Net Neutrality or Not? 352
Reverse Gear writes "CNN has two commentaries about net neutrality with quite opposing viewpoints. Craig Newmark discusses how the legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives would efficiently remove net neutrality, while Mike McCurry writes about how the big companies should pay their fair share for the physical upgrade of the internet. From Newmark's commentary: 'Telecommunication companies already control the pipes that carry the Internet into your home. Now they want control which sites you visit and how you experience them. They would provide privileged access for themselves and their preferred partners while charging other businesses for varying levels of service.'"
They already pay their "fair share". (Score:5, Insightful)
I pay for the bandwidth I use.
Politics sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
How about raising rates? (Score:5, Insightful)
Infastructure + Content = Power Grab (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the government should sieze control over the main backbone and make the upkeep/upgrade no longer a responsibility of the major providers. ISP's would all compete for the last mile hookups/billing, allowing other companies in who don't already own part of the highway itself.
They can try to earn more of their revenue from these supposed services they are going to bring in - if the services really are all that fantastic. If they really are cooking with gas, they should have no beef with a truly level playing field with Google. If I don't like the fact I can't get (competing service) as well with ISP Alpha because they're partnered with TVIP-X, I'll just drop them and move to ISP Beta since they treat everyone the same.
Re:They already pay their "fair share". (Score:1, Insightful)
But Google can shop around for its bandwidth, finding a good deal (thanks to competition) - They're *not* paying their fair share...
The last-mile providers can extort them to pay twice! And twice the cash is better than one times the cash
Re:They already pay their "fair share". (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They already pay their "fair share". (Score:5, Insightful)
Google are just as free as you to shop around for a provider and as long as that provider supplies a service and gives backbone bandwidth to the paying customer then what has it got to do with anyone else.
If the home user ISP isn't making money then thats not googles fault, but a problem with the ISP's business plan, it has no right to complain about content further upstream.
Re:They already pay their "fair share". (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing will come of this. It's all bullshit "what ifs". There's no such thing as a "good new law".
Privileged access (Score:3, Insightful)
The telcos could create whatever rate scheme they wanted but they would have to treat everyone equally. Actually, the telcos are currently common carriers. It would be necessary to pass legislation to make them otherwise.
OK (Score:3, Insightful)
Vote (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Infastructure + Content = Power Grab (Score:2, Insightful)
the real issue (Score:5, Insightful)
its not just the low bandwidth and the tiny screen, its because
its packaged as a delivery media for ringtones and crappy games.
not just as a pipe.
the value of the internet is that there isn't necessarily some
marketing shmuck in tan slacks and a blue shirt sitting between
me and what i want to do. its a free-for-all. if those people
had been involved from the beginning it would have been worthless.
do whatever you like. dont mess with my rfc 791.
and this surprises whom? (Score:5, Insightful)
The free ride is over. It was destined to be over the moment the internet was opened to commercial activity (1992?). It just took the pointy-haired types a few years to figure out why they needed to pay attention.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They already pay their "fair share". (Score:3, Insightful)
Regulating companies that have any form of a monopoly (I literally have one choice for broadband) is not a bad thing. When the phone monopolies were granted it was under a condition of universal access. The government realized that a monopoly has no interest in reaching every consumer, the way competing companies do. Hence they made universal access a requirement of granting the monopoly. Here we're faced with largely the same issue. Google may have leverage enough to push telcos into not throttling their traffic, but Mom&Pop Inc. doesn't and neither do small grass-roots coalitions of any party or flavor. Until we have total competition in all aspects of the network, I think it will be hard to make any hands-off arguments.
What's so complicated about this issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, think of the pipes and wires that you use to go online as the car you pay for by renting. The question is, should the rental car actively resist the steering wheel when you pass by a burger king and instead redirect you to a McDonalds because McDonalds paid the rental car agency a bribe.
God, I hate stupid f*ing metaphors. The thing is easy enough to understand, I can't believe how the debate gets convoluted by the other side: You are already paying for net access. Now your telecoms aren't quite satisfied with your payment and want to double dip by collecting on the other side of the pipe. The problem is, that as a consumer, this isn't what I paid for. I paid for internet access, not Verizon's Paying Friends network. This is fraudulent behavior against the consumer, plain and simple.
In his anti-NN article, Mike McCurry, who obviously knows how the net should really work instead of how it current did for the last XX years wrote:
Their thinly disguised self-interest happens to be my self-interest in this case too. Rather than your stance, which coincides as the thinly disguised self-interest of the bells.
Oh, and no matter what, the consumers will pay for the upgrades. Let's not pretend that the corps will pay for it and not pass it down.
Re:Why net neutrality? (Score:5, Insightful)
Net Neutrality only concerns itself with the source of a packet. QoS rules can still be applied, but they need to be applied without regard to the source of the packet. Why the telcos are so big on killing net neutrality, is exactly so ISPs can give their/their allies internet applications huge advantages over competitors. In fact, everybody knows this. This is why there are actually changes to various anti-trust regs that are being pushed along with killing net neutrality.
The one thing I have to say is, if internet companies have to pay to send their content over telco pipes, then the telcos should pay the content providers for providing the content that makes people want to have internet connections.
Re:They already pay their "fair share". (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed.
When the phone monopolies were granted
A mistake.
The government realized that a monopoly has no interest in reaching every consumer,
A consequence of that mistake.
Hence they made universal access a requirement of granting the monopoly.
A bad new law to band-aid over that mistake.
Until we have total competition in all aspects of the network
That won't happen. The last mile is a natural monopoly. I believe that localities should own last mile media. Any interested party should be able to rent use of said media.
That will solve your "one choice for broadband" problem nicely. The only place there isn't competition is the last mile. People seem to be extrapolating their situation onto the Internet in general.
I can tell you when you go shopping for a T1 or T3 or more, you get to choose from at least 10 ISPs. There's plenty of competition there.
I can see both sides of this (Score:5, Insightful)
Like most slashdotters, I feel and instinctive affinity for net neutrality. And I think having a medium where all "content providers" are equal has been great plus, not only for internet culture, but also for the level of competition in internet commerce.
Still, the tremendously increased investment that can be conjured up by the profit motive is nothing to be sneezed at. I was using the internet as a graduate student before there was a web, and I remeber the ruckus over the first advertisment that appeared on usenet. Like most usenet denizens of the time, I was appalled, and I thought that commercialization would destroy our beloved cooperative internet. Obviously, I was dead wrong. So having been proved wrong once, I'm not inclined to dismiss the power of the profit motive to provide us with an infrastructure capable of doing things we haven't even dreamed of yet.
The Bells OVERSOLD (Score:4, Insightful)
If the bells sold these connections knowing that they could not support them, they should be sued for fraud, they shouldnt be charging us MORE money to fix their fuck-up
Re:So what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Net neutrality becomes irrelevant in a market with choice.
Take the natural local monopoly away and give it to the localities and all this becomes irrelevant.
I wonder if this is the entire reason this debate is centered on the net neutrality provisions, to take attention away from the real issue, the breaking of the local monopolies.
McCurry... ugh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Politics sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. The idea these people are putting forward (not just telcos, several cable ISPs are in on it as well!) is a horrible, horrible one, which I hope to never see in action.
But if it does come to it, I hope the content providers are ready. Google should not pay, and simply post a front page explaining that "Your ISP is reducing your access to us". Other companies that bill their users should pay, and pass that cost directly to the users in the form of a line item "verizon (or whatever) charge *" with a "* please call verizon customer service at 1-888-whatever for questions concerning this charge".
If the content providers stand up for themselves and provide the customers with education about the situation (god knows the ISPs won't, despite all the idiots insisting that some fairy hand will magically make everything better) then we still have a chance at making this go away, law or no law.
telcos... (Score:5, Insightful)
What rankles network service providers is that the current infrastructure doesn't give them much freedom to charge by what people are able to pay; that greatly reduces their opportunity for revenue. Telephone companies, for example, have been able to charge a premium to individual residential customers because individual residential customers don't have much ability to negotiate. While that premium may be small in absolute terms, it's huge in terms of percentages. The same is true for other customer categories. They also want to be able to continue to charge excessive rates for specific services, such as voice. With the proposed changes, network providers can implement that kind of differential pricing again.
There is absolutely no justification for any of this; all it does is create market inefficiencies that make telecommunications services unnecessarily expensive. Both from an economic and a public policy point of view, net neutrality is clearly the better system.
Re:Infastructure + Content = Power Grab (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, there's just no way that statement could end badly!
Re:Vote (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:the real issue (Score:5, Insightful)
They want to offer us fast connections to "partner" sites so that we can shell out 20 bucks for a drm-crippled movie download, or to another site where we can pay $19.95 a month to listen to streaming music.
What the telecoms really want is control over the internet similar to the way in which cable t.v. is controlled: compartmentalized areas of advertising-infested crap. The internet as it exists today is too fragmented and open to easily hypnotize the consumers. The telecoms want to change that. They want control.
A tiered internet would really suck donkey-balls, but in some ways I won't be disappointed if it happens. The internet seems to be becoming one big tool for citizen tracking and monitoring, both by the government and the corporations. Perhaps the glory days of the internet are over no matter what happens.
Re:Why net neutrality? (Score:3, Insightful)
The end of net neutrality means that if you sign for VOIP service with company A, and that company doesn't pay YOUR ISP's (extortion) fee, your ISP will (at least be able to) lower your traffic quality (possibly to such a degree it is no longer functional). And maybe your ISP offers a competing VOIP service. Since they don't have to pay themselves this fee, they have an unfair market advantage (and they could set the fee to whatever they want)...
Also, it could completely disolve the peer-to-peer nature of the internet. I'm not talking about file sharing. If person A wanted to have a video-conference or whatever with person B, in order to ensure decent service, A would need to payoff B's ISP and B would need to payoff A's ISP.
This sort of prior arrangement isn't very feasible in a network of peers...
Re:CNN has both viewpoints... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Chopping off baby-heads? Why, that's insane!"
or,
"How do we know that offering baby-heads to satan won't solve all our problems?"
Must we link and quote from both articles? And yes, handing the internet over to the telecoms to devour is just that crazy.
Re:Pay their fair share? (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny thing is, if congress would remove all monopolistic actions and actively prevent a local monopoly (except for possible a very local access monopoly by a company that provides nothing but CO to/from endpoint) in any community, then it would stand a chance. But this congress and admin will not do that. This is all about large company protection that will guarentee the break-down of the net in the USA. Sad, really.
Re:They already pay their "fair share". (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole "Hands off the internet" campaign tries to frame the issue as who should pay for the expansion of the internet, consumers or Amazon/Ebay/Google/etc.
Where does Amazon/Ebay/Google/etc. get their money from? That's right, consumers.
If Amazon and Ebay have to pay to reach consumers, then they will be forced to raise their prices. This, of course, means the consumers will still be paying for the expansion of the internet, only indirectly. The only problem with this is if Amazon and Ebay have to charge so much more to reach consumers, that it's cheaper for consumers to buy from brick and morter stores. Consumers may stop shoping online altogether, and Amazon and Ebay risk going out of business.
Google is only sightly more complicated. Google gets it money from advertising, so it would have to charge more for ads. Any business that want's to continue advertising through Google, will have to charge more for their goods and services, and you have the same problem as above.
The real question of who should pay for the expansion of the internet isn't between consumers and Amazon/Ebay/Google/etc, but consumers (directly) and consumers (indirectly). The answer to this question will determine whether internet innovation will continue as it has, or stop and the internet will become just another way to watch TV and Movies.
We've already seen the non-neutrality model... AOL (Score:3, Insightful)
There is only one side here in the end. (Score:5, Insightful)
this is allowed. Nobody is stopping them. If you believe that its a free market out there, then you must accept that the market will charge what the market will bear.
Not enough money to upgrade the internet? RAISE THE RATES. Google Yahoo and other content providers getting a "Free ride"? RAISE THEIR RATES.
Prioritising packets has nothign to do with protecting the bottom line. its totally uneccessary for the reasons they give. It is about being able to finely control every little packet you get, so you can be billed accordingly.
Why give up the incredibly profitable Long Distance business model for the "flat rate" model of the internet, when you can convert the internet into another "long distance" service?
Quality of Service != Tiered Service (Score:3, Insightful)
If this was really about deploying QoS, I think there would be far fewer arguments. The technology for QoS is well defined, short of the mechanism needed to charge individual customers and distribute the revenue to ISPs. This is actually harder than one might think because your data for a QoS-enhanced video conference would usually traverse multiple ISPs. If the ISPs were serious about figuring out how to do this, and then giving customers a better video-call for a per-call charge, I think most of us would be happy for the extra service.
Instead of going through the trouble setting this up, ISPs want to do something far easier -- filter based on the source or destination of a packet and put packets indiscriminately into a different queue based on who it is coming from or going to. Then they simply charge people who want to put large numbers of packets into the high priority queue, namely the large content providers. Of course, the resulting service might not be any better. To get priority service for all its users, a company like Google would have to pay all ISPs who play this game along all paths between it and any customer -- essentially all ISPs in the entire Internet.
Even if an ISP is only interested in prioritizing its own traffic (to give itself a competitive advantage), it might not get very far. ISPs do not typically carry traffic end-to-end from user to user, so the priority they give their traffic may be wasted once the traffic gets to a competitor's ISP!
I'm tempted to let the ISPs hang themselves on this one -- if large content providers refuse to pay, and the high priority queues stay empty, then what? They get blamed for artificially slowing down all Internet traffic? Not pretty.
One scenario: In a competitive environment, rival ISPs (in the backbone) will end up fighting each other to offer the best possible price for the best possible non-tiered service, and those offering more expensive tiered service will end up losing their customers.
Re:I hope Slashdot makes it into the "silver packa (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no sense in even coming near information or ideas that may contradict what your god and fox news says. Remember those liberal elite intellectual bloggers are probably french and most definately communists who hate america.
Re:What's so complicated about this issue. (Score:3, Insightful)
Or how about the metaphor of McDonalds charging you $10 for a big mac in the drive thru when they see you bought a new car or when you seem particularly hungry that day. Or the gas station charging $20 a gallon when there is a hurricane bearing down on your city and you are trying to escape. As long as the metaphor doesn't involve any practice that is considered legitamite in a free market then it is good with me.
God, I hate stupid f*ing metaphors.
oh yes.
Re:I can see both sides of this (Score:4, Insightful)
"Still, the tremendously increased investment that can be conjured up by the profit motive is nothing to be sneezed at."
What tremendously increased investment are you referring to? The tremendously increased fees that content providers will have to pay to already bloated telcos for the 'privilege' of continuing to do business? The trememdously increased revenues that the telcos receive for sitting on their fat asses? Others have stated already that the only incentive present in this scenario is for them to reduce performance for customers of certain clients until the clients agree to their extortion. This is a shakedown, pure and simple.
F*ck balance. There are two sides to this argument all right, but they are Right and Wrong. Extortion has always been wrong and always will be.
HTH, HAND.
Re:Vote (Score:1, Insightful)
You pay for more than the bandwidth you use. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's really not the case so much for Google and other big content providers. They pay for a certain level of service and expect to use that much all the time, and they pay for a guarantee that they'll have it.
Video and other services obviously mean that consumers are going to use a lot more bandwidth than they currently do. Content providers will pay for their end, but the consumer end of the system is still going to be swamped. ISP's will have to deliver the sort of bandwidth to consumers that consumers already think they're paying for. Raising consumer prices therefore means ISP's will have to confess their bait-and-switch ways, so that's not appealing. The only other option is to squeeze content providers.
One wonders why the ISP's can't simply turn on some portion of the zillions of miles of dark fiber that's already in place. I'm sure there's hardware to be purchased and all, but upgrading networks this time around ought to be pretty inexpensive compared to previous upgrades. That cost seems like a small price to pay to cover up the fact that they've been overselling their networks for years.
Fear mongering. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:monopolies to commodities: won't get fooled aga (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong - people DO want huge downloads from a central company, but they can't get that, so they're downloading from other end users instead. Things are slowly starting to change: now you can get some of the content you want, for a little more than you'd like to pay for it. In time, you'll be able to get more content for less money, but that's several years away (and remember, if Apple didn't have a monopoly position, they couldn't negotiate prices down as low as they are now - they had to fight pretty hard to keep songs at $0.99, and were only able to force the record companies to agree because the record companies can't afford to lose Apple's customers altogether).
Re:They already pay their "fair share". (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I don't mind if an ISP gives higher priority to say, voice packets over data ones. I don't mind if they give a higher priority to SSH sessions to reduce lag. Giving priority per packet type is certainly acceptable and Mike McCurry (from TFA) uses this as an arguement on his platform of promoting Net Neutrality (oddly enough). However, priority because of the name of the company providing the packet is a huge NO!
Hasn't this already happened? The network infrastructure is the hardware and the apps running on top is the software. I remember when IBM laughed at Microsoft saying that the profits are in the hardware, not the software; and look how they were wrong.
I think telco companies are finally starting to realize that the big bucks in the Internet game is not in the wire, but in the applications themselves.
And they want a piece.
Re:They already pay their "fair share". (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:monopolies to commodities: won't get fooled aga (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, I didn't polish my post enough and make my point clear enough. Geoff Huston did a much better job in his presentation that I mentioned.
The key word in the "a central company" is "a". Lots of different companies letting you download stuff pushes the telecommunication companies into the commodity market. The telecommunication companies hoped to be competing against other telecommunication companies for delivering their products from their TV and movie studios, the "great convergence" that caused Timewarner/CNN/AOL to merge and Disney to invest in the Go network, etc., not with companies like "youtube", "google" or "myspace" which no one ever heard of a decade ago.
The point in the first paragraph where I mentioned features "call waiting" and "answering machines" is that these companies were used to being the only ones that could create new features. Downloadable music would only happen when they had created the appropriate product that could be profitable, not when some company like "napster", "iTunes", or "allofmp3" figured out how to do it.
If you wanted the content controlled by your phone company, you would have to buy ISDN/ADSL. If you wanted the content controlled by your cable company, you would have to buy from them. If you wanted both of these differentiated products, well, you would have to buy both. And no one really wants any content other than what was on TV, movies or the major record labels, right?
By breaking net neutrality, these telecommunication companies hope to at least recover some of the control over packets that they send to you, even if they lost the ability to originate the packets.
Re:They already pay their "fair share". (Score:2, Insightful)
If the ISP cannot afford the charges to the internet then yes they have to increase their prices to the customer.
If they misled the customer by offering a 10mbit connection with no bandwidth limit then its their tuff shit, content providing sites who do pay for bandwidth should not be charged double.
I currently pay for a 10mbit line with a 75gigabyte usage cap per month. I can use my internet connection to download or upload anything from anywhere as long as I stay within the cap.
I pay more for my internet from my ISP than others in my neighbourhood but I know my boundaries, the ISP in question has a lower price band for customers who use less bandwidth and does not try to extort money from the content providers on the other side of the connection.
The "problem" is entirely down to certain ISPs who have the wrong business model.
What to expect... more costs to the consumer! (Score:3, Insightful)
- Do you play World of Warcraft or another MMO? Expect the monthly fee to double, since they will need to become a preferred provider to every major telco in order to keep their connection speeds fast enough. Otherwise, the game won't be playable for their customers.
- Want to shop at Amazon.com or another online store? Expect there to be a non-trivial surcharge tacked on to every item so that the store can pay up.
- Enoy reading online news? Be prepared to see four times as many ads or be forced to pay a few bucks for a subscription. The news providers will need the extra money to be preferred content providers.
- And the fate of bloggers, small web comics, independent music artists, etc. that won't ever be able to generate the money to pay for being preferred providers? Expect the speeds their pages load to be about ten times slower than they are now.
Oh, and when the telcos get to "upgrading the internet," expect to see the bill in your taxes. It'll likely be subsidized heavily by the government. That way the telcos can charge you even more for the "upgraded" internet they didn't even have to pay for in the first place.
Re:They already pay their "fair share". (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, both ends pay for bandwidth, but *content providers always pay more*, because they require more bandwidth. And in most cases, the big content providers are *already paying* for the backbone, because they are buying their connection from the backbone owners - in many cases multiple backbone owners - for the bandwidth.
You also forgot option #4, which is what the telecoms really want to do: don't build anything, just give priority to the your content provider partners, and sell your own video - for extra! So it's really #1 AND #3, except your customers new charges are for a whole other service: IPTV!!
The other flaw is that all that backbone and infrastructure that was built today was paid for by allowing telecoms to charge monopoly prices, providing tax breaks and incentives, etc.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the telecoms simply cannot be trusted. This is not the first time we have heard the telecoms tell congress "Hey, you must do [insert what they ask for here] so that we can build more capacity!" Well, guess what? *THEY NEVER BUILT IT*! At my house - in a densely populated, affluent area, - I can't even have ANY broadband access except cable, because Verizon won't upgrade their switches - but this is what they promised last time congress gave them what they wanted (favorable treatment, special dispensation, monopoly access to me and many other customers). Instead, they just pocketed the profits. They will do it again.
Why is the US #10 in broadband deployment, even though we started out on top? Because the telecoms are buying congress and selling us out - while NOT building the infrastructure they keep promising.
Re:They already pay their "fair share". (Score:2, Insightful)
Except that telcos are actively working to put this plan into place. So its a little beyond 'what ifs.'
I think that murder laws are pretty good; I think keeping companies from raising prices for everyone but with out any benefit to those people is a good thing too.
Lets say the telco's get their way. What benefit does it have for anyone but the telcos (who get a larger profit margin)?
Re:They already pay their "fair share". (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you propose to get money from those people?
If the American ISPs get their way, how would you proportion the money to all the ISPs that you make connections with?
Bottom line,
You pay to connect to the internet and your monthly fee should cover all bandwidth charges you make according to your contract terms.
If your ISP has oversold themselves I hope they go out of business because they do not have a sustainable business model.