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."
NN? (Score:4, Interesting)
Net Neutrality problems solved, at least for Google.
Re:NN? (Score:2)
Will it be invitation only?
Re:NN? (Score:2, Funny)
Rebuild the net the way they think that it should be. Tie in all services to their brand new
Of course, the last time I told them that, they never answered me. Maybe I shouldn't have sworn so much in the email. Telling them to 'fuckin' bury Microsoft' probably didn't add to my id
Re:NN? (Score:2)
It would also probably have helped if your suggestion made sense. How could creating a new TLD -- which has nothing to do with Quality-Of-Service or TCP/IP itself -- fix anything related to net neutrality?
Re:NN? (Score:2)
Re:NN? (Score:2)
Easy... (Score:5, Funny)
Anybody who's experiencing problems due to clogged Tubes is well-advised to deploy as much Fiber as possible.
Re:Easy... (Score:2)
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.
Re:NN? (Score:2)
Now that's what we're talking about it would be like getting a drink out of a firehose hooking your 'pu
Re:NN? (Score:2)
After reading that, both I and my PC need to take a dump.
Re:NN? (Score:2)
Re:NN? (Score:2)
Re:NN? (Score:2)
With all the fleshy pink things gone, there will be no more Net Neutrality problems.
With all of the fleshy pink things gone, there will be no more need for, or traffic on, the internet.
Re:NN? (Score:2)
See? Problem Solved!
Spoofing and net neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Spoofing and net neutrality (Score:3, Interesting)
We will see new "portals". Not the web portals that you think of now, but point to point gateways between
parts of the globe which are tunnelled through adaptive multi route connections. The adaptive part is the key to this
and the mentioned software is a vital component. Internet proxies will spring up where traffic basically disappears into them
to emerge elsewhere. Sure you will hav
Re:Spoofing and net neutrality (Score:2)
Doesn't make it right, but I'd like to see them jail every internet user on the planet when they all do the same thing.
Drug war. (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the '60s a lot of people thought the solution to the drug laws was civil disobedience - lots of people buying and using drugs clogging the legal system, forcing the government to throw in the towel.
You can see how well THAT worked.
Re:Spoofing and net neutrality (Score:3, Interesting)
Ummm... no... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's EXACTLY what's already happening. The telecom companies have long been doing this and the whole net neutrality discussion is being prompted by those same telecom companies wanting to loosen the rules (you know, using their lobbyists to get favorable regulation). Further, I would argue that the return on investment from lobbying is so large that any business of sufficient size will invest heavily in lobbyists. They'd be dumb not to.
Net Neutality needs to happen before we give the telecom companies any more leighway in other areas. The reason is simple. If we do not do this, then if we find that we need to impose it after the fact, they will have already invested billions in business built around the new regulatory structure. At that point, they can legitimately claim it would be expensive and onerous to do it. Today, if we put this regulation in, it doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the network they already have.
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 hos
Re:Ummm... no... (Score:3, Insightful)
Strange... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Strange... (Score:2)
CoS is a way of keeping bandwidth prices low, as it allows the carriers to gain better use of edge oversubscription. If they are forced to continue this rediculous growth model of simply building more bandwidth, your going to be seeing some serious price hikes, now that the false competition has gone out of business.
Lets face it, the folks that undermined th
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).
Technical Corrections (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Strange... (Score:3, Insightful)
So do you have a problem with accessing google right now? Vonage? Amazon? If there is no problem, then why would Google, Vonage or Amazon pay for "better" access? You're missing out the strongly implied threat that if Google, Vonage, and Amazon do NOT pay up,
Re:Strange... (Score:2)
Actualy I see it like I'm paying for two one bedroom appartments, but one of the people I'm paying for is living in the High-rise and his expensive lifestyle is forcing the other to be a bum in the alley! If I'm paying for 768K of "best effort" DSL, that's what I want, but what I'll be g
Re:Strange... (Score:3, Insightful)
Provided there are options, things will be just fine. The trick is to make sure the consumer has options. Right now the government has all kinds of barriers to make sure that the only option you have is the one they have given monopoly rights to. That's your problem.
Re:Strange... (Score:3, Informative)
So long as that
Re:Strange... (Score:2)
Re:Strange... (Score:2)
For heaven's sake, would you stop with this nonsense. This is not about ISPs; this is about carriers! I'm sick of people trotting out this mendacious argument that everything will be fine if we can just switch ISPs. Network Neutrality has little or nothing to do with the last mile. It's all about the backbone carriers, who are proposing to
Tangentially related... (Score:4, Informative)
confused with Tim Berners-Lee, Web inventor and NetNeutrality proponent [mit.edu].
AHHHH... (Score:2)
Even better (Score:2)
Re:Ummm... no... (Score:2)
Indeed, the industry is already being regulated; we're just trying to make sure that regulation continues to be favorable to us.
Now, the best solution is still to either deregulate it entirely (and by that I mean end the agreements that give companies sole access to right -of-way for laying wires, etc.), or to nationalize the lines and let the companies compete to provide service over them. However, either of those would be much harder to accomplish than net neutrality.
Re:Ummm... no... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ummm... no... (Score:2)
You need to tie the monopoly up, no. I don't expect new companies to suddenly spring out of the ground and immediately offer service. A bank isn't going to give a loan to do such a thing. But, existing companies could easily expand their networks into the regions of others. All it takes is one cable company to start offering service in another cable company's area and everyone else is going to follow suit. There will be chaos. Prices will drop to try to keep ou
Re:Ummm... no... (Score:2)
Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Do YOU trust your congressman [wikipedia.org] to not just create a huge beauracracy, with new laws being stuck on whenever they want to "protect the children/fight terrorism".
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, we need to end this madness. I want my congressman to debate real issues, subjects that (hopefully) he knows about. People screaming for net neutrality are completely ignoring the historically proven facts of economics. We do not want people like Ted Stevens running our internet.
Re:Obvious (Score:2)
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obvious (Score:2)
Re:Obvious (Score:2)
One of the major prohibitive costs in many industries, (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry) are directly due to regulation. Pharmaceutical research, development and manufacturing wouldn't be as cost prohibitive if it wasn't for the FDA hoops that have to be jumped through and all the patents that have to be filed and defended. I'm not saying there shouldn't be some kind of approval proscess
Re:Obvious (Score:2)
No net neutrality will kill innovation (Score:2)
No net neutrality will only make the big telcos rich and small businesses woefully uncompetitive.
Foreign companies not affected by tiered bandwidth costs will eat our lunch.
Re:No net neutrality will kill innovation (Score:2)
Re:No net neutrality will kill innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
It's really quite simple. If you let congress get involved in the internet, then everybody is going to be lobbying congress 100x more than they are now. Things will turn against the public's interest pretty quickly. And quite frankly, I don't trust the government to get it right to begin with
Re:No net neutrality will kill innovation (Score:2)
a) the copper or fiber was all laid by one telco in a certain region.
b) the telco of that region thus owns all that fiber or copper.
c) the telco of that region which owns that fiber or copper, can flatly refuse to allow any ISPs on there.
d) deregulation makes it easier for them to refuse.
Exactly how does competition happen then?
BTW Congress isn't entirely inefficient like you claim it is; after the Do Not Call List came into being, my telemarketing calls dw
Re:No net neutrality will kill innovation (Score:2)
Simple, companies lay down their own copper or fiber. Verizon already did it a few towns away from me, as they've been doing around the country. But I'm probably not going to see any of that fiber for another few years. Not because Comcast will say no, but because Verizon has to negotiate with each municipality to get a franchise, a process that can take years.
Re:No net neutrality will kill innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay. Now *you* set up a company and start doing the same. What? You can't afford it? You don't have the *massive* resources at your disposal that a company like Verizon does? Oh. Hmm... so much for competition, then.
See, competition ain't competition if it's among, say, 2 or 3 big players who can choose to collude to fuck you up the ass. Welcome to the telec
Re:Obvious (Score:2)
Re:Obvious (Score:2)
You know what I'd really like to see? A government-regulated utility that only controls the wires. No service, no nothing. Just pure hardware. And ATT, SBC, Speakeasy, AOL and all the rest can compete on services all day long
What happens when the copper isn't good enough, or the Coax isn't fast enough and you need fiber? You need the government to upgrade it? Good grief.
Also, it's a pretty simplified view (some would even call it Ted Stevens-esque) to think that the wires are just tubes that any servi
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Except, oh, wait. That didn't happen. In fact, the skies are vastly cleaner than they've been since the 1950s while the American economy has surged for 24 years with only two minor recessions.
Despite the mantra "Government can't work", the uncomfortable fact for neo-Friedman anarcho-capitalists is that, in fact, it can. Which is why the conservatives have officially seceded from the "reality
Re:Obvious (Score:2)
You mean like Patents and Copyrights?
Or maybe you mean like Standard Oil Co. or Ma Bell?
Then again... A lot of innovation came out of Ma Bell.
But I'd think more innovations happened after its break up. Its not that government regulation hinders innovation, it is the lack of competition that does.
Sometimes competition needs to be cramed down people's throats with an iron fist
Congress is involved, remember. (Score:4, Insightful)
That last bit. (Score:2)
The more I read the more i begin to realise that maybe market presure will keep the Telecomms honest... I know I wouldn't pay fpr access that didn't let me use services just because they say it
Re:That last bit. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:That last bit. (Score:2)
As for contracts wtih apart
Re:That last bit. (Score:2)
I think you mean it takes 6 months to a year for a municpal bureaucrat to pull the contract out of their throat and sign it as given, don't you? I've seen next-to-zero evidence that *any* "negotiating" takes place on behalf of rate-payers in the places I've lived. Not the case with garbage contracts and such, but definitely the case with cable and telco.
In Palo Alto, CA, which h
Re:That last bit. (Score:2)
Re:That last bit. (Score:2)
Of course they can compete. The city-owned cable exists at the pleasure of the citizenry. They are free to demand that their elected officials dump the city-owned operation in favor of a more "Comcastic" offer. (As indeed many municipalities are turning their waterworks over to giant commercial entities that promise lower rates.)
Re:That last bit. (Score:2)
The question I have. (Score:3, Interesting)
The first, what happens if encryption makes it impossible to really tell what anything is? How does a non-net-neutral ISP then determine tiered prices for the content? Does encryption effectively enforce Net Neutrality?
And second, if an ISP wants to charge a customer more because they are simply using the bandwidth or transfer limits which the ISP already sold to the customer, what is this telling us? I mean, if I buy 50 gigs of transfer a month and I use it all, that's ok right? Until all of the suddend everyone is using it all. And then the ISP is saying "wait wait wait, yea we sold you this, but uhm, if you are all going to use it then this isn't going to work". In effect the same as the cell companies when they sell you minutes. If everyone is using their cell phones, your phone is pretty much useless "network busy".
I mean, what the hell?
TLF
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:The question I have. (Score:2)
About this part: "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."
So if NN is important enough to people, then a neutral ISP will win market share. But if some ISPs are quasi-NN, i.e. they aren't net neutral but the majority of consumers won't even notice, they will probably win more share and make more money?
It's an interesting top
Re:The question I have. (Score:2)
Especially since, as you point out, each is compelled to break neutrality or be forced out by a cheaper company.
It is an interesting topic. My own personal take is to let the phone and cable companies try breaking
Re:The question I have. (Score:3, Insightful)
Encryption just shoots yourself in the foot, since an ISP can just put all encrypted traffic into the lowest-speed or highest-cost tier. So instead of the ISP penalizing VoIP, now they will penalize all your traffic.
Re:The question I have. (Score:2)
Ah! I See! (Score:2)
Right, gotcha. So regulation is evil because regulation can be subverted, and that would end up with ISPs free to do as they liked. While legislating against Net Neutrality would mean that ISPs got to do whatever they wanted too. Only sooner.
So TFA cleverly recommends a middle road of preserving the status quo, which would leave the ISPs... erm.. free to do whatever they want. Which i
Re:Ah! I See! (Score:2)
No, TFA recommends preserving the status quo (which is as good or better than where we are ultimately going to end up) rather than wasting a few billion taxpayer dollars letting the government get involved.
Re:Ah! I See! (Score:2)
And did TFA have any ideas on how this was to be achieved, sans legislation?
I seem to have missed that bit.
Re:Ah! I See! (Score:2)
The whole quote was
So TFA cleverly recommends a middle road of preserving the status quo, which would leave the ISPs... erm.. free to do whatever they want.
We don't need any (new) legislation to allow the ISPs to do whatever they want.
Re:Ah! I See! (Score:3, Insightful)
Call me a communist, but I never really bought into this concept of a Holy Sacred Market with all these mystical powers or self regulation. It seems to me that a cartel can raise as effective a barrier to competition as a regulator.
Regulation? (Score:2)
First, any individual can check their own connection for neutrality and bring a lawsuit if it is violated. Every law doesn't require a special oversight regulatory organization to monitor it all the time.
Second, if such a body is required, the FCC is the logical choice. They wrote the current neutrality laws, and they already hold power over the telecom companies. I don't real
Re:Regulation? (Score:2)
A couple of swarthy guys in ill-fitting pinstriped suits in the offices of Amazon.com:
"Gee, Mr. Bezos, it would really be a shame if the response time to your servers was to get SO much worse, but after all, bn.com is paying us to make sure their customers get good response, and the bandwidth they need has to come from SOMEWHERE. Now if you were to make a small contribution to our "infrastructure fund", we can see if there's anything we can do to prevent that..."
I had a friend who was
Re:Regulation? (Score:2)
We've had neutrality for a long time with no regulatory body enforcing it.
Not so, not at all. In the early days of the internet, the "backbone" of the internet was provided by the Department of Defense and the various non-profits (mostly universities and non-profits) who ran the internet day-to-day embedded "net neutrality" into the basic protocols of the internet.
When the government decided to turn the backbone over to be run by private firms, the FCC explicitly required net neutrality as a condi
Re:Regulation? (Score:2)
Evidence that we probably shouldn't put the FCC in charge again, since they already dropped the ball once.
Re:Regulation? (Score:2)
Evidence that we probably shouldn't put the FCC in charge again, since they already dropped the ball once.
Well, you are in luck, since the net neutrality legislation doesn't leave the decision in the hands of the FCC in again!
Re:Regulation? (Score:2)
The net neutrality legislation? I wasn't aware that any net neutrality legislation had passed congress. In fact, I was pretty sure there hadn't been any. Until a bill is written, discussed, amended, voted on, passed and signed into law there are no guarantees what form it will take. Congress could easily put the FCC back in charge. In fact, I can't imagine who else they would put in charge. The FCC will
free market vs. protectionist troll (Score:2)
Re:free market vs. protectionist troll (Score:2)
But what if you want to start up an ISP that is not more neutral? What if your purpose in doing so is to woo certain end users that fit a particular business profile or that require a certain type of customer service or payment mechanism? I should be able to start up an ISP as I see fit, and serve those customers that I choose in the manner and at the price that I choose to. My service may turn out to be neutral, or it may not... but it's my service.
Someone should point out... (Score:2)
Re:who wrote (Score:2)
Bandwidth commodity trading (Score:4, Informative)
Lee ignores one point... (Score:2)
Re:Lee ignores one point... (Score:2)
Do you work in the tech field? 40 hours? More like 60 to 80 hours with no overtime. I even had a boss that announced his new cost saving measures, Lay off 1/2 of the IT Staff and every one was required to work a minimum of 80 hours. He saved 1/2 his budget and got promoted for it.
As to the Family Medical Leave Act, Ha! My Wife w
Re:Lee ignores one point... (Score:2)
Due to our 40-hour work week we spend 2.5 more weeksand three months moreat work than do our Japanese and western European counterparts, respectively [indiana.edu]
Yeah, a great example of regulation working for us.
Net neutrality, rah, rah, bah, humbug (Score:3, Insightful)
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, I'm sure Osama Bin Laden is for world peace, too -- but I doubt when I speak of world peace I envision the same thing. Or rather, if everyone could agree on a common vision of world peace, we'd have achieved it, we do not have world peace precisely because while everyone might claim to be for world peace, everyone has different views on what that means.
So of course everyone is for net neutrality -- people running around going "Oh noez, big companies are going to take away our freedoms! You're not against freedom, are you?" People running around going "Equality! Neutrality! Freedom!" etc. Of course no one is going to say they're against those things.
But... how do you expect to legistlate or regulate such things if you can't get a concrete definition?
Does net neutrality mean that ATM and frame-relay QoS services go away? (I know of some ISPs who bought frame relay circuits with lots of CIR, and of ISPs who bought frame circuits with virtually 0 CIR -- I know whose traffic has priority on the network (to those who think the net today is neutral -- HAH!))
What about equal access to colocation facilities? Who gets to go in and play with the wires? Be kind of annoying to find out some no-name company registered in another country has 'accidently' attached something to your physical connection... I know of colocations where you can't go without a union guy around, and facilities where techs would refuse to go at night without an armed escort. Someone going to pay for those things for the little guys so everyone is 'equal' and 'neutral'?
Equal opportunities to build network gear? I mean, should that start up being able to stick in custom gear into a colocation whenever they want, or do we want to have some testing first to make sure it's not going to catch fire?
Handicap access? Should we treat everyone's network connection the exact same in terms of QoS, or lack of QoS? Should we have 'equal treatment' in a technical sense, or make sure everyone has 'equal access' to services?
We could just shutdown the Internet completely -- that would be 'equal' and 'net neutral' to everyone. Sort of like Armeggedon would result in world peace after everyone is dead. Certainly satisfies the requirements... right?
Sure, it benefits folks in more affluent urban areas to suggest opening up the 'last mile' (sic), because perhaps the local governments could afford to maintain the last mile (or half mile, or wireless, etc.) Of course, if someone is living in a rural area (like, say, in the Appalachia, where mountains and valleys make wireless a bit iffy) where the 'last mile' might be more like the last five miles... Well! I suspect in those areas there are phone companies that would be thrilled to dump non-profitable infrastructure maintainenance on small rural governments.
Let's hash out some *real* policy details -- starting from the hardware, physical network deployments, physical network operations and maintenance, and working our way up. Let's see how long 'everyone' (sic) is for 'net neutrality' (sic). What is it? How will one test for it? How will one measure it? How will one enforce it?
But, be assured, I am quite for net neutrality, net freedom, and all that stuff. Like world peace. Of course, if I could implement net neutrality the way *I* want it... a lot of you might start the massive whining. For those reasons, I an quite against any legistlation for net neutrality until someone offers a real policy plan -- realistically, the network will never be perfectly neutral. The question is where can we get agreements on what will have to be compromised on (security/reliability of facilities/infrastructure vs. ability to innovate and deploy, emergency services vs. every day use, handicap access vs. 'normal' access, rural low density connectivity vs. urban high density areas vs. access costs vs. maintenance/opex, etc.)
I don't see much policy, mostly I see whining.
Bring on the test! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bring on the test! (Score:2)
Just my view (Score:4, Funny)
If Microsoft is the answer to the problem, you did not understand the problem!
%s/Microsoft/The Goverment/g
Government sucks, but is there another option? (Score:2)
MORE PAID CRAP - Yes, this is what it is : (Score:2)
And this is all i am going to think and say about such shit that is produced by 'lobby companies' (oh god, what a fantastic name for paid propaganda work) - CRAP.
PAID crap to FOOL PEOPLE.
Bad Analogy (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a truly bad comparison. After deregulation new airlines (e.g. People's Express) could get started while previously single-state restricted airlines (e.g. PSA and SouthWest) could expand outside of their state. In fact it took big states like California and Texas just to support a state restricted airline before.
Afterwards all airlines got relatively equally access to the necessary resources (e.g. airports), and I could choose among a large selection of air carriers for my trip.
This isn't the same as when there's one coax cable and one copper twisted pair coming to my house. I don't have a good choice of competition in this monopoly market.
I'll tell you who I am willing to choose however. It will be the first company who brings fiber to my curb at non-extortionaire prices.
Re:Bad Analogy (Score:2)
So very true. I hate Verizon with a passion, but if they can bring FiOS to my house, I'd make a pact with the devil himself to get it.
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?
Re:Man, what (Score:2)