. Some DSL outfit like Verizon may buy transport from another tier 1 provider who connects to Google's tier 1 providers. If Verizon's access to Google sucks, it should get a better tier 1 or pay for its own circuits directly to Google. Seeking to charge Google for that transport is bizarre and not how things work - sort of like making rivers run backwards (which usually requires an act of Congress).
Eyeballs vs. Content
This "Google must pay Verizon for access to their eyeballs" issue isn't new. It's been fought since some first saw it rise in 1995-1996 when some NSF-connected tier ones decided to mess with PRDB (policy-routed database) routes and limit access to NSF nodes (as the NSFNET was operated by ANS under NSF contract - separate and lengthy discussion). NSF was the content of the day and a few, such as the BBN NSF regional acquisitions (e.g. NEARNET and other nonprofit networks which were acquired by the for-profit BBN and instantly pushed into a network access battles) decided to try to limit access in order to extract more fees.
BBN got hammered then, and again learned the hard way with the whole Exodus and Genuity battles. Again, one party which was mostly consumer customer oriented decided to charge the producers of content for access to those consumer eyeballs. The result was similar to the response your local cable TV outfit would get by threatening HBO that it would be dropped or relegated to one channel if it didn't pay the cable company fees for access to their eyeballs. HBO knows consumers will just switch to Dish or DirecTV. BBN learned when numerous commercial clients dropped their T1s and switched to a network that wasn't inferior in its access.
Bandwidth Hogs and QoS?
There is a real issue here, but it isn't what the consumer broadband providers are telling you. DSL and Cable Internet have numerous QoS issues, are mostly obsolete standards incapable of provid
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:4, Informative)
For example, I pay Cox Communications each month and in return I get unlimited access to the web (well, as unlimited as my bandwidth allows). What your proposing (rather, what I'm going to pull from your comment) is that it won't be the well established companies that pioneer this method, they have too much at stake if they're the only one adopting this. It will have to be some start-up that tries to make it's way in to the market by offering low-cost high-speed internet. Now, you've got this ISP throttling some sites, and making others faster, how does this benefit the user? If I wanted to pay $9.95 a month for dog-slow internet, I'd still be using (for example) NetZero. Now what good is it to me the consumer if the only sites I can access at a decent broadband speed are "Microsoft.com" or "CNN.com", absolutely none.
Now perhaps there is a small sub-section of the general populace that would adopt this, but I think that in the end any company trying to use these tactics of moving the cost of service off of their customers on to the "content providers" will quickly realise, it ain't happening.
To coin a phrase "It just don't make sense." Also another major downfall these companies would have to look out for is just being "kicked off" the net by the major back-bone holders.
I dunno, I just see this as being more US-centric FUD, ooh the big bad companies are out to make money by "extorting" the "good guys", it's already being done, and I'm the one being extorted. Wake me up when I've got fiber to my house, a dedicated range of IPv6 addresses for every computer in my home and bandwidth that would make a script-kiddie nut himself all for less than $50 a month.
Re:Other preferential treatment (Score:3, Informative)
Well, sure, that's the surface idea, in the sense that to get packets delivered at all (this is painted as "with higher priority", but since packets don't live forever, in practice this will become universal), you'll not only have to pay your direct ISP for the bandwidth, but pay every network provider over whose network your packets will travel for an additional toll for carrying your packets. Never mind how the cost of that is already built into your ISP's bandwidth charge, since interconnections are already covered by contracts which are paid for either in dollars or in-kind with agreements of "I'll take your packets, and you'll take mine."
Telcos could just raise their charges, or eliminate peering and charge bandwidth fees on interconnection, and drive these costs directly and simply down to the ISP charges where, if anywhere, they belong. The reason they aren't doing this is that this isn't really about charging for bandwidth, which they are already getting paid for. This is about establishing that a network carrier that is remote from, e.g., Google can charge a prohibitive toll to carry Google's packets across its network, thus allowing it to effectively shut-off Google from providing services that would compete with content services that that network carrier wants to provide itself. The immediate targets, from the comments the telcos have already made, are major portals (Google particularly), streaming video entertainment, and VoIP (the reason the latter is targetted is most clear -- it competes with the telcos telephone business; the others are targetted because those are markets the telcos want to get into themselves to set themselves up as content gatekeepers and to compete with the cable companies in the lucrative video-on-demand market.)
Destroying net neutrality is an attempt to leverage the telcos power over the last mile (often a regional monopoly, though the regions are growing with telco mergers) and the network backbone into the power to squelch competition by fiat in every field relying on the network.
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:4, Informative)
Re:is it just me... (Score:4, Informative)
You're talking about paying more to get a faster connection. The proposal is to give you a fast connection, and then artificially throttle when you connect to certain web sites, as a way of extorting money from those sites.
Re:Hrmm... a POSSIBLE link between the two... (Score:4, Informative)
Hrmm, let's see here. Telecom providers want to charge for best access to their pipes. Telecom providers buy LOTS OF NETWORK HARDWARE. Suddenly, hardware providers agree with them! I am shocked, SHOCKED to find them in bed together!! SHOCKED!
You've hit the nail on the head here. Cisco and the gang have been trying to sell people on the new management and Quality of Service features for years. They can make a pile of cash selling ISPs the gear they need to know what traffic is coming from and going to a given location, what QoS that "customer" has paid them, and guaranteeing that the level is enforced. In fact, I work at a company that has tools that let them do that (among many other things) right now. I have stock options and profit sharing and stand to make a pretty penny myself if ISPs are not held to the same standard as other common carriers. I'm more than willing to not make that profit in exchange for things being done properly. Cisco and many others smell green. I've heard more than one network gear operator use the metaphor of the arms dealer. Arms dealers are in favor of more lax UN restrictions of arms buildup and invasion of neighboring dictatorships? Gee what a surprise.
FYI (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Self interest directed this move. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:3, Informative)
Ummm, it doesn't? That's the entire net neutrality point. Absent these safeguards companies like SBC have incentive to offer Google and Yahoo special deals: say, whoever pays us more gets 50% more traffic than your competitor. As long as they're careful, the slowdown will be relatively minor. Your average consumer is completely incapable of determining why Google is a bit slower than Yahoo; maybe Google is overloaded. Maybe your ISP is throttling you.
The claims that some sites will be totally blocked off are implausible; if Google stopped working an ISPs customers would be furious. But a slight throttling of a non-compliant site's bandwidth would work just fine.
This isn't about saving the consumer money. Broadband rates are pretty reasonable already. This is about a new source of revenue for ISPs. This is about figuring out how to charge twice for service. I pay my cable company for my broadband. Google pays for its network pipes. My cable company shouldn't be asking Google for more money.
This isn't hypothetical worrying. The CEO of SBC wants to charge both you and the content provider. [businessweek.com] The CTO of BellSouth wants the same thing. [marketwatch.com] They're both essentially claiming that because I run a web site that their customers visit, I'm somehow "stealing" from them, completely ignoring that their customers already paid them so they can get access to my site.
QoS != net neutrality (Score:4, Informative)
QoS was designed into the protocol stack to allow a network provider to provide priority routing for realtime types of service over non-realtime types of service in the presence of contention for limited bandwidth. The idea is that basic services such as HTTP, FTP, and other non-realtime types of service are useful even when the link is temporarily slow, so they use a low priority. Types of services like VoIP or streaming video become completely useless below a certain bandwidth threshold, so they use a higher priority. Overall, the priority is set based on whether the given type of service is useful in the presence of low bandwidth.
It is also worth pointing out that tradionally, QoS only comes into play when there was more traffic passing through a router than the router could handle in a given instant.
The QoS protocols were never intended to discriminate based on network endpoints. If EntityX and EntityY provided the same type of service, QoS was not intended to be used to give EntityX an artificial boost over EntityY.
So keep in mind when thinking about Net Neutrality that you are discussing a whole level of issues over top of traditional QoS. In its basic form, shaping traffic based on protocol types, QoS causes no harm. Only when traffic shaping is done based on endpoints does the topic stop being QoS and start being Net Neutrality. Most likely, the traffic shaping you are referring to in your post prioritizes based on protocol types and applies those prioritization rules regardless of endpoint; therefore you are talking about QoS, not Net Neutrality.
A completely separate issue you bring up that bears consideration is the idea of what constitutes an ISP. Many organizations allow their employees to use the Internet, nominally pursuant to organizational goals. I doubt any one would object to such organizations applying whatever limits on use they want. On the other hand, commercial ISPs exist to sell Internet access to people, and should not apply traffic shaping policies, especially when only a small number of ISPs are available in a given market.
University Internet connections pose the most complex problem, but ultimately they too break down to simple categories. Within the context of administrative offices, labs, and classrooms, the university is clearly like any other organization and within its rights to limit Internet connections. However, many universities also share one Internet connection between offices/labs/classrooms and residence halls. Often, the students living in residence halls are required to pay some fee for the Internet connection (often rolled up into the costs of the dorm) and are prohibited from using an external ISP. In this context, universities clearly act as ISPs and should have the same obligations as ISPs. I am hoping that one of the outcomes of this issue is that universities are forced to differentiate their policies between office/lab/classroom and residence Internet connection, or give resident students a choice in ISP.