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.
Keep it limited (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why the red herring? (Score:4, Insightful)
Customer: "I'm getting an 'invalid username or password' error, is your service down?"
Agent (after checking logs): "No, you're typing the wrong username."
Other thrilling examples include "So, is my modem my hard drive or is it my screen?", "What's an X?", "What is a phone?", and "What is a keyboard?" (This last one was from someone who spoke fluent English and said she only used the internet for Yahoo mail, and after 5 solid minutes of explanation using phrases like "The thing your hands touch when you type an e-mail" she still couldn't grasp the concept).
Why is this relevant to net neutrality? People have no idea what the internet IS, let alone how it works. You can't expect understanding of a "complex" issue like network neutrality from someone who thinks he must be connected to the internet because his computer is on.
Senators are not necessarily more technically inclined than anybody else. Believe me, honest misunderstanding, or just lack of understanding, can account for FAR more than you think.
Re:Why the red herring? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why the red herring? (Score:2, Insightful)
Like the best lies, it's an intentional distortion that takes advantage of an honest misunderstanding among nontechnical folks.
> While most people don't know the nuiances of negotiating a high-dollar agreement with a carrier, there are a great many people out there who pay $10-50/mo for simple web hosting.
There may be a few hundred thousand people who pay $10/50/month for web hosting, but you're still looking at the top tenth of a percent of technically-aware users.
Most consumers are under the delusion that having a Myspace/Livejournal/Blogger (or back in the day, a Geocities) page/site is the same thing as having "web hosting".
These people outnumber the "$10-50/month for web hosting" folks by a million to one, and they do what they're told: When AT&T puts a commercial on TV telling saying "Don't you want to be able to watch movies on the Internet? Tell your Congressman that your telco should have equal rights to provide the same services your cable company does!", they fall for it hook, line, and sinker, reel, rod, and copy of Angling Times.
I mean, AT&T's customers can all have "have a web site" (read: a Myspace page) without paying AT&T a red cent! Obviously the big web sites like the Googles and the Yahoos, must be getting an even better deal than free!
Re:Why the red herring? (Score:5, Insightful)
But Comcast and Covad are paying for their upstream connections to AT&T. Do you think Comcast and Covad connect to the Internet for free? Everybody who connects pays their upstream provider. It's not like either Comcast or Covad are one of the big backbone providers.
Re:Why the red herring? (Score:2, Insightful)
No they don't, at least that's my understanding as of now. AT&T is free to block that traffic, but then again all the people who connect to AT&T are free to stop doing business with them. Perhaps AT&T is wineing about the free market and wants to use the government to force Google to pay no matter what. Perhaps Google wants to use the government to force AT&T to be neutral no matter what. IMHO, they are both wrong, we don't need any new laws either way.
Re:My understanding (Score:4, Insightful)
What makes you think the market can force neutral access? Remember Betamax? Undeniably the better format technically, yet the market chose the inferior format. The free market isn't magic. If people are too stupid to regulate something correctly, what makes you think they can acheive a better outcome through random purchasing? Besides, we are dealing with oligopolies here, there is no free market. Adam Smith's invisible hand only works in certain limited circumstances, libertarian rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.
Move on to MoveOn (Score:1, Insightful)
Slashdot should just save itself the trouble and redirect all of its traffic to MoveOn.org or DNC.org.
I'm not trying to troll here. It's just that this has gotten increasingly bad over the last couple months. Since there's nowhere else to make such a comment, I'll make it here and expect to get modded Offtopic / Troll / Overrated.
If I wanted to read this crap I'd go to Huffington's blog.
Re:The law of unintended consequences at work (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest barrier is the last mile. You don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry digging up the streets to lay fiber, so localities make agreements with a few players. The problem is, some of these players like the phone company and the cable giants, has historically made exclusive agreements and done their best to keep the public from knowing. (Time Warner has packed town hall meeting with employees so the citizens wouldn't be able to speak)
So, in steps the State and Federal governments. Legislation is proposed to limit the big players, since they have defacto monopolies. These players, sensing that the new law would cost them money, send their paid lobbists to increase their monopoly status. Hilarity ensues.
Re:Lack of basic understanding (Score:5, Insightful)
DSL/cable isn't being offered at a loss. This is simply untrue! Go check out the financial statements of your local exchange carrier (LEC) http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml [sec.gov]
Lots of them make huge coin and are paying out big dividends.
Forget the huge windfall later, most assume that data will eventually be commoditized in the way voice was (i.e., things will get worse).
Net Doublecharge (Score:4, Insightful)
AT&T wants to charge Google for carrying Google Net traffic, even if Google isn't directly connected to AT&T. Let's say Google is connected to GCom, which is connected to AT&T, and Google users are connected to UCom, which is connected to AT&T (of course there are really many more intermediaries, but the system works exactly the same). Google pays GCom for its traffic, while users pay UCom for their traffic. GCom and UCom each pay AT&T to carry their traffic. AT&T gets paid its portion by Google and its users through those intermediaries. AT&T gets paid twice, once in each direction, for every transaction, without marketing the traffic: Google does that risky part.
AT&T just wants to doublecharge Google, because 1: Google has money, and 2: AT&T has a blackmail toolkit, including the huge network used by so many people, and Congress. If they just raised their rates, the traffic would flow over the redundant Internet to their cheaper competitors. So they're getting their cartel^Windustry to add a new kind of charge that everyone will collect, killing competition.
What does the telecom carrier industry plan beyond just ripping off everyone paying for our distributed Net access? To start, they're planning to suck up the "fast lane" with video, IPTV, to "compete" with cable companies and independent distributors. Including YouTube and any other upstart not in the telco club. Charging competitors outside the cartel too much to stay in the game, just like they killed the DSL competition. They'll also squeeze out any upstart VoIP competition, so their core voice business can keep its 20th Century domain intact.
Of course, along the way, they'll kick the crap out of any independent media they carry which tells the truth to the people. With voice, video and data under their privileged control, as well as the government, how can they lose?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Same story, second verse, same as the first (Score:3, Insightful)
Because, one thing is for sure, without neutrality, you'd get exactly what you do NOT want. Webpage providers, especially ones like Google or Amazon, will pay the information highway tax. So webpages come in without delay. Game servers (at lease private game servers that host games like Counterstrike or other multiplayer games that aren't in the MMORPG area) most likely won't be able to afford it. Thus, they get held back.
That what you want?
Re:Same story, second verse, same as the first (Score:5, Insightful)
1) If you want a low-latency connection for gaming, nothing today stops you from doing that today. Contact your local telecom and ISPs and ask them what latencies they offer and at what price. There's nothing wrong with doing that, it happens today all the time.
For example, I work for a telemedicine company and our clients are hospitals who use low-latency high-bandwidth pipes, and they pay extra for that. They prioritize the audio/video traffic over the HTTP requests.
2) This would be a net neutrality issue if Microsoft paid Comcast to prioritize XBOX Live traffic over Playstation traffic. Or if Comcast bandwidth capped World of Warcraft traffic unless Blizzard or their customers paid them extra.
On A Smaller Scale: (Score:3, Insightful)
On a smaller scale, what if I had a son who was old enough for me to charge him rent. Let's say part of his rent went towards using my DSL. So my ISP is carrying both my and my son's traffic. Should they charge me extra because both of us use their service? Of course not. The bandwidth is bought and paid for regardless of where the traffic is coming from and who is generating it.
The same applies to the whole of the Internet. Some companies want to double-charge for their bandwidth, and it's wrong.
Re:Why the red herring? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, everyone pays their upstream provider. I really think this is the telcos being greedy and wanting more money.
With the backbone providers, here is what must be taken into consideration: each provider allows the traffic of the other providers to freely pass through their network in exchange for free passage on the other providers network. If the large telcos want to start charging for that traffic, they will raise costs for everyone using the internet.
If one provider starts charging for peer traffic, other providers will follow suit. This creates higher costs for all them. The increased costs will then be passed on to the customers because otherwise they would affect the precious profit margin. So one by one, the higher costs will passed on until everyone is paying a higher cost just to satisfy telco greed.
Re:Move on to MoveOn (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does every tech article, without fail, have more political jibes in it than tech comments? I just started reading the comments under this story, and this is only the first one I saw. I'm sure it won't be the last.
Unfortunately, the Internet has become a political battleground now, and the whole Net Neutrality issue has polarized opinions among techies and non-techies alike. Most people with a technical bent see Net Neutrality as necessary, to keep everyone on an even footing. The non-technical can't understand the fuss, because they lack the knowledge of how the technical side of the Internet works and how it's paid for. Let's face, how many people look closely at their phone bill and wonder just what it all means? All they know is, the phone keeps working if I pay the bill.
Now, you won't find a more opinionated person than your average Slashdot user. We squabble over Linux vs. Microsoft, Oracle vs. MySQL, Google vs. Yahoo!, etc. Even those fights are now becoming more political, because they involve legal challenges, laws, foreign governments, and the like. I think it's safe to say that now that the political wind is blowing so strong through IT, Slashdotters wound be hard pressed to saty out of the fight. So don't expect the political diatribes to die down in the foreseeable future. It's the price we're paying for our new technological culture.
Re:Why the red herring? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not so at all. Each network has a peering agreement with the other networks. The second in line and the first total up the amount of traffic they send and receive from one another and then one pays the other the difference or they call it even based upon the contract they've signed.
AT&T's complaint is that they have to carry this traffic for free across their network, and get nothing from this particular transaction.
No. Absolutely wrong. AT&T's complaint is that they have to carry all traffic of the same kind the same way. They can slow down all VoIP traffic, or all traffic from Comcast's network, or all Web traffic, but what the FCC mandated (until recently) was that they couldn't go to Mr. Smith on Comcast's network and say, "Dear Mr. Smith. We know you've recently lost a loved one and need the support and comfort your family provides via VoIP and e-mail. As a result we've decided that if you don't pay us (with whom you have no business relationship) $10 a month we're going to make sure all your VoIP calls drop sporadically and your e-mails take a week to get through. Have a nice day."
Until recently, they were prevented from gouging third parties by intentionally slowing or degrading the progress of just their traffic over AT&T's network unless they paid the extortion. They are not, of course, applying this to individuals, but only to businesses. For example, by degrading all Google queries, but not all MSN search queries unless Google pays up.
Now you might think the market will act on this. After all, Won't Google's upstream provider charge AT&T extra for more poorly carrying some of the traffic they send? The answer is sadly, not likely. You see, these network operators are businesses. Thus they want to charge different people different prices for the same service. Suppose it costs them $5 to carry some type of traffic. What they'd like to do is charge every customer absolutely as much as they can afford, but it is hard to win customers that way. This way, they can all gouge the richest customers, while still keeping enough companies between them and the company being gouged that they cannot effectively bypass it by switching providers.
Re:The law of unintended consequences at work (Score:3, Insightful)
So dig up the streets once and lay some nice big conduit for every tom dick and harry to pay to install in. When its full, you'll have received enough to dig the streets up again (several years later) and lay another nice big conduit. If the company fails they get a choice of pulling their lines out or selling them to the city to get the installation cost back, and the next company to come along gets an option to use those lines at a discount.
Re:Move on to MoveOn (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand. You opened an article about the fundamental rules of the Internet being rewritten by a bunch of technically illiterate politicians, and you're surprised to find people are discussing politics?
WTF do you expect people to be talking about?
I share your nostalgia for the days when politics wasn't a major topic here. Now please wake the fuck up.
It hurts new companies MUCH more than Google (Score:3, Insightful)
But if I come up with the next YouTube, I not only have to pay for my bandwidth, I'll also have to pay fees to all the other providers so my site isn't slow for their customers. This model empowers the telcos to keep Google on top and YouTube on bottom.
The FCC has provided protection of network neutrality up until just recently. All that is being asked is that it be reinstated so the telcos can't act on their short-sighted and greedy urges. So enough with the 'regulation is bad' crap. Do you really want to trust the telcos to do the right thing without it?!?
Get informed. Get irate. Call your representative in the Senate. If you don't, you might regret it later.
If you still don't get it, ask the ninja:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H69eCYcDcuQ [youtube.com]
Re:So, out of curiousity.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think net neutrality is a good idea in theory, but I am VERY afraid of the government getting involved. Let's sit back and let the free market work this out.