Senators, ISPs, and Network Neutrality 174
Polarism submitted a good article about
net neutrality that is currently running on Ars. It's a good explanation of where the pieces of the problem are, the government issues, the industry issues, etc. Worth a read.
List (Score:4, Informative)
More importantly, if you don't like where your senators stand, give them a call.
Re:Why the red herring? (Score:4, Informative)
Peering agreements only exist between two providers who pass roughly equal amounts of traffic between eachother. It's just an agreement that say: I'm passing 1000TB of traffic to you, and your passing 1000TB to me, so we'll carry each others traffic for free.
If one of the companies loses market share, they will not renew the agreement. Take a look at what happened with Level1 and Cogent (IIRC)
Not quite dead (Score:3, Informative)
First, the House net neutrality vote was for a net neutrality amendment to a larger bill(COPE). They didn't include it obviously.
Now, the Senate is considering their version of the bill. Their version may or may not include the net neutrality provision. Talking Points Memo is keeping a tally of where Senators currently stand [talkingpointsmemo.com].
Ideally, the Senate includes it in their version of the bill. Then, the bill will go to conference to iron out the differences between the Senate and House versions. Hopefully, someone will champion it there and ensure it stays in the final version.
Then the larger bill goes to the House and Senate for a final vote. Congressmen who voted against net neutrality will probably not vote against the final bill.
Then it goes to the President for signing, and since Bush has yet to veto a bill, the bill likely becomes law and so does the Net Neutrality provision.
So the House vote was a setback but by no means the final blow.
Re:Why the red herring? (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who used to be a network architect in a Tier 1 global telco I can say only two words: Utter bollocks. Get a clue would ya?.
Traffic is carried between two autonomous systems on the Internet if there is a transit or peering agreement. In your example either Covad or Comcast is paying for transit from AT&T. Otherwise they will not get the routing table entries for each other. AT&T is definitely not doing it for free. If Covad and Comcast were directly connected it could have been either a peering agreement under which they exchange traffic at no cost to each other or once again a transit (one of the buying from the other).
What is happening here and what Net neutrality is all about is that in the US the public peering points used to be run by big telcos like MCI (f.e MAE East or MAE West). MCI and friends deliberately made them suck really bad around 7 years ago so that people switch to buying transit. The telcos themselves switched to private peering agreements. Thus, the tier 1 cartel creation was complete (it started to coalesce around 3-4 years prior to that). As a result in the US an ISP like the ones you mention usually has 2-3 transit connections for which it pays and very few private peerings where it exchanges traffic.
Compared to that in EU a similar ISP has 2-3 transit connections and 20-30+ peering agreements across public peering points. The private peerings can be counted on the fingers of one hand. This changes the overall traffic pattern considerably and most of the traffic is going across peering points not across a tier 1 telco like AT&T. As a collegue of mine jokingly put it a few years back: "The UK Internet backbone consists of one floor in a building in Docklands". In other words the Linx has become the backbone. As a result the transit ISPs can no longer hold their customers for ransom with QoS threats the way the Tier 1 cartel is doing it in the US.
Futher to that, the fix for the no-net-neutrality is trivial. Someone with the resources to do this who does not have the conflict of interest (the way MCI used to) should reestablish the public peering points and run them using the same model and rules as the successfull ones on this side of the pond like Linx, DGIX, etc. The resources to run this are a drop in the ocean for the likes of Google and Yahoo and it will restore the healthy network economics in less then half a year. In fact it will be cheaper than moaning and trying to graft congresskriters.
And if they do not do this the telcos will get them by their balls and their wallets will quickly follow. Frankly, I would be surprised if we do not see Google Peering or Yahoo Peering by the end of the year
Internet is owned by the phone companies. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.businessweek.com/1998/29/b3587124.htm [businessweek.com]
You knew they would try this. If you didn't then you are stupid.
Cringley had a piece on this. I guess it doesn't make sense for them pay for a network that cannibalizes their long distance which voip does.http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200
Unlike this article. The phone companies DO own the net.
http://www.networkingpipeline.com/blog/archives/2
This is the end of the internet.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester [thenation.com]
We need LOWER prices and faster speeds. I don't the phone companies with their history and now their attack on this network are going to be for that.
Ultimately we need a public municipal lowcost network with backbone owned by NO ONE.