Poll Says No Voter Support for Net Neutrality 337
Giants2.0 writes "A survey conducted by the Commerce Committee says that Americans don't know what net neutrality is, and they don't want it. Ars Technica reports that only 7% of respondents had ever heard of net neutrality, but the report questions the fairness of the survey, which was crafted by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation to assess support for the current version of the Telecommunications Act of 2006. The survey suggested to respondents that net neutrality would prevent ISPs from selling faster service or security products, both of which are not true." From the article: "The very brief net neutrality description used by the pollsters is somewhat misleading insofar as it suggests that net neutrality would bar Internet Service Providers from selling faster service than is available today. Strict net neutrality does not concern itself with ultimate transfer speeds available to subscribers, but instead focuses on how different kinds of Internet traffic could be shaped by ISPs for anti-competitive purposes. For instance, strict net neutrality would not prevent an ISP from selling extremely fast 35Mbps connections, but it would prevent ISPs from privileging traffic for their own services for competitive advantage, or degrading the traffic of competing services."
Don't know what it is, don't want it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gee, that's amazing. I wonder if that could be because almost all the media in the US is owned by ten megacorporations, and they don't report on things that they don't want us to hear about?
If this subject interests you, I suggest watching Orwell Rolls in his Grave [hyperlogos.org]. (ObDisclaimer: link to a review on my website, amazon referral link if you clicky from there. You know what to do if you want to find it somewhere else. I do not sell ads, I don't get money for page views.)
Re:Commercials (Score:2, Insightful)
Did telecoms design the survey? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that it is extremely unethical for a committee to try and shape public opinion through the misuse of untrue information on their survey.
Net Neutral = Fair (Score:5, Insightful)
It all depends on how you ask the question (Score:5, Insightful)
For comparison, Cato [cato.org] has similar things to say about polling for support of school vouchers. When you imply in the question that other countries are doing it with great success, people are in favor. When you imply that it would hurt the public schools, people are against it. Shocking.
Some Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably not malice (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't stop creationist ministers who don't study biophysics, self-righteous atheists who attack religous people, race-baiting anti-immigrant types who don't full understand NAFTA and GATT or people jumping the anti-welfare bandwagon without knowing anything about how public assistance works.
Its usually the least informed who have the most to say.
The problem with democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't know what it is either (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, you are on the west coast with ISP A.
The server you want to talk to is on the east cost with ISP B.
Backbone provider C sits in the middle, and your packets want to cross over their network.
C decides that B hasn't payed them enough money, and thus slows down packets to and from B that cross over C.
From your end, it looks like service is degraded and your ISP sucks. What do you do? Switch ISPs? It won't help if you still have to cross C to get to B. So there's really no way to "vote with your dollars" in this case -- as if that would work anyway, because like I said you won't know the root cause.
Network neutrality is a basic part of the net's design. So basic nobody thought to codify it until it became clear that certain money grubbers want to eliminate it. Sorry GP, but regulation is the only way to fix this problem.
Call me old.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Now I just feel this being segmented, sliced up, analized, commercialize, and legalized. Don't get me wrong, some of it has been good. Would have never gotten outta dial up days if nothing happened to it but the face of the internet in another 10 years scares me.
Am I gonna need a passport to go to a website in another country?
Will I have to log into more then one "Internet" depending on who I am and where I want to go?
I think, the price of the internet should eventualy move to nothing, with the right commercalization wouldn't commerce want to you log on to the net like they want you to turn on your TV?
Don 't know what Common Carriage is either (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't know what Common Carriage is either, but benefit greatly from it. Net Neutrality is basically trying to re-frame Common Carriage as something new, unnecessary and unproven rather than old, essential to business, and time tested. It was what allowed all the small ISPs and software companies to flourish in the last two decades: it prevented newer business and services from being locked out by more established ones, it prevented ISPs and hosting companies for being liable for the content produced by their customers.
Now that a handful of megacorps have crushed or absorbed all of the small ones, and it's really hard for these to crush or absorb each other using the same methods. Going back to the pathetic crumbly, balkanized patchwork of non-interoperable, 1960-style proprietary networks seems to be what these want to try again. It gives exponential advantage to larger market share. Common Carriage is preventing these megacorps from balkanizing the net. So far...
How about a poll phrasing it this way:
"Are you in favor of equal access to the net or would you prefer to allow groups and businesses to be closed out by the big players and to allow ISPs to give you slower service unless you pay extra?"
Inherent Flaw? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yikes (Score:2, Insightful)
What's in a name? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe we can call it "Not being sodomized by the bastards" or "Not paying extra for crap service" or "Leave my Skype alone!"
Re:Interesting to see cunning use of questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Some Perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
Why you should want net neutrality regulation: (Score:1, Insightful)
Even for a capitalist, regulation isn't all bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Those cases mostly arise when the market either has already, or threatens to create a situation that prevents future competition in the market. For this reason, you have anti-trust laws and lots of other regulations; the goal of them is to create a basically level playing field on which various firms can compete for business. This is how the system is supposed to work. Let the market work when it can, but when it won't produce the desired outcome on its own (where the desired outcome is determined through the democratic process), then there's a place for regulation to step in and create the environment where it will.
Now I think we can all agree that the outcome that most users want is not one where there is nothing but a series of regional monopolies, dispensing to users your telephone, cable TV, and internet, and charging exorbitant rates to do so, far in excess of what other people in other parts of the world pay. Therefore, if this seems to be the likely result of noninterference, then the government has a mandate to inject itself and regulate.
Although the government does have a history of mucking things up where it's not needed, history does show that there are times when regulation by some sort of governing body is both necessary and in the long run, beneficial. (E.g., securities markets.*) Also, governments have been engaging in infrastructure-development projects since probably the beginning of recorded history, and in the 21st century, the Internet is as much an important economic thoroughfare as the Interstate Highways are. Allowing a small number of companies to control and manipulate our electronic "tubes," would be akin to handing over control of the highways to Ford, GM, and Chrysler in 1955, so that they could prohibit Japanese cars from driving on them.
* - For a pro-capitalist analysis of the development of the U.S. securities markets prior to regulation, I recommend reading The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street; I think most people who advocate complete deregulation aren't quite appreciative of how rough things were prior to its introduction.
Re:I don't know what it is either (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't block Net Neutrality on the grounds that it introduces government regulation to the net, when the very existence of the infrastructure on which the net runs is due to a whole raft of government-granted monopolies, government claims of eminent domain, etc.
The day I can start charging Verizon rent for the lines they keep on my property, instead of just giving them those rights for free because the government tells me to, is the day I'll buy the "no government regulation of the net" argument against Net Neutrality.
Re:I don't know what it is either (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Call me old.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Big business will charge you any way they can. And they'll usually make you watch ads at the same time. Ads that they charged someone else to put there.
Does no one see where this leads? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me try and break this down into small, understandable chunks:
Scenario A: The Die Hard Gamer
Johnny plays Unreal Tournament 2004 and Quake 4 almost religiously. He has a nice DSL connection and usually sees ping times under 30ms to his favorite servers. His DSL provider contacts him and informs him that due to a restructuring, his $54.95 a month now only allows him 'Standard' service. He notices that his ping time has risen to over 200ms during his gaming sessions, significantly impacting his ability to play online games, but sees no other real latency issues while surfing. Another phone call to his ISP informs him that for the low, low price of $14.95, they will stop prioritizing his gaming packets lower than all other traffic. They would call it the 'Gaming Extreme' package. Now, Johnny is spending $15 more a month, just because his ISP has the ability to prioritize his traffic as they see fit.
THAT SUCKS.
Scenario B: The Mom and Pop Shop ISP
Mom and Pop start an ISP and have a big contract with Concentric, one of the bigger backbones. A high percentage of their customers are in the SW, and a lot of what their customers do involves servers in the NE. In order for the data to get from Customer to End Server, it passes through Mom and Pop, Concentric, Cogent, and Level3. (I know, I know, it wouldn't likely go through that much.) Cogent and Concentric are at odds, because Cogent wants to charge Concentric $1.00 per megabyte for priority speeds. Concentric told Cogent to stuff it, so now every packet going through Cogent has 4x the latency of 'priority' traffic. As Cogent is a bunch of idiots in this example, it's not much of a stretch to assume that Level3 dislikes them as well. Level3 won't pay Cogent for priority traffic, either. So now, Level3 is slowing down Cogent's traffic, and Cogent is slowing down Concentric's traffic. This results in your latency being between 500ms and 750ms, instead of 30ms to 50ms. All because some assface in a suit at some table wants his $1.5M salary pushed up by another $250k/year.
If reading THAT doesn't make you understand that 'waiting to see' is the stupidest idea in the history of stupid ideas, GET THE HELL OFF THE INTERNET. No one wants you here if you don't have the slightest of interest in the longevity and perserverence of the network.
Re:Commercials (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone know the PR firm who produced these ads?
Re:Your wallet is worthless. (Score:4, Insightful)
They are spending huge amounts of research money on this... when the switch flips they will make back the research spending in DAYS! that's how much money is at stake here.
Re:What do you expect? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, but such a shame that none of them are running the country
Re:I don't know what it is either (Score:5, Insightful)
A big problem is that whenever one of these massive companies notices a potential regulatory threat to their cash cow, they simply sponsor a few senators and their parties and get the entire thing stopped.
Re:I don't know what it is either (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Commercials (Score:4, Insightful)
What even sadder is that I don't have even a remote clue of how to answer this problem. No matter what I think of, someone will find a way to absorb resources allocated for any project, and ultimately ruin it. What's there to do with a population that blatantly REFUSES to educate itself, and an upper echelon that uses that to bone the rest of us?
Re:I don't know what it is either (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, yet. Are you implying that therefore the ISPs might not actually want to? Then why are they fighting so hard against net neutrality? It certainly isn't because they're averse to government regulation, seeing as how that's why most of them exist as localized monopolies! There's clearly a desire to implement tiered services, and to target packets to slow them down. They will do it, it is only a matter of time.
Personally, I prefer to fix issues before they become a problem. Kinda like fixing your tire design before the first SUV flips over. But waiting until the obvious problem actually bites you in the ass sure is the typical market way of dealing with things.
I say at least let the market try first (may or may not work), then if an actual problem arises, try regulation.
I'd be interested to hear how it could work. Where's the market incentive? As I was pointing out, it's not like end users can actually affect anything, assuming they can even tell what is going on.
Once regulation starts, it's only going to get more pervasive. There is a good chance that regulation will be worse than the problems that may arise without it.
There's already regulation. Regulation is why the internet exists in the first place. Internet is better than no internet, and net neutrality is better than no net neutrality. Even if the legislation that brings it about has its own negative side effects. The balkanization of the internet is a terrible problem. I do not see a good chance that even particularly bad legislation would be worse, so long as it enforced neutrality.
hold on a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
self-righteous atheists who attack religous people.
For one, in my experience, it's almost always the other way around. In particular, one of the preferred attacks is to claim that atheists are always attacking them and trying to repress their beliefs, which is laughable in a country like the US where 80%+ of people are Christians, and an open atheist stands no chance of getting elected to national office. There is a minority of new atheists who are obnoxious asshats, but they usually calm down after a while, and they're no worse than born-again Christians, who (on the other hand) tend to never get less shrill.
Its usually the least informed who have the most to say.
For another thing, most atheists I know are quite familiar with the commmon arguments for and against the existence of God and knows at least a bit about the history of Christianity and the Bible. (Often weak on other religions, but hey, Christians are the majority religion here and are often big proselytizers.) Atheism is not a position most people come to passively or inherit from their parents -- unlike most religions. The atheists I know are well read, thoughtful, rational, highly informed people.
Re:Commercials (Score:3, Insightful)
Educate yourself, get the the upper echelon and bone the rest of us.
Re:The problem with democracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Indigenous cultures managed their affairs very well for tens of thousands of years before our culture came along. And in less than a planetary blink of an eye, we've spread across the planet and brought ourselves to the brink of destruction MORE than once.
It seems the problem isn't with the species (there are plenty of other human cultures to hold up as examples), but with our particular culture.
Re:I don't know what it is either (Score:3, Insightful)
A) If the telecoms don't intend to implement tiered services, then how are they going to pay for all of this magical, mythical, better Internet, which net-neutrality would supposedly prevent? They argue that they won't be able to "upgrade the Internet", but doesn't that directly imply that they want to use a non-neutral internet? It's funny since part of their defense against net neutrality is "There's not proof that anyone has been implementing tiered services."
B) It has happened. A couple of months ago, the Vonage forums had one post with many, many pages of replies about difficulties using Vonage with Comcast Internet in areas where Comcast also offered VoIP service.
C) Once the problem arises, it will be too late to do anything about it. The Guv'ment is deciding, with the help of lobbyists on both sides, whether to allow it or not. Whichever way they decide will determine the way the businesses of the Internet will align their business models. There's no simple way to go back and regulate, when everyone will have already been building the Internet in the wrong direction.
D) One of the inital cool things about the "Intarweb" was that any kid in his basement could have a website, and so could big corporations, governments, churches, schools, and anyone else. Not only will a tiered Internet take small-time folks out of the game almost entirely, it will also force the big corporations and everyone else align with specific providers for their sites to be available, or to be useable. You don't have AT&T? Sorry you can't go to Amazon.com. You don't get your Internet service from Comcast? Sorry, you can't read Slashdot. You'll have to read Comcast's own "News for nerdy Comcast subscribers". How does that not sound wrong to you?
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:3, Insightful)
They were talking about atheism, not secularism. While it's true that the genocides in Russia and China were secularist acts, it's completely wrong to claim that the primary reason was to persecute religious people. Those governments were trying to establish power and religious organisations were in strong opposition; the genocides were mostly political. In any event, it's a frivolous claim that the genocides were secularist, because anything which isn't religious is secularist. The majority of things that happen in this world are secularist activities. Secularist governments are the most sought after - the US government is an example of a secularist government. Secularism simply means making decisions without consideration of religious beliefs.
Back to atheism. That atheism had anything to do with the horrors in China and Russia is a nonsense taught during the McCarthy era. McCarthy used that rhetoric to promote distrust of China and Russia by implying they were "godless heathens" and that godlessness led to evil acts. It's not true. China was Buddhist during the 1900s, now tending towards Christianity. Russia was and is Orthodox. It's true that neither country had a state-sponsored religion. It's also true that both country's governments persecuted minority religions. In both respects that is exactly the same as the USA back then and even now.
The horrors in those countries were a direct result of totalitarian fascist governments. Guess which superpower is exhibiting those same qualities today.
Re:I don't know what it is either (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, I'm not suggesting this as a workable solution. If Verizon had to actually deal with the free market, and obtain the right to lay line on everyone's land, they wouldn't exist. The logistics would be impossible. That's the point. The internet is a public good, like the road systems or sewer systems. The only way these systems can be created is through government circumvention of the fundamental property rights of citizens. Thus, its stupid to argue that government regulation will destroy free market competition, because there is no free market involved.
Re:I don't know what it is either (Score:3, Insightful)
I maintain that this whole thing is way overblown and that geting the government (note correct spelling) involved in regulation based on speculation is not a good idea.
Okay, then, to pick a nit, what is your logical basis (founded in solid evidence, of course) for maintaining that this whole thing is overblown?
It's one thing to say that you don't believe that it's likely, but a statement like that reads as if countless hours of research and/or thought had gone into solidifying it into a personal faith.
There are two basic ways to approach it, one tends to presuppose a lack of action, and one tends to presuppose a certain action of a certain type. Given that the industry lobbying against Net Neutrality is the telecom industry (who would be in a position to generate more revenue from existing services if there is no such legislation), is it reasonable to assume that there would be a lack of action on their part without net neutrality legislation to halt it?
I propose that the answer to that question is "No, it is not reasonable to assume that", and there is, indeed a fair bit of thought and research behind my thinking.
There is ample evidence that telecom companies actively lobby for legislation and/or regulation that furthers their business interests. Most notably, in recent years, against CLECs and Cable operators that wanted to offer similar services to those offered by the telecom companies.
Alongside those types of activities has been a moving-target push to get more revenue from internet services. First, internet service was expensive, DSL and T-1 lines made significant revenue for the telcos, along with local loop charges on top of the actual bandwidth charges. The unrelenting push of the internet closer and closer to the customer drove down prices for consumer and commercial broadband connections (and pretty much killed frame relay), and forced some communications companies into actual fights over previously amicable peering arrangements (Level 3 and Cogent being the prime example). With it becoming obvious that cutting off service completely to other networks mainly serves to anger your customers, and not your peering partner, there became fewer viable opportunities to generate new revenue.
Next, came the idea that Net Neutrality is meant to address, which is that of degrading service to certain portions of the internet unless an additional fee is paid by a company or companies with sites connected to that portion of the internet. "Tiered" internet service can also be called "selective" internet service, since the telco gets to select which parts of the internet will work best for their customers.
The last option, and the one that telcos don't want to use, is that of raising subscription prices. It's unattractive because it forces real competition, and because doing so will raise some pointed quiestions about Fiber-To-The-Premises and the large amount of money every single phone and internet bill contributes to the FUSF (or FUCR) fee that goes back to the telcos to build high speed connections to every neighborhood. That's government money lobbied for by them and paid by you and I.
Not having to do that means less questions about those fees, and more time to dip into the federal money supply to support their businesses.
That's a lot to think about, and it's certainly all researchable. There are plenty of reasons to think that the telcos *will* implement service degradation, if it's seen as being okay. A survey like this, while obvious to many who are paying attention, is fodder for the PR machines of those telcos to say "Net Neutrality is bad, and everyone thinks so", even if it's based on the answers of 800 people who mostly haven't heard the term.
Idontagreewithyou, I don't agree with you.