The Real Issue With Net Neutrality 239
An anonymous reader writes "TechDirt brings into focus one of the largest problems in the net neutrality debate, not the issues themselves, rather it's the people involved and the lies they like to sling. An example of this is certainly the number of lobbyists that are being looked to as 'experts' and getting their opinions published as such. One specific example was a recent piece published in the Baltimore Sun by Mike McCurry, a lobbyist working for AT&T who claimed that with new legislation working for net neutrality Google wouldn't have to pay a dime. In response, TechDirt has suggested that McCurry should swap telco bills with Google, somehow I doubt it will happen."
Re:you are getting ahead of yourself.... (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean "peaking." Blockbuster and NetFlix offices are running around freaking out as we push our net connections to 1Gb/s -- more than fast enough to display HD video real time to the home. While sales numbers may keep climbing, I would venture a guess (an industry-educated guess, at that) that the DVD is already replaced with XViD and fast connections. Two more "evolutionary" steps for video and HD-DVD will be forgotten, too.
For that matter, CD sales are still brisk (even now)
I'm already helping bands sell their music at shows straight-to-iPod. A US$100 device (basically a memory stick, a button and an iPod cable) lets bands make infinite margins since they have zero distribution cost (no CDs, no printing costs, etc). It won't be long for CD to be forgotten, either.
and there's a lot of dead trees turning into newspapers.
Massive layouts at every newspaper, the resurgence of limited-distribution zines online, and the blogosphere would disagree with you in terms of the next 2 years.
What the lobbyist really means (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with. (Score:4, Insightful)
The government has ALREADY created monopoly powers for internet companies - unless you want 45 different lines running down your street, you get one, maybe two providers.
The tradeoff that these natural monopolies provide is that they don't get to benefit from being a monopoly (i.e., regulation and price ceilings). It's a non-ideal solution for an unsolveable problem, but it's a necessary solution that is practical, much as the anti-regulation crowd may hate it.
Everyone I've seen rail against regulation on the grounds that "regulation never encourages competition" always seems to forget that Net Neutrality proponents are only trying to restore the very balance that DID exist, the balance that the FCC removed last year.
Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with. (Score:1, Insightful)
The problem is that competition in this case means that any yahoo with a business plan and a backhoe has to be given permission to dig up any street on any schedule. Anything else limits competition and makes this whole "competition will fix all problems" argument a cover for "we need to make sure we don't interfere with the entrenched players ability to control the market."
Oh yeah, and we need to bill AT&T for the BILLIONS we gave them to lay fibre. That would level the playing field real fast.
can a wired net be old hat? (Score:4, Insightful)
Municipalities are pushing wireless access. Home networking is hot. Wireless access is unibquitous. Add it up. Soon enough, links from one cloud to another will start to happen. When enough content exists within those hops to let users surf for longer and longer time periods before hopping to a big-pipe ISP, you're going to see this mess move on. The largest middleman of the internet to get cut is...the backbone!
To read the (some of) local newspapers in my hometown (oregonlive), I may be able to go from the city to them. I want more wireless hosting, or perhaps mirrors. It seems this is the only path towards skipping these monopoly wires. Then, they'll have to again offer better price/value points than this garbage bill.
Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with. (Score:3, Insightful)
The government has ALREADY created monopoly powers for internet companies - unless you want 45 different lines running down your street, you get one, maybe two providers.
Huh? Why is this a problem? 45 different lines won't occupy much more space than they already do -- plus I doubt we'd see this problem as I think we'd see companies dedicated to pulling lines to re-lease to others if we had more competition in the municipalities. To think that every company would want their own lines is unrealistic, just as every company doesn't do their own website hosting or handle their own business card printing in house or whatever. Companies that can offer services to others will always be around. I'd rather see 3 or 4 competitive line-leasers than 1. In my community, we already have about 8 ISPs over various mediums (and 2 WiFi ones).
The tradeoff that these natural monopolies provide is that they don't get to benefit from being a monopoly (i.e., regulation and price ceilings). It's a non-ideal solution for an unsolveable problem, but it's a necessary solution that is practical, much as the anti-regulation crowd may hate it.
Of course they get a benefit -- they get to set the prices without competition. They get to keep new technologies out of the market, as well. Cell phones were kept out of the market for decades because of Ma Bell's power over everyone else. DSL and Cable were kept out for a long time while old laws were replaced. It is a non-ideal solution because there is an ideal solution -- allow competition.
Everyone I've seen rail against regulation on the grounds that "regulation never encourages competition" always seems to forget that Net Neutrality proponents are only trying to restore the very balance that DID exist, the balance that the FCC removed last year.
It NEVER existed because the "net" was too young and companies were still trying to overcome technological barriers. The FCC is a great evil and arguably unconstitutional. No new law will create any balance or harmony, you have to be incredibly naive to believe that a new law will "balance" a market that is already very competitive and working just fine. Net neutrality, as I said in my OP, is FUD. It doesn't need to exist based on a law, it exists fine without any regulation.
The lay have no way to truly know (Score:5, Insightful)
I have spent the last few months speaking (sometimes drunkenly) at great lengths about the net neutrality concept - a concept, which quite frankly, I had taken for granted (I didn't really realize the net was neutral, it's just how it has to work). Many of my friends had fallen for the idea that a tiered internet would simply mean better and faster access to video and music. After all, didn't they pay more for "premium" channels on TV?
My one friend, so adamant - largly because he is naturally agumentative - finally began to realize how easily those in power (and today information is power - has it even not been?) can manipulate the ignorant. He realized this only after he asked me to look at his computer to see why his comcast was so slow (and why his vonage was cutting-out).
I ran a simple trace route and noticed that it appeared requests to local IPs were being routed through dallas and new york from his home in Sacramento. I told him I didn't think this was the best way to reduce the latency he was getting from his long distance calls and online gaming. I hypothesize that by comcast routing some clients through these innefecient routes they were somehow load-balancing the demand on their network (of course, new york, dallas, and chicago could just be fancy names for comcast's local california routers - but it seems a dubious naming scheme for local devices).
Without me, his technical friend, he would simply continue to accept his connection as is - and in fact may begin to attribute his degraded service to the FUD of the internet "falling apart".
There are so few of us who can fully (or at least somewhat) grasp what the debate really means - how can the vast majority of non-technical, voting citizens possibly make informed decisions about this?
Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with. (Score:5, Insightful)
I consider myself a Republican, but I'm going to say something against the party line - the free market does NOT solve all ills! Where exactly is this competition of which you speak? Tell that to the masses of Americans who do not live in large towns and have only source for broadband. Where exactly do they go when their local broadband provider charges them AND Google and friends more?
Guys like you always spout off the same tired nonsense - "If company A charges me too much for broadband, then I'll go to company B!" What exactly do you when there is no company B in your small town?
There are things in life in which it is useful to have government regulation. There are things in which it is useful to not have government regulation. I feel sorry for you that you are yet another person too blind to see that. You are going to get your wish. It's clear that Net Nuetrality is dead and for better or worse (probably worse) we're going to have to live with that.
By the way, AOL and Prodigy are both still around. I don't know about Compuserve. In the case of AOL, I think it wasn't just competition that killed them but other factors.
1) Increasing technical knowledge by their customers who finally realized that there was more to the internet than AOL and its hand holding.
2) Increasing desire of Americans to move to broadband with the realization that AOL didn't really offer any value for the extra money if they already had broadband. It's one thing to pay AOL for a dial up connection. It's something else to pay for broadband AND then pay for AOL on top of that.
3) AOL's prices weren't very good compared to the competition.
4) AOL's very unpopular mail campaigns may have, in fact, turned off potential customers.
5) AOL's terrible reputation for customers being unable to cancel service surely was a huge negative. If you're a 22 year old graduate on your own for the first time are you going to sign up with a service that makes it essentially impossible to cancel? Probably not.
Re:Potatoes are a series of tubers (Score:3, Insightful)
You get to shut the fuck up, or at least not post anonymously. Or when I have more time, I'll carefully rip apart the pile of crap you linked to. "If it had been left to the government..." Yes, but it was done with BOTH the corporations AND government support. Take government funds, suffer goverment regulations. Fair's fair.
Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with. (Score:1, Insightful)
Well this may be well and good for you, but what about where I live and not a single high speed service provider finds it worth the money to provide internet access. Eventually, some company might, but when there is only one provider for internet access, net neutrality really comes into play.
Re:you are getting ahead of yourself.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Net Neutrality and Quality of Service (Score:5, Insightful)
What is important in Network Neutrality legislation is to ensure that Internet providers do not discriminate based on: (a) the type of content sent, or (b) the sender and/or receiver. What sort of discrimination should be permitted, however, is a differentiation of "quality of service" depending on what the sender/receiver has paid for: with the same rates applying across all of their customers. Hence, the legislation in this area should permit technical advancement in mechanism to partition service based on quality -- but not innovations which extract monopoly rent from particularly lucrative customers and/or content types (or unfavored customers and/or content types).
A good analogy is sending first-class mail via USPS, the price is the same no matter where the destination is and regardless of what the letter in the envelope says. The "common carrier" doesn't open up letters to see if there is a check/cash inside, and charge a 1% fee for sending monetary instruments. The USPS doesn't differentiate between Joe or Martha in line, play political favoritism, or deliver particular customer's mail faster than others, etc. What USPS does differentiate on is the size of the content sent (ie, number of letters) and on the speed of delivery -- you can get 2nd day overnight, etc. The point is, all businesses and content are equal from the point of view of the mail carrier. So too should the transmission of internet packets be neutral to the sender/receiver and the actual message sent.
By fighting that all packets are equal is a losing (and wrong headed) battle. What is important is that we fight for democracy on the Internet: Vonage should get the same quality of service per dollar as AT&T VoIP services and even completely unrelated content, such as Google searches. What is being sent and by whom should be forbidden from the price/quality curve - but there should be a curve.
Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardly. As long as there is competition in a hugely capital-intensive market, you'll have a minimum of providers undercutting potential new competition, along with collusion. At best you'll get very, very slow one-upmanship without major capital improvements.
Let it crush more? So that we have fewer, not more, options as to how we get deliverables? Unregulated markets of non-commodity goods (like internet service) result in monopolies and oligopolies. That's the natural state... even your totally unregulated Austrian model has to adjust for monopolistic force in order to work properly. If you really want better performance in terms of net result for the consumer, you either need to take actions to prevent monopolies, or take actions to regulate them -- whether you're from the Austrian school of thought (such as yourself), the Keynesian (such as the FRB), or another (such as myself). In the case of the telcos, it was determined that regulation was a better bet because of the alternative would have either been state-owned infrastructure, or no service to less dense areas.
McCurry's Favors (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course it doesn't -- but it can. I bet that most of the ills you speak of are completely non-existent.
Where exactly is this competition of which you speak? Tell that to the masses of Americans who do not live in large towns and have only source for broadband. Where exactly do they go when their local broadband provider charges them AND Google and friends more?
So start your own provider. I live in a tiny town of about 2000-3000 people. I run my own mini-ISP with my ISP's approval (WiFi to about 32 neighbors now). I used to own property in a farm town in western Illinois, and I set up a very expensive digital line to provide service to about 15 houses out there. They each pay about US$70 for the line and it works great. I long left the area, but I've heard that two more companies have started to compete. In some towns, they can't compete because the town doesn't allow it.
If there is no competition, it is for two reasons: government says no, or there is no demand. Why supply in either case?
By the way, AOL and Prodigy are both still around.
Sure they are, as competitors to the rest. They were HUGE for years, though, and many people thought they'd be monopolies. Competition eased that concern -- not the law.
I'm no republican, in fact I detest the republicans more than the democrats 50% of the time (vice versa the other 50% of the time). I am a-political. If there is a demand, the market will provide a supply if it is not restricted from doing so.
Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with. (Score:3, Insightful)
And herein lies the rub. What are you going to do when your mini-ISP's ISP kills all your clients' connections to Google? Switch to another ISP who... suprise! ultimately gets their internet connection from the same place you did and is currently having the same problem?
Regulation or no regulation, once the telcos and cable companies have crossed this line, it will be VERY expensive to fix it if they can't be forced to retreat on their own (and seriously, now that the statement of intent has been made, how will one ever know that they have retreated, or that they haven't already crossed the line?). In the meantime, we might as well go back to the old uucp days. I hear the telcos offer reasonably priced flat rate long distance these days...
Re:you are getting ahead of yourself.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The scary part of that map is that the green areas are areas in which there is still no viable competition. One telco plus one cable modem provider does not competition make. That means for maybe 3% of the country, there is a true broadband marketplace, and the other 97% still gets stuck with a bill for $50/month for 384/128k. Yes, I'm exaggerating a little, but only a little....
Re:Swap telco bills? WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
mi said: The telco's are supposed to already be regulated by the FCC (part of the executive branch of the government) because they are already monopolies. The current administration is trying to dismantle as much regulation as it can get away with. These efforts recently did away with enforcing regulations that had been keep the Net "neutral".
In theory at least, our government is composed of three official branches which are supposed to balance power through a system of checks and balances. If the Legislature feels that the Executive is abusing its power by being way too lax in enforcing the existing laws and regulations then the proper way for them to deal with that situation is to pass new, more explicit, laws even though there are already laws on the books that have been working just great for the past 100 years. This is how our government is supposed to function.
To put it in other words: we didn't have a friggin' Internet 100 years ago so laws that were meant to regulate the steel, gas, and railroad industries may need to be updated in order to be applied correctly to a type of monopoly that wasn't even imagined 100 years ago.
The problem with let the market decide argument... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would agree that there should be no legislation to force any net neutrality on telcos, but these companies are expressing their INTENT to discriminate against specific content providers. And when both your dsl and cable company discriminate in a similar fashion, by having tiered services, how can you choose to take your business elsewhere?
Put yourself in the shoes of the executives at the telco companies. If you want to maximize your company's profits, the best thing to do might be to create an artificial shortage of bandwidth for everyone once ANY company is willing to pay for premium routing service. Now consider the point of view of the content providers. You might want to be the first company willing to pay AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc. for premium routing service so that you have a competitive advantage in terms of performance. Of course, you will only want to pay for premium service if there is a performance benefit compared to non-premium service, hence discrimination is key for opening this new revenue source.
Yes, letting the market decide instead of forcing legislation is the best option in a truly competitive environment, but we do not have such competition in the U.S.
Re:you are getting ahead of yourself.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:w/out early efforts they couldnt call anybody! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is foolish. The radio technology could've solved that "last 10 miles" problem", if the government had not created the land-line monopolies, for example.
And? What exactly is wrong?
I would very much like to avoid this piece of history being repeated.
Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with. (Score:3, Insightful)
No they don't; they're supposed to be "common carriers" which means they can't discriminate based on content (for example, by charging more for some packets because they came from Google). The monopoly ISPs are trying to abolish that; most everyone else is trying to keep it.
What are you talking about?! The telcos won't do that; half the time they're the monopolies in the first place! At most, all that would happen is that they'd collude with the cable company to form a duopoly and the end users would still be screwed because both of them would suck (this is the case in metro Atlanta; we get to "choose" between BellSouth and Comcast -- whoop-de-do).
Besides, my point is that your scenario wouldn't even have a chance to happen because if the telco (and cable -- they're on the same side) lobbyists win we'll lose net neutrality WITHOUT getting rid of the government-supported monopolies!
Net neutrality issue ridiculous, lobbying worse (Score:3, Insightful)
The long and short of it, I explain the issues to some of the non savvy, and outline that it's ridiculous, and the real problem is the super wealthy and powerful shoving government around... or rather that the government listens more to the money than to the issues.
Re:The lay have no way to truly know (Score:1, Insightful)
Probably the same way technical friends can hope to have a chance of understanding our new world of today [*] and how Internet routing and peering work.
I ran a simple trace route and noticed that it appeared requests to local IPs were being routed through dallas and new york from his home in Sacramento. I told him I didn't think this was the best way to reduce the latency he was getting from his long distance calls and online gaming. I hypothesize that by comcast routing some clients through these innefecient routes they were somehow load-balancing the demand on their network
Oh. It seems we have a long way to go. Ask yourself, why would Comcast desire to consume bandwidth on expensive cross-country circuits if they had the option of getting the traffic out of their network sooner (locally) instead? Could it be that Comcast was routing your friend's traffic cross-country because that's where they peer with the destination's ISP? You could start by taking a look at the Wikipedia article on hot potato routing [wikipedia.org].
[*] Not to mention our old world of tomorrow and our current world of yesterday.