U.S. House Rejects Net Neutrality 598
tygerstripes writes "A recent vote in the U.S. House of Representatives has led to a rejection of the principle of Net Neutrality from the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (Cope Act), in spite of massive lobbying from prominent businesses. According to the BBC, the bill '...aims to make it easier for telecoms firms to offer video services around America by replacing 30,000 local franchise boards with a national system overseen by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'. However, according to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, 'telecommunications and cable companies will be able to create toll lanes on the information superhighway... This strikes at the heart of the free and equal nature of the internet.'"
How Peculiar (Score:4, Insightful)
In it's raw form, the internet is a communications device. You section it off--and you're going to piss people off. The more people you piss off, the more hackers you'll spawn. I for one hope that these "toll" lanes are violated right off the bat by the best and brightest of the Ukraine & Russia.
don't get Congress involved please! (Score:5, Insightful)
1)bandwidth is already plentiful; we're talking about hypothetical harms here. (For the record, I actually downgraded my broadband a few months ago, with absolutely no complaints).
2)companies already pay for ISP's and webhosting; tiered service is not anything new. Anyway, webhosting costs have been decreasing in price. I find it highly unlikely that this downward trend won't continue across the board.
3)The thing I find strange is that if anything, tiered pricing, by passing on costs to distributors, could ultimately benefit consumers by lowering subscription costs. Tiered pricing could increase flexibility. I really am not sure. But that should be for private industry to decide. Even if legislators were relatively well-informed and up-to-date, the pace of technology change tends to outstrip that of legislative oversight; this legislation will probably be obsolete on the day it is passed.
4)So what if SBC decides to implement a tiered system of bandwidth! Consumers just stop renewing their contracts if they hate it enough. That's much better than making courts and legislators do a lot of hairsplitting about what legislative intent was/should be.
5)I worry less about tiered service than I do about ISPs blocking p2p traffic. Then again, I see no need to enact legislation merely to keep certain ports open.
6)as an independent content producer (and soon a distributor), I want the Net environment to be as unregulated as possible (even from laws that purport to ensure acess). If some ISPs are going to charge for tiered service, either they better offer substantial benefits to customers or people will abandon them in droves.
7)what concerns me more is restrictive Terms of Service and EULAs. If ISPs offer twice the bandwidth for half the cost, that is great. But if the saving comes with all sorts of extra provisions on TOS, then the battle has been lost.
8)There is a certain arrogance to the notion that consumers can't be trusted to act in their self-interest but require government's "help" to be protected.
9)I think the harm being addressed here is that consumers and businesses need more alternatives for obtaining net access. They shouldn't be in a market where they only have one ISP to choose from. To use myself as an example, the only way I can obtain DSL access in my apartment complex is by getting SBC phone service first. SBC could double the prices of a landline, and I'd have no choice but to swallow it. Then again, I could easily switch to a wireless phone carrier that includes wireless Net service. Or if worse comes to worse, I could obtain satellite. But government regulation would introduce an element of uncertainty and legal wrangling that could deter the offering of new services. For the record, I had a legal dispute with SBC, so I ended up going with a local company for DSL (although I still had to pay for a landline). It's still possible even in the day of semi-monopolies to withhold support from the incumbent ISP.
Public vs. private infrastructure (Score:4, Insightful)
I assume we're talking here about ISPs discriminating in favour of their own paid subscription services, as opposed to the backbone operators doing the same. Now the ISP's infrastructure is private, and there seems to be a competition among ISPs. Will they all practice packet discrimination? I doubt it.
You can say that this breaks the "spirit of the internet", but some packet discrimination is essential when routers have to choose which packets to forward first, especially when some traffic should be low-latency, other high-bandwidth, other low-priority. I agree that the best solution is for the end-users to pay for their traffic, not the solution provider, but again -- it's the ISP's infrastructure and they can choose their own business model.
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet has reached the point where it is, essentially, as much of a necessity of modern Western society as the telephone. Therefore, if EVERY telco implements a tiered bandwidth system, there won't be anyone to turn to after they cancel the contract...leaving the consumer high-and-dry without an ISP.
I wouldn't have any problems with a tiered bandwidth system if I didn't think it would be abused by the telecom corporations. However, the purpose of a business is to make money--no more, no less. I don't think they can be trusted to maintain a free and open communications medium such as the 'Net.
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:2, Insightful)
Silly people! (Score:3, Insightful)
No people, the Federal Communications Commission exists to censor those communications from swearwords and nudity, which is obviously a much more important thing for government to be doing.
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:3, Insightful)
I would replace "already" with "currently". And YOU downgraded your broadband, would you still have no complaints if your were downgraded by your ISP?
2)companies already pay for ISP's and webhosting; tiered service is not anything new. Anyway, webhosting costs have been decreasing in price. I find it highly unlikely that this downward trend won't continue across the board.
It would be likely that the price would continue to fall - unless some kind of artificial system were put into place so that the telecoms could start increasing the price for "extranet-access" and a "media connection". Currently, you host a website, someone in Japan can browse to it. "media connection" is just called "bandwidth" currently.
4)So what if SBC decides to implement a tiered system of bandwidth! Consumers just stop renewing their contracts if they hate it enough. That's much better than making courts and legislators do a lot of hairsplitting about what legislative intent was/should be.
Just like if people hate spam so much they would just stop opening it. Sorry, not a great example. But you do realise that for many there is little other choice than SBC. Additionally, if I decide to go with another DSL provider they will still have to traverse SBC's network - and without nuetrality SBC can charge that ISP what they wish for access to "their" section of the internet
5)I worry less about tiered service than I do about ISPs blocking p2p traffic. Then again, I see no need to enact legislation merely to keep certain ports open. Tiered service and blocking types of traffic are essentially the same thing - except tiered services is much more a hammer than a chisel. How can you less worried about the superset problem?
6)as an independent content producer (and soon a distributor), I want the Net environment to be as unregulated as possible (even from laws that purport to ensure acess). If some ISPs are going to charge for tiered service, either they better offer substantial benefits to customers or people will abandon them in droves.
Microsoft:"as an independent software producer, I want trade to be as unregulated as possible (even from laws that purport free trade)."
A little regulation is neccessary sometimes - I don't like the idea, I think we have too many laws as is. But bandwidth is gold. The internet only operates as it currently does because of neutrality. Remember the internet.
encrypt everything (Score:3, Insightful)
Then they wouldn't have any way to know how to filter it would they?
Maybe by port number.....but they wouldn't be able to parse packets for "google" and slow those down.
My TCP/IP knowledge is rusty...but maybe you can't encrypt the destination port.......yet.
As for this:
It's utter bullshit. The ISPs won't lower the bills the end users, they'll just pocket the profits from prioritizing provider content.
Look for a technological workaround to this problem soon.
I thought all /.ers were libertarians... (Score:4, Insightful)
"The regulatory regime envisioned by Net neutrality mandates would also open the door to a great deal of potential "gaming" of the regulatory system and allow firms to use the regulatory system to hobble competitors. Worse yet, it would encourage more FCC regulation of the Internet and broadband markets in general."
Is it just me, or are a lot of people asking the government to regulate our businesses?
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Yes, they pay for their bandwidth and hosting (if they do not host on their own, and most smart and big companies do) from the ISP they get their services through. We are talking about double, triple, quadruple billing companies just so they can have guaranteed access to customers.
3) You are joking right? If you transfer the cost to the content providers, you will be lucky to see any cost drops in user services. Why? Because most telecoms are already having trouble with old business models. They will continue to charge current rates, which honestly may be reaching their minimums sooner rather then later. It will actually probably mean in increase in services we currently pay for online too. If the content providers are paying the ISPs extra money, they will need more money to cover their cost and this ultimately comes from the consumers.
4) Yes, because so many people ISP hop. You know that the reason many people never switch services is because of e-mail addresses? It is similar to the reason people would never leave cell phone companies until after the government said you have to allow people to take their numbers with them. Once this happened, people began becoming cell phone company hoppers and the wars for customers began anew, because now people can change at the end of their contract and have nothing to hold them there.
5) If service providers create a tiered system, where they decide who and what gets the traffic, then your P2P will be shot to hell. Most cable companies will start finding ways to block or increase the cost for VoIP providers to their customers. Remember, most these companies are owned by larger corporations with a variety of interests that conflict with consumer interests. A tiered internet is basically going to turn into a bidding war for what content providers can pay the ISPs the most money. It will kill the concept of a free internet by giving the people with money a means to ensure they are the most accessible and usable sites.
6) I hate government regulation, but before this bill amendment there were regulations in place that helped to ensure this would stay free. I really have a hard time seeing how the concept of net neutrality is ever a bad thing, but I welcome someone to give me an example.
7) What extra bandwidth? What half the cost? Has anyone but a telecom said they will offer you more bandwidth with lower costs if they can spread the charges around? I really do not believe most of what Verizon, AT&T or any of the other companies tell me. Besides, your ToS and EULA are probably already much more restrictive then you realize...including the ability to shut off your connection for abusing the bandwidth, hosting a server (in many contracts for home users), or for using P2P networking, even if you are not breaking the bandwidth abuse.
8) No. The problem is they do not trust the telecoms to self-regulate. Seriously, the telecom industry has to be one of the most untrusted industries, right up there with the oil companies. We have a group that charges mysterious fees (look at your phone bill) and has no real competition. VoIP is hardly competition, since it has its own array of problems and deficiencies.
9) This problem boils down to a lack of competition in most areas. In some cases, the monopolies over the phone lines are locally approved, while in other cases it is just a lack of companies willing to setup their own userbase for DSL services. This could also relate to a name recognition problem. I mean it is sort of hard to compete against Telecos and cable companies for recognition...I mean in some areas t
Re:What's to stop them from downthrottling too? (Score:5, Insightful)
Switch ISPs to who!? As the bill notes, most US citizens, if they can get broadband at all, are limited to one or two choices... either the local cable monopoly or the local telephone monopoly. We already know AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast were heavily in favor of a tiered Internet, so if your telephone is provided by AT&T and Verizon and your cable by Comcast you are shit out of luck. Welcome your new broadband overlords and prepare to only browse their Premium Content Providers at more than 20KB/sec. If you're lucky enough to have Covad in your CO then you have some more choices for now like Speakeasy, but it's not clear whether they will be able to continue to resell those last mile circuits anymore. Also, say goodbye to Vonage as well. I was debating whether to get a traditional telephone line from AT&T when I move or switch to VOIP with Vonage, but this decision cements my choice back to the traditional POTS line. Vonage will be pushed out of business within 2 years by QoS issues.
It's simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
THAT'S WHAT I'M PAYING THEM FOR!
I'd rather go back to dial-up than watch them extort content providers.
Not a solution (Score:5, Insightful)
How would that make any difference? At some point, those packets are likely to ride over one of the big telco's backbones. At that point it will be subject to QOS.
Using the smaller ISP does not avoid the issue...
Re:Public vs. private infrastructure (Score:2, Insightful)
At another thread someone has claimed that the situation is a near-monopoly (only one or two broadband providers in each area). In that case there's certainly a need for government regulation to prevent a monopoly extracting rents for the use of their infrastructure. Perhaps because I'm a city person I thought there was more competition. Probably rural areas will be harder-hit.
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:5, Insightful)
My dad and step-mother live in a small town 120 miles from the nearest large metropolitan area in BellSouth territory. Here are there choices for high speed internet:
The local cable company
There is no 2nd choice. His 2nd choice is dialup. So suppose the cable company decideds to implement tiered bandwidth and my dad doesn't like it. He has no choice because going back to dialup is not a choice.
I suspect that a rather large number of Americans are in exactly the same position as my father. They have one choice for high speed internet where they live, so going with someone else isn't an option.
Here We Go Again... (Score:2, Insightful)
Or on the other hand, how long before US ISPs start making phone calls to non-US content providers? I can see just how that'd play out.
Verizon : Hey BBC, your good friends at Verizon are supplying 30 million customers with your content. BBC
Scary stuff. I've argued against a tiered internet before, because 'the public' will always go where they can get their information the quickest. Note I said quickest, *not* the most factually correct. Big Brother doesn't need to watch you if Big Brother can control your information before it even reaches you.
Re:How Peculiar (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, google pays the telcoms a huge amount of money every month for the bandwidth it uses. The people who use google pay the telcoms for their internet service.
Now you say google should have to pay again for something they already pay for
How many times does it have to be paid?
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:4, Insightful)
The only chance we have of this not destroying the Internet as we know it is to keep it from happening in the first place.
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:1, Insightful)
(b) You appear to think that anything that might potentially benefit "consumers" is good for everyone. All I can say to that is a big fuck you. You may be happy slouching on your couch as a passive "consumer", wasting your life like a cow in a field. Some of us are producers as well as consumers. And if ISPs are allowed to choose which producers their consumers will get to see, then creativity will be stifled: the net will become like TV. How much content do you see on TV that was not produced by a big media company? Yeah, that's kind of my point. Today, the net allows small producers to compete with big producers on an equal footing. I can record a song and put it online, and you can download it as easily as anything you get from iTunes. Without neutrality, that would not be the case: your ISP would extort money from Apple to allow you access to iTunes, and would block me altogether.
If that's the world you want to live in, kindly fuck off to China or somewhere where the population thinks censorship is good, and leave America for the real Americans, the creative, experimenting pioneers who have made it the great country it is today.
Re:Not a solution (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's important to differentiate between protocol based prioritisation and toll based prioritisation.
The ISP I use does traffic prioritisation based on protocol. This is a Good Thing and should be encouraged - it means that RTP traffic, for example, gets higher priority than BitTorrent. This is great since RTP gets pretty unusable more than a few hundred milliseconds of latency jitter, but BitTorrent won't care. (Yes, I'm aware that many people complain that they want to be able to shift enough BitTorrent traffic over their 15ukp DSL connection to destroy the usability of everyone else's connections).
On the other hand, I'm paying for the internet connection so prioritising traffic based on whether the remote party are paying protection money to my ISP is a very Bad Thing - I already paid for the connection, the remote party already paid for theirs, why the hell should my ISP be demanding more cash from them and penalising me if they don't pay?
Of course, protocol based QoS is fraught with problems because you can't trust the end user to set the ToS flags correctly so you have to identify the protocol by fingerprinting instead. It's not an easy problem to solve, but it's very worthwhile.
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the crucial part. Yeah if there were plenty of competitors and plenty of parallel alternative routes owned by different people to get from point A to point B on the internet, we wouldn't have anything to worry about as competition would take care of the problem.
However, is this ever going to happen? Is this even cost effective? I mean, duplicating the net infrastructure in order to ensure a minimum level of competition would cost _billions_. Sometimes, because of these kinds of cost, it's better to have a single semi-monopolistic infrastructure that is well regulated and neutral and that acts as a kind of common good. This reduces the costs of having the competition.
Sometimes market competition just isn't effective. Consider the roads and the highways. Would we save money by privatising the road system and ensuring that there are competing alternatives to go everywhere? The cost for the redundant infrastructure would be phenomenaly high.
I'm not saying that neutrality is a great solution, just that it's the best we have. I'm all for the invisible hand wherever the free market can work, I'm just not sure this is a place where it can.
Re:How Peculiar (Score:2, Insightful)
ISPs get their money for letting people access the net. Those people are paying because the net obviously offers content they want. Now the ISPs want to charge not only their users but also those people who offer the content the users are paying for.
Imagine UPS charging your customers for receiving the packages you paid them to deliver.
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:5, Insightful)
If this was universally true, then paying extra to have your traffic prioritized would make no sense -- on a non-full network all packets arrive in a timely manner. The fact that Telecom considers selling this, and thinks they'll get buyers, tells me that either you're wrong. Or they're considering purposefully delaying "non-prioritized" traffic. It's a simple matter to configure a router so that f.ex. voIP is only usable with high priority. This represents a step backwards from todays situation. Furthermore, earning money from selling "high priority" gives them an incentive to ensure that non-prioritized traffic moves more sluggishly.
4)So what if SBC decides to implement a tiered system of bandwidth! Consumers just stop renewing their contracts if they hate it enough.
Many consumers will have little/no choise. Internet is today an utility, going without is as unthinkable to many as going without telephone. Many consumers are on 12-month contracts and cannot get out on short notice. Many consumers have only one, or only a small handful of broadband-providers available.
6)as an independent content producer (and soon a distributor), I want the Net environment to be as unregulated as possible (even from laws that purport to ensure acess). If some ISPs are going to charge for tiered service, either they better offer substantial benefits to customers or people will abandon them in droves.
That is naive. And I hope you see it. More likely they'll have some high-profile agreements with some high-desirability content-producers essentially as marketing. People will *prefer* using that ISP, because by them you can get the newest Disney-shite or whatever at "guaranteed high speed". Those people will get sluggish access to for example your content, unless you bend over and pay what is demanded. If you *do* bend over and pay, you're back to status quo -- your traffic has the same priority as that from Disney.
8)There is a certain arrogance to the notion that consumers can't be trusted to act in their self-interest but require government's "help" to be protected.
Perhaps it's arrogant. But I'd take a wager that 9 out of 10 broadband-subscribers couldn't even tell you what "net neutrality " means. How can they choose intelligently when they don't even know there's a choise to be made ?
9)I think the harm being addressed here is that consumers and businesses need more alternatives for obtaining net access. They shouldn't be in a market where they only have one ISP to choose from.
Agreed. They shouldn't be. But many are. My mothers choises for broadband just last month went up from zero to 1. Any "choise" she has is illusoric at best. (in *principle* she could go back to metered dial-up access at $1/hour, but that's not much of a choise...)
Re:How Peculiar (Score:3, Insightful)
They are already being paid for internet access. The question is should they be allowed to provide teired access at different prices. Teiring will be a process that gives internet traffic higher or lower priority based on who pays. Furthermore, what are the limitation of tiering? Should Verizon be allowed to slow Google down to the point that it is unuseable? Should they be allowed to just plain block Google? or redirect their traffic to Yahoo? Afterall, by your reasoning, it is their network.
The answer to these questions is the internet protocol itself. The internet is defined by the protocol. The architecture for the internet just happens to be one of network neutral. Since teiring changes the protocol for handling internet traffic, it is considered re-engineering of the internet. Therefore, what Verizon would be selling their customers is not internet access. Rather it is access to some other network altogether and they should not be allowed to sell it as "internet".
The supporters of network neutrality made a fatal error, IMO. That is selling this an idealogical issue pitting the big bad telecom against the little guy versus selling this as the purely technical issue that it is.
Re:I thought all /.ers were libertarians... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I'm Not Complaining For Naught (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree 100% There was an article in the latest Maximum PC by Tom Halfhill, and he was against net neutrality with the argument that high bandwidth content providers should pay more.. along the lines that 'google hogs the internet' so they should pay more, and that 'ma and pa' couldn't get fair net usage because google were hogging the BW... what what the F*&K do you think 'ma & pa' were accessing... Google!
The providers dont hog the bandwidth, it's the millions of users that are accessing it. If my content provider starts to charge me more for access to google, or slows traffic to google, in favour of their search engine, then thats gonna get me pissed.
Advocates for this tierd charging argue that its like private roads / toll roads; well it already is! I pay a fee to my ISP for the piece of road to the Internet backbone... ! I like to think of the Internet backbone as a state highway... free, and everyone gets treated the same. I pay for the private road bit, to get from my house to that highway.
This is googles opportunity to roll out googlenet... bring it on. I have faith that they will be our 'saviours' with low cost fixed fee (if not free) net access.
Or may god have mercy on my CPU core.
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, Americans don't take their business elsewhere due to rotten service. They just don't. Americans buy based on price, period, especially with something they don't understand like Internet service. Look at movie theaters: Lousy seats, lousy sound, overpriced popcorn, surly workers, rude audiences. Sure, maybe the theater down the street is a little better, but you don't see them switching. Why? Because the first theater is fifty cents cheaper.
Like what? Quality? Nobody competes on quality anymore. What this means is the big guys crush the little guys by suffocating them, just like everything else. They'll buy up all the QoS they can because they have the deep pockets. After all, why compete when you can eliminate the competition?
Not yet they don't.
You've never worked for a company that runs an enterprise-level web site, have you. These contracts are negotiated in terms of years, and moving the site is likely to be far more expensive than just ponying up the premium. Besides, the problem isn't with your bandwidth provider, it's with your customers' providers. You're getting the bandwidth you're paying for, but your customers are at the mercy of their provider in terms of whose packets get through unimpeded.
Re:How Peculiar (Score:2, Insightful)
It's strange how much we detest government-imposed taxes, but suddenly we're begging to allow corporations to impose their own private tax burdens on people who don't even do business with them.
Why isn't it reasonable that if a company is making money by using someone else's resources- they should have to pay for it? When send my customers packages, I have to pay UPS to deliver them. This isn't any different.
Actually, people are already paying to receive data. So this is like UPS saying "we're going to carry on charging you to send packages, but now we're going to charge your customers to receive them as well!"
Well, actually it's not very like anything to do with UPS at all. It's more like a sales tax being imposed both in the seller's state and in the buyer's state and in every state the package travels through in between. I'm sure you'd complain loudly about that if the state governments tried to do it. I'm not quite sure why you don't have any problem with corporations doing the same thing.
Re:What's to stop them from downthrottling too? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is terrible because the average person isn't informed enough to make the so-called free market work here. Companies being able to limit your access (even if it is only a slightly longer time to access) to the last vestige of true free speech is not a good thing, and cannot -- in my mind -- lead to good things.
Re:I thought all /.ers were libertarians... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you mean, "prevent the wholesale slaughter of small businesses," then you might be correct.
Re:How Peculiar (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I thought all /.ers were libertarians... (Score:2, Insightful)
First off, the subsidized network that I have already paid for should not require 60$ a month for access. Second, there is no way in hell it should be able to be manipulated into a toll booth. What happens when a company like Amazon says, "OK, Fine. We'll pay, but we can only afford to pay 2 of the 3 large Telcos."? So I have Comcast, but Amazon paid for fast access through Verizon and Southwest? My content still gets slow as hell once it hit's Comcast, if they don't "accidentally" drop packets.
Comcast: 60$ A Month for low level broadband in Arlington, TX
I-net Infrastructure: Gazillion dollars by US Tax payers
Seeing greedy Telcos bend over the content providers you've already paid access too: Priceless.
Re:I'm Not Complaining For Naught (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's to stop them from downthrottling too? (Score:3, Insightful)
You'll be getting an invoice (Score:5, Insightful)
You said: "Why isn't it reasonable that if a company is making money by using someone else's resources- they should have to pay for it?"
and
"www.kadko.com"
So I went and ordered $4,000 worth of Polymeric Silazane Finish. Verizon (my ISP) will shortly be sending you a bill for, y'know, making money off of their network. Does that seem reasonable?
Re:I'm Not Complaining For Naught (Score:5, Insightful)
Your analogy doesn't apply to the tiered internet model. In fact, your analogy better describes the internet we use today. The "gas tax" is a pretty fair way of explaining how we would pay extra for faster speed (such as a high-performance V12 supercar) or higher bandwidth (trucks)- such as it is we get charged a lot more to have a T3 line than a DSL line.
The analogy would be better suited if you were to tax the destinations which cause the higher traffic; it would be akin to making you pay for your gas tax, and then turning around and forcing your destination to pay for your gas tax as well. And if the destination refused, the government would lower the speed limit to all roads leading toward that destination.
Simply stated, the telcos are just being greedy, and want to extort more money from existing customers. They don't seem to be struggling, nor do they appear to be innovating much as of late, so I don't see why the government needs to interfere and bail them out.
Holy crap. (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's just add a little emphasis here... it's amazing how slippery you can be with vague qualifications slipped into your rhetoric.
...and so forth. Yes, that's very slippery of you indeed, Representative Boehner. You're a capable politician.
In other words, "If you don't like it, go make another internet; this one's ours."
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:2, Insightful)
Bandwidth is plentiful at the moment because the Internet is over-provisioned. Remember the 90's, when everyone and their dog was laying fiber across the country? Remember what happened right after all those cables got laid? So basically, we're working with an Internet that's been set up to handle far more traffic than is actually generated. Right now, that's a good thing, but the telecoms aren't increasing the capacity of the Internet at anything near the rate that the demand for that capacity is growing. In 10-20 years, we'll be right back where we were 10 years ago, and those 'toll lanes' are going to really mean something.
Sounds great, yea?
So in 15 years AT&T will be making money hand over fist by providing premium services at a higher cost. Then they'll realize that in order to maintain the quality of those premium services, they're going to have to lay a new cable between New York and Dallas. What kind of traffic do you think is going to be routed over that cable? Over every bit of capacity added to the internet starting today?
This isn't going to be a problem right now. This is going to be a problem in 20 years, which is why it's so important that we stop it now, and why it's so hard to explain to the average person why you can't pay more for more reliable internet service.
Re:What's to stop them from downthrottling too? (Score:3, Insightful)
By providing a service thats worth it, obviously. If the "free" service is crap, sell service that isn't. If the residents are happy playing with crap, then curse the corporations before you as you attempt to use marketing to educate the public instead of turning them into the mindless sheep who are happy with the crap that corporations and governments sell them.
Of course, it also means that if the city is charging Google to allow its residents to access google, and google is refusing to pay, you won't be able to charge google, otherwise your service would be just as crappy, AND you'll be charging for it.
Re:Peculiar? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:2, Insightful)
Sometimes, just sometimes, there is need for regulation.
Let's examine this point-by-point:
(1) The harm is not hypothetical. There are numerous incidents of ISPs blocking or degrading traffic of competing services. And, although I'm happy you have all the bandwidth you want, that's likely to change. Available bandwidth will be reduced as telcos move into the IPTV business. One or two high defintion channels will eat the majority of the capacity to your home.
(2) You said it yourself - companies already pay for ISPs. Why should they have to pay again?
(3) Tiered pricing will lower subscription costs? Do you really believe that? Do you think the telcos just want move their source of income from consumers to content providers? No, they want both to pay. You say tiered pricing should be for private industry to decide. Should private industry be allowed to determine who I connect to, or how well a providers service will work? Network neutrality is not giving control of the Internet to the government; it's keeping control in the hands of consumers. Net neutrality simply returns things to the status quo before a flawed decision by the FCC removed the protection that has been in place since its beginning. This principle has endured through decades of amazing technological change. It will NOT "be obsolete on the day it was passed."
(4) Don't renew my contract if I hate it? Only 53% of Americans have at least two choices in broadband providers - the rest have one or none, and both the telcos and cable companies have stated their intentions. There is no choice except to do without, and in today's world that's not a reasonable option.
(5) Banning the blocking or restricting of applications ISPs don't like, such as P2P, VOIP, streaming video from sites they don't own, etc. is part of net neutrality. ISPs should act as common carriers, not gatekeepers. CONSUMERS should decide how they want to use the bandwith they pay for, not ISPs.
(6) I understand the concern about regulation, but this simply writes into law the principles that have made the Internet a driving force for innovation. It corrects a flawed policy decision of the FCC.
(7) The battle has been lost. Sure, you're provided a ton of bandwidth, but God forbid you actually want to USE the bandwidth you've paid for. Verizon's EULA's are particularly amusing.
(8) Arrogance to think that regulation is sometimes necessary? How's this for arrogance? Edward Whitacre of AT&T: "Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?" Well, Ed - they ain't YOUR pipes. We, your customers are paying for them.
(9) Here we agree. Net neutrality would not be an issue if there were true competion because consumers would not stand for it. However, in the real world, most people do not have the option to choose another carrier. AT&T and others understand this, and are trying to use this to their advantage.
Re:How Peculiar (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, but the big telecoms are aiming to destroy the free market with quality of service and end to end discrimination.
Do you not get it? There are but a handful of long haul carriers left and they are all on board with triple billing their customers for content. These companies at one time or another owe their ability to exist from the power of government to seize people's property and legally maintain their cables on public rights of way, yet they want to have final say over ever packet that goes over their network without considering the benefit of the public. The public has the right and obligation to regulate public rights of way and this is all that this was.
Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, seek to serepticiously undermine competition at every step along the way and my fellow libertarians seem caught up in the idea that it is somehow still a free market even when the marketplace itself is by invitation only.
And I said they seek to triple bill customers... it could be far worse, with every telco along the way seeking further kickbacks along the way to promptly deliver each packet. This is as if UPS, Fedex, Airborne express all suddenly started to demand greater payments along the route for prompt delivery, not just by weight, but based on the source and destination of the packet. If you live in a good neighborhood you get charged more, if they think your company can afford it, you get charged more. And everyone else gets purposefully shitty service.
Welcome to the free market, as long as you don't define "free" and "market" in old speak.
Re:My Congressman's explanation (Score:3, Insightful)
Right, nobody blocked VoIP at all...
"In fact, any significant discriminatory behavior on the part of broadband service providers ( BSPs ) would generally be financially counterproductive considering that BSPs make more money by carrying more traffic. On the rare occasion that a BSP may actively regulate traffic or impose differential pricing schemes on their network, it would likely be for rather sensible reasons. Network owners may want to discourage the use of certain devices on their networks to avoid system crashes, interference, or signal theft. They may want to price services differently to avoid network congestion and/or conserve bandwidth. They may want to exclusively partner with other firms to help them reach new customers and ultimately create superior services. And perhaps they may very well direct users towards some content before others because it helps them make the necessary money to recoup the huge investment required to create and build out broadband networks. "
Emphasis mine on what is by far the scariest statements I have seen to date on this topic.
Re:My Congressman's explanation (Score:3, Insightful)
2004 election donations [opensecrets.org]
2005-2006 donations [opensecrets.org]
I guess AT&T has further payments to make for this year's election, to at least match 2004...
Re:How Peculiar (Score:4, Insightful)
How many times does it have to be paid?
"How much you got?"
Re:Not a solution (Score:4, Insightful)
The first principle is simple - where you have power over someone, such as providing them a needed product, then you squeeze them for every penny they have. The second principle is equally straigtforward - where possible, create barriers to entry to prevent people doing things for themselves.
Re:Not a solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you think that Cisco was one of the only major tech companies to come out against net neutrality?
:-)
Re:Not a solution (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, I'm paying for the internet connection so prioritising traffic based on whether the remote party are paying protection money to my ISP is a very Bad Thing - I already paid for the connection, the remote party already paid for theirs, why the hell should my ISP be demanding more cash from them and penalising me if they don't pay?
This is basically it. I pay $50/mo. for 3M/800K and I expect full pipe. Of course, in my ToS agreement, it's explained that they cannot guarantee that service will be available all the time, so I don't expect 99.999% uptime or anything (as a side note, I would like to not reboot my DSL modem every 10 hours), but nowhere in my ToS does it say that if I use 'too much' of what I pay for my connection will degrade. So if I BitTorrent all day and max out my connection, I assume that my ISP doesn't have shit for brains and oversold their bandwidth. Fundamentally, then, it's not my fault if _your_ connection (RTP) degrades because I'm using _my_ connection (BitTorrent), it's _our_ ISPs.
At this point, there's no basis (legal or moral) to really be upset with me for using the service I pay for. This is what the ISPs are trying to do, make their product more valuable by increasing the scarcity... like DeBeers and Diamonds.
If you want to see the Internet become something like a newspaper full of classified ads, make sure the people who make money from the bandwidth are in control. I mean, can you imagine calling someone on the phone and having to sit through a radio ad before you got through to your grandma? Or plugging in your lamp and having to sit through a holographic presentation of why this margarita mix is better than that one? This doesn't happen because these services are REGULATED, so everyone's guaranteed phone service and everyone's guaranteed electricity... unless you're ridiculous and you live in the Grand Canyon or something.
What it comes down to is this: Do you want your Internet service to be like electricity, or like cable? Hell, I'd pay $70 a month for DSL if it meant they didn't have to oversell bandwidth, but all that would happen is some Executive would get a new car.
Re:don't get Congress involved please! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not a solution (Score:2, Insightful)
No, they oversell it because they are greedy bastards. End of story. The monthly fees they collect plus the enormous government grants they received over decades, combined with the fact that new technology allows much higher speeds at lower hardware cost are more then enough to satisfy these bandwith requirements. But not if you are planning to increase the cost per bandwith unit in order to abuse the public further.
No, they've chosen all providers in order to both profit and in one motion eliminate pesky high-volume political sites not friendly to the agendas held dear by the owners of these corporations.
Yet another clueless libertarian waxing musical about how "free market" will "fix it all", never you mind that everytime the market was left to its own devices in the past new and more horrendous forms of abuse inevietably followed. The "market" has no choices here because the telcos have established a steep barrier to entry via a combination of factors, major of which are the inter-city fiberoptics infrastructure and peering agreements, which prevent competition from any newcomers. Major telcos are essentially in cahoots with each other on this issue, knowing that if they stick together they will be able to rape the public unchallenged and knowing that only the wealthiest and most powerful corporations can even dream to try to enter the business, never you mind dislodging this cabal and that the "optimal" business strategy for these mega-corps is to join the cabal instead of fighting it.