On Entangling and Testing Net Neutrality 185
P3titPrince writes "In an NYT op-ed today, Timothy B. Lee argues that legislation specifically guaranteeing Net Neutrality would in fact be less effective than just allowing the status quo." From the article: "It's tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise. The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage. Economists have dubbed this process 'regulatory capture,' and they can point to plenty of examples. The airline industry was a cozy cartel before being deregulated in the 1970's. Today, government regulation of cable television is the primary obstacle to competition." Relatedly, winnabago writes "Computerworld reports on a potential method for testing a net connection for neutrality. Somewhat similar to Traceroute, the software uses spoof packets that appear to be from a potentially throttled source and compares the transmission time to that of neutral traffic."
Re:Ummm... no... (Score:3, Informative)
If you understand how CoS works, you will relize that turning that on a public network will have little or no affect on 99.999% of the hosts connected to that network. This is law for the sake of law, and certainly not going to protect google or vonage from anything. It could concievably make it MORE difficult for them to do business, as the carriers begin to oversubscribe thier infrastructure more, lack of effective CoS will put vonage out of business.
Do you really think Vonage can make a case that the cable company has to buy more Public Internet access because Vonage's application doesnt work right over thier network? Aint gonna happen!
Tangentially related... (Score:4, Informative)
confused with Tim Berners-Lee, Web inventor and NetNeutrality proponent [mit.edu].
Re:That last bit. (Score:4, Informative)
Strange... (Score:3, Informative)
So long as they as it costs as much for them to provide a given service as a competitior, I have no problem with them creating tiered services.
Re:NN? (Score:5, Informative)
This will never happen. Google bought all that dark fiber so they could ferry all their massive internal dataloads from A to B without paying through the nose for it. They made a long term decision and figured it would be cheaper in the long run to have their own transcontinental (G)LAN rather than keep ponying up to the major telcos. Big companies do this.
Do you think those fibers are still dark? Right now they're probably at full capacity shifting the teraquads of dataload upon dataload upon dataload back and forth between to Google legions of analyists and their analysiers, so they can confirm that, yes indeed, people really do think those ads are search results.
Bandwidth commodity trading (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The question I have. (Score:4, Informative)
Which could lead to discrimination against content you don't like (e.g. fast access to nra.org, shutting aclu.org to a trickle), but it's site-based, not something you can fix with encryption unless you start talking about fancy stuff like onion routing. Even that doesn't really help, because they could throttle everything except packets directly to their paid providers.
What guarantees network neutrality is your ability to switch to a neutral ISP if you don't get the access you want. That only works if you have competition among ISPs, which too many people don't.
For your second question, there's also a notion of using special protocols (quality of service, QoS) to guarantee certain bandwidth between two sites on a site-by-site basis. So if you want to watch a movie in real time, and you want to guarantee that there's at least 1 Mbps available between the sites, the ISPs want to be able to charge you for that guarantee.
Most ISPs make very little in the way of guarantees to individual users. (High-level providers like the one amazon uses are a different story). Guaranteeing 1 Mbps constantly requires a lot more hardware than they have now, and most of the time that's just fine, because most Internet traffic comes in short burts. It becomes not-fine only when you have a specific requirement, like watching a movie or a VOIP conversation, or a web site that you absolutely must keep running 99.999% of the time or you'll scare away the customers.
Re:Strange... (Score:3, Informative)
They have that infrastructure because they have control over the pipe into my home. In most locations the competition for that pipe is, at most, two companies (one for phone and one for cable). There is a natural monopoly in this because it's incredibly expensive and legally complicated to wire up individual homes. This was acknowledged long ago and government regulation helped make wiring up all those homes feasible. It is more efficient to have one or two companies have exclusive access, but because it's limited, it's also important for those companies to be regulated.
Claiming this as a 'reason' for needed net neutrality is like saying people who choose to shell out for a high rise apartment need to wall up thier windows because they have an unfair advanatge over a bum living in an alley!
More accurately it'd be like the people who are GIVEN a high rise apartment getting cranky when the people who gave it to them want to come over for a visit and check out their great view.
Re:Strange... (Score:3, Informative)
So long as that is the case, competition can only exist in a regime of government regulation that forces it to exist.
Re:Bad Analogy (Score:3, Informative)
This includes 10 Mbps up/down Internet access, telephony, and a basic cable TV package (about 30 channels).
Upgrade to 100 Mbps Internet is also available.
Would you call that reasonable?
Technical Corrections (Score:3, Informative)
The big impacts on latency are how far you're going (speed of light is about 100,000 miles/sec in fiber or copper), which isn't affected by what provider you use unless you get backhauled to the other coast or something, how long it takes to put a packet on a wire (depends on the packet size and wire size), and how many packets you have to wait for (at the DSL layer, it mainly depends on how oversold your ISP's regional ATM connections are, and at the IP layer, it depends on what order the packets get put on the wire - do your VOIP packets go first, or do they get stuck waiting for a bunch of BitTorrent or FTP packets?
The newer proposals from the telcos propose splitting ADSL or FTTH bandwidth into two parts - one used to carry Internet and one used to carry television. The pricing models I've seen in the press are mainly clueless about people who'd _want_ to buy a whole 25 Mbps of internet and 0 Mbps of TV; TV needs about 15 Mbps, and they're assuming they'll get to sell you 1.5, 3, or 6 Mbps of internet at prices similar to the current services, and we'll see how long that lasts :-) One channel of HDTV needs about 9 Mbps, and the most cut-throat pricing I've seen for Internet transit bandwidth is about $10/Mbps/month, so don't expect to get unicast any-source Internet access to watch HDTV at prime-time as part of the $19.95 loss-leader special; the ISPs will need to use multicast feeds from the content providers to your telco office.
As far as natural monopolies go, the economics and technology were much different back when Theodore Vail and the other robber barons got government monopolies on local telephone service and on radio broadcasting, and the argument was pretty dubious mercantilism back then (and the unnatural monopolies on wireline and radio services prevented them from competing with each other.) They're much more bogus today, but the regulatory bureaucracies are bigger than ever. I may be an official old geezer by now, but that was still way before my time. However, I _was_ around to see cable TV networks installed in much of the country, and the big issues weren't the real cost of deployment - they were the rent-seeking by towns and counties who were much less concerned about the future of telecommunications competition than they were about whose brother-in-law got the street-paving contracts, and about how much free air time the city council and public-access videos got.