Slashdot Mirror
Telcos Propose 2-Tier Internet
cshirky writes "Boston.com is reporting that 'AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers' own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors.' The telcos basic fear, of course, is that the end to end design of the net (PDF version) will erode the telcos ability to use service charges to generate revenue for delivering video and voice; the proposed solution is to break end-to-end in order to protect pricing leverage over the users." We reported on this at the beginning of the month, when it was just speculation. Not any more.
I admit to being a bit too young to remember the original, but maybe it's time for another breakup similar to the original Bell? Seems the current ones have gotten a bit too monopolistic, IMHO...
Does this fall under the heading of "If we ask permission, it's not illegal anymore?"
Good thing the american government^W^Wicann is in control of the internet so we are protected from things like this at the root level
Wouldn't this go against the common carrier provisions? Wouldn't this sort of filtering and degrading things that they choose open them up to liability in other areas like P2P sharing that happens on their networks?
So they want to break the internet to make more money for themselves?
Will anyone actually go for this?
Seriously, what ever happened to running a business on the merits of its product, not on cash generated by hidden surcharges?
not like anyone reading this doesn't know already, but this would be the worst thing ever to happen to the internet. if you think they would stop by offering crap connections for competitors, you're blind. things like /. would be low priorities since they love to expose what big bells are doing to screw us.
-- lol pwned
that they can forget about it.
-Lasse
Don't telcos do this already by customizing their BGP routing so that their own traffic takes the fast routes and external traffic that they carry takes the slow routes? At least by allowing multiple tiers of service they will be able to better accomodate QOS concerns by allowing external traffic to take the fast route if the owner of the traffic wants to pay for it.
Hmm, maybe we need to send these telcos over to World of Ends and remind them that the end-to-end or "dumb" nature of the Internet (in the sense that all the logic is handled at each end, not in the middle) is a big part of what's made it successful.
Not that that's ever stopped anyone from killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, of course...
Google is fighting the proposal, along with other large Internet companies including Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. They fear they may have to pay telecoms millions of dollars to gain access to customers who use the premium Internet services. In addition, they argue, many small Internet start-ups would be unable to pay the fees, which could reduce consumer choice.
Ma' Bell strikes back!
It confuses me as to why Congress should have any say in companies creating additional networks. Interstate commerce clause? What a joke.
If companies want to try to create supernets for their customers to better access each other, I say allow them to. I can not imagine any supernet subverting the Internet in any way. If an ISP decides to slow down traffic to non-ISP destinations, you're going to see user backlash. I've changed ISPs over the years due to bad routing (or repeatedly failed routing) and I know some of my non-techie friends have done the same.
These supernets would just be a second backbone connecting their network together, correct? I think this is a great idea, especially for corporations that can not afford their own backbone connections for remote offices. If my companies could connect quickly through a secondary network at no additional cost (or lower cost), I'd jump on it immediately.
I just can't understand why Congress has any say in what companies do with their own property. They're already providing for the "public need" and they should be free to supplement the "public need" for what other users are demanding/needing.
Wouldn't this automatically end their common carrier status, if they're filtering blocking traffic from certain sources to certain destinations? Or is that something they hope the law they're lobbying for to address? The Telecommunications Cake Eating and Having Antiterrorism and Freedom Act of 2006!
the American Govt doesn't run the interweb, eh?
Oh, wait....
never mind.
I am a leaf on the wind
are not becoming more few?
This means that common carriers will be essentially committing fraud.
If for example, I get a T1 from Verizon (I would never buy from them directly, we're going with an alternate provider, but hear me out) and AT&T has a dispute with Verizon. Were this thing to pass, data transfers between my T-1 and a customer's T1 (who happens to be an AT&T provider) would be downgraded. This means that my customer is not getting the full 1.54mbps bandwidth their SLA guarantees, and by effect neither would I. This is {potentially} interference with interstate commerce and is also discriminatory in deciding whose traffic goes where, not to mention breach of contract (violating the SLA).
Implementing this kind of policy should immediately result in the provider's losing common carrier status, as by advertising one thing and then providing a different service, they are carrying out a bait-and-switch on the customer - in short, fraud.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I pay already for internet access. If I go for DSL I guess it will have to look at Earthlink.
Maybe this will push Google into the ISP market so it can do no evil and make a lot of money.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This has the potential to turn the Internet into a huge mess, especially as the telecoms continue to consolidate. I hope that Congress is not going to implement this. At least we have Google, Amazon, Ebay and Microsoft sticking up for us, because we all know that their interests are much more pure.
For one thing, it would require a radical change in how the internet currently works. TCP/IP was designed around the whole idea of having no central routing (note, I didn't say naming) authority. This is one of the features which make it resilient to damage, since the network can adapt to nodes which suddenly might go dark.
This, after all, was the whole purpose of it, since ARPANET was intended to be resilient to enemy attack if parts of it were taken out.
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
For [insert favorite diety]'s sake, write your representative, and write your senators (both of them)!
Tell them this is a bad idea. Make up some ideas - I'm sure there will be plenty of discussion here.
Write them a physical letter if you can bear to touch it - those go farther...even if you're talking 'bout the internet.
--LWM
Over my dead body.
"AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill..." ...But our politicians are elected to best represent the needs of their constituents (and we all voted, right?), so everything will work out just fine in the best interest of the individual citizen.
Whew. That was a close one.
--- witty signature
the proposed solution is to break end-to-end in order to protect pricing leverage over the users.
I'm quite disgusted by these US businesses...they are probably the most unethical and immoral among all the developed countries.
Just another example of greed? This is directly comparable to them being allowed to degrade voice service from another phone company. Its ridiculous for voice its ridiculous for the internet. See what happens when you stop considering them to be common-carriers where everyone is on a level playing field? It will lead to no good, thats for sure.
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
I get free access to Verizon's news servers. Presumably, they can manage the expense by providing local servers that limit the bandwidth utilization to their local network (besides the peering to the outside world, of course). As long as they don't mandate I use their news server or add a mandatory surcharge for it or prevent me from using another premium news server, I'm cool with this. If they provided some version of a Verizon intranet, I would be cool with it, as long as it doesn't prevent me from getting to the outside world or mandating me to use their proxy, I am again cool with this.
Fortune 500 mega companies massaging congress to get what they want so they can bill the shit out of joe average. why not the RIAA is trying to do it and has done it. Now it only makes sense that the Telcos try it. Since when did was business about control as opposed to service. I hate this but in reality thats how you build a business. Create a product then force the masses to use it. When an alternative is found then you buy out congress and legislate the hell out of them
Services only get better when free enterpise rules. It is expensive to keep up these networks. Congress shouldn't be allowed to regulate the internet. We can't have it both ways (regulation and no regulation). Look what happened to the cost of long distance when congress stopped regulating the telephones here...
This has to be stopped before it's allowed to ever get started. I hope everyone who is a customer of these firms immediately and loudly complains. If not, you'll find yourself owned by your monopoly carrier when it's you who are paying the bills to start with!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If they are transmitting their "own services" in their own network what is there to stop them from setting up their routers to mark packets from their own web (and other) servers with higher quality of service (TOS/Diffserv field)?
Of course these markings lose all meaning when the packet goes out of their AS, but if they want they can always set up peering agreements where the QoS is preserved..
I'm not a fan of this proposal, but I'm curious what the real difference is between this and Internet2 connectivity that get people so incensed? Universities and corporations on Internet2 get higher bandwidth to each other than the rest of the internet, and for that they pay a premium.
It seems to me that the major difference is that it's the telcos coming up with the idea and that end users may actually get to use it. While I'd prefer everyone get access to the higher speed network, what's stopping backbone providers from continuing to upgrade services as they have been?
This seems quite a bit different than previous stories about telcos offering priority on the regular internet to services that pay up. That would definitely be questionable. This is using a completely separate network that they own and charge access to - why shouldn't they be allowed to do this?
This is an old issue - Lessig has been writing about it since 2001.
The idea pops up every few months, but in the end, it is economic suicide for a market that already has an open, neutral standard to splinter into a set of closed, preferential standards.
In short, the competition between providers will reduce their profit below the current 'tacit agreement' point it is currently at, thanks to the neutral standard. This is especially true as long as they are not offering any additional value with their service, and only destroying the value of the current network effects.
The economically feasible solution is to price discriminate (as much as existing customers hate it, it does reduce deadweight loss and increase revenue). Simply, charge by bandwidth provided, and charge less for 'preferred' types of bandwidth, such as traffic internal to their network.
[Recommended Reading: The Innovator's Solution (which addresses closed vs. open standards) and anything about Nash-Bridges Equilibrium (which addresses tacit agreement among competing parties).]
They have their own private internet for video services and a separate internet for normal IP traffic flow.
This allows them to send massive amounts of video with fairly reliable QOS.
There really are both sides to this issue. From the press release linked it sounds as it they want to offer video on demand and other services over the DSL line. This is almost identical to what comcast does with its video on demand. It run through a special channel that doesn't tie up your internet, and arrived much faster than regular internet video on demand. I see nothing wrong with DSL providers doing the exact same thing. ON THE OTHER HAND. If like google fears the DSL providers want to be able to charge random websites for faster access to their customers.. There is a definate conflict of interest, though I can't see anything obviously illigal about this idea.
From the article:
Davidson has an ally in US Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Malden. ''I don't understand why we would tinker with the model that has been so wildly successful," Markey said.
Markey said he's engaged in ''intense private negotiations" with telecom companies and congressional colleagues in search of a compromise.
Why the hell a compromise? If the current model is so successful, why change it at all? Because the telecoms want it? Congressman need to be reminded that just because some corporations ask for something they don't need to leap into action.
Davidson has an ally in US Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Malden. ''I don't understand why we would tinker with the model that has been so wildly successful," Markey said.
Markey said he's engaged in ''intense private negotiations" with telecom companies and congressional colleagues in search of a compromise.
How about this for a compromise? No. Bad Telcos... you had yours.
The prospect of a tiered Internet with ''regular" and ''premium" broadband services is spawning fierce debate as Congress takes up a major overhaul of telecom regulations. The House of Representatives last month held hearings on a preliminary draft by two GOP congressmen, Joe Barton of Texas and Fred Upton of Michigan, that would give the telecom companies the freedom to establish premium broadband services. The telecom bill is due for action early next year.
a rtonTX-6.html
y Id=4497035
Hmmm...I think I will do a search of these guys just to see what else they are involved with.
http://www.dccc.org/houseofscandal/members/JoeB
"Joe Barton voted to weaken the ethics rules in a move that many say served only to protect Tom DeLay."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
"All Things Considered, February 12, 2005 U.S. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) has sponsored a bill in the House that would increase Federal Communication Commission fines for "indecent" broadcasts. He talks about the bill, which goes to the full House in the coming week."
I can see where this 2-tiered internet is heading, more political scandals and tighter regulations of the internet. No thanks.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I'm not practiced in writing legal verbage, but in it's own way, it can't be much more difficult that thinking in program code... making sure there are few if no loopholes or problems with interpretation and all that.
But Damnit if I'm not tired of seeing law and legislation constantly being proposed to prop up older business practices in newer and changing environments. This *HAS* to be seen by our legislators as the quickest way to outmode our economy. While the rest of the world grows and changes with the times, we're letting law pass that essentially attempts to keep us in the 19th century.
The EFF is famous for defending cases and fighitng bad law, but how is it on attempting to introduce laws and practices? I'd like to see them write something that would essentially outlaw or limit the creation of new law to prop up failing business models.
The feds (FCC, FTC, SEC) catch wind of this they will go ballistic. The House and Senate committes will grill the telcos until they are well done over QOS or priority packeting, filtering, depeering and email routing. They won't hear the end of it until they drop the bloody thing altogether.
You know it aint going to happen.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
This is just further evidence that Telcos have been over-charging their services. The market is for the carrier; People want bandwith and SLAs. The fact that innovative home grown solutions from third parties pose a threat to paid-for hosted services is no surprise. It will be up to the Telco's to utilize their size and leverage existing tools quickly. I prefer my homemade PVR to the one that comes at a subscription price, and deletes content X days later. It is cheaper too. I prefer my email gateway, web interface and spam protection to one that comes at a subscription price from a 3rd party. The Internet drives innovation. If a Telco is using the wrong technology, or does not have the brain pan to come up with profitable solutions, then it is time to find a new CTO, and whilst at it, write a letter to the previous CTO that forced old technology down the throat of willing consumers. The future is friendly .. as somebody once said, and another, copyrighted.
Um, by "they" you mean "the article submitter" and by "bullshit business terms" you mean "the article submitter's own language which is already intended to present the telcos unfavorably." Gee how could you possibly arrive at the conclusion that telcos are bad from the submitter's implication that what they are doing is bad? Brilliant.
There's no money in just providing a service.
If you want to make money, you have to find or make a bottleneck for a desired product/service.
Then you make big bucks off of the bottleneck.
All they're doing right here is trying to build a bottleneck where one doesn't exist today. Whether they succeed or not is another question.
Create a premium service,
charge people more to access your network at 'fast' speeds. Ok no problem. That's sort of been going on for a while with tiered speeds for broadband connections.
Telco's provide content targeted at those premium accounts. Again, ok by me. Paying more generally entitles you to more.
So now other sites that provide streaming auido or video or just use lots of bandwidth are going to have to pay a premium or face serious degradation of quality of service. Welp, that's not good for those sites.
Hmmm... so now I probably loose a lot of choices when it comes to where I get my streaming media from. The Telcos price the competeing web sites out of buisness or force them to a vastly inferior product. That's not good for me now.
I can understand and even support the telcos wanting to provide some form of quality of service garauntees for customers willing to pay for it. But a second tier internet controlled by the telcos is likely going to end badly for people on both ends of the fiber.
I'm confused why they are asking or even need to "rearchitect" the Internet to do this. Can't they just use some QoS features of their router hardware to give packets for "partners" higher priority? Lower latency, more bandwidth, etc, etc. What other power is needed?
Instead of paying for what I pay now, they'll want to put their own obnoxious content (which I never use) onto the faster pipes and make everything else suck??
As other people have pointed out, I hope this loses them their common carrier status.
Changing the network topology of the internet to make sure they can continue to sell me extra services/features/content is crap. Imagine getting an itemized bill charging you additional moneys for accessing stuff other than their content.
I mean, really, WTF does AT&T have that I want from the net?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What is the last straw here? What is the textbook definition of facism and its 6 bullet points we need to check off before we can finally just call ourselves the United Facist Empire of Corporate America??? So now telcos and the like are seeing a previous revenue source dry up because of the nature of the internet itself, rather than finding new ways to utilize its very power they would (artifically) break the system through legislation to cover their asses. This is pathetic. Innovate or die corporate america, you've seen this coming for years, try to act like the founders of your companies and create a useful product and service use technology in new ways rather than crushing progress under your heel in the name of profit margins. (I know, many of the big corps founders used government sactioned monopolies and force to build and protect their interests, but some founders actually had an eye for the future and innovated.)
I forget the quote itself, it's probably been posted by now, but to paraphrase it (poorly) here: No investor or company should expect the law to turn back the hands of time to protect previous sources of profit.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Actually physical letters don't carry the weight they did even a few years ago. After the anthrax scares many avoid them now like the Plague. While I can't say what is most effective now: faxes, e-mail, telephone calls, personal visits, visits to their local offices, I do know that the gold standard that each actual letter represents this many other people who never quite got their own letters written is not what it once was.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
All they have to do, to give prioroty to their communication, is to quickly route anything that has the Evil Bit set to 1.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The article states the telcos want to prioritize packets for video and voice. Wouldn't this be similar to what cable companies do right now to priortize bandwidth for their digital video over cablemodem packets?
This sounds inevitable as everything goes ___ over IP. Can you imagine the troubleshooting nightmare of this?
example trouble call:
Grandma: I can't get Matlock!
Telco: Your grandson is downloading hundreds of pirated movies off bittorrent and using all your available bandwidth.
Grandma: Bandwidth? I just want my TV!!!
What other ways would the Slashdot crowd suggest to make sure HDTV or On Demand programming, separate from the internet data but using the same pipe, be assured 100% availability?
Also, I didn't read anything about service speed degredation. I saw info to the effect of making sure their services which were subscribed to by the customer are delivered in a high quality manner.
The telcos basic fear, of course, is that the end to end design of the net will erode the telcos ability to use service charges to generate revenue for delivering video and voice; the proposed solution is to break end-to-end in order to protect pricing leverage over the users.
Translation of above paragraph...
The telcos basic fear, of course is that the end to end design of the net will further erode the telcos antiquated business model. The proposed solution is to use legislation to protect and keep their business model viable for many generations to come.
You failed it.
Three points I got out of this:
/. article:
From the article:
while rival firms' online video offerings would be transmitted at lower speed and with poorer image quality.
Meaning they're hampering their user's choices.
That could mean that a company like Yahoo might have to pay AT&T to send high-quality video to AT&T subscribers.
Read: Out-right extortion.
From the
in order to protect pricing leverage over the users.
I believe someone already rephrased that the way it should have read to begin with: screw the users.
My sig can beat up your sig.
This shouldn't surprise too many people. Around where I live, the politicians constantly forced a vote (around 20+ times) until people eventually got tired of voting "No", and stopped caring. Thus, it eventually passed.
The morale of the story should be that politicians (regardless of what they are "supposed" to do/be) are completely supported by corporations. When you consider the monumental amount of money that stands to be made (see "Google"), it should go without saying that corporations will find some way to truly cash in on the Internet, nevermind the "next" Internet.
I mean, get real. Imagine you are staring at (lets be conservative) 10 billion smackers in corporate revenue. Are you going to let that annoying attitude of "freedom of information" stop you?
Read any amount of political history to see countless examples of this type of nonsense.
I am getting real sick of corporations influencing the law to create/stabilize/alter the market it order to preserve their desired business strategy instead of sucking it up like the rest of us and enduring competition for better or worse. The law should be preserving a market that encourages change and fair competition in order to hinder stagnation, why can't anyone uphold this very simple principle. The worrisome idea here is that if we keep allowing the corporations to push competition out through legislation we will only see more of this behavior...and I am afraid that leads to a world similar to our sci-fi nightmares.
Well:
1: They can charge more for the premium service.
2: They can continue to degrade the basic serivce to force you to upgrade to the premium service and pay more.
Is this how you want to be treated by your telephone company?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
To their exchanges.
Deleted
So is it that the carriers now wish to disclaim that they are "Common Carriers" since they will no longer carry content on an entirely non-discriminatory basis?
I'm making my own internet!
I've got a spare linksys and two pringles cans; who's with me?
Is anyone else thinking that Verizon will side with Google, et. al., and oppose the other telcos in this effort? Verizon's big push, the on they're basically betting the company on, is their "FIOS" fiber-to-the-home initiative. If they control the fiber going in to the home, they can stick their video infrastructure in their own CO's and (where necessary) use private broadband circuits (owned by them) to transfer data. They don't need priority on the internet to deliver their product well. So it would seem that it's in their best interest to keep this from happening, because a 2-tier internet (with the telcos at the top) would level the playing field and negate the advantage they have with the infrastructure they're putting in now for FIOS.
Does this mean if I want a better Internet, I now really will have to go to AOL? NOOOOOOO!
.. 2 weeks ago SBC mentioned they would intentionally cripple the internet with 1000 ping times and allow only 3 or 4 sites that would run regularly. The user would have the option to pay extra money for each site they want to run optimally.
... oh well.
So are they going to create a seperate backbone as an excuse for this project? Think about it? They can't let just any ordinary user use the fiber backbone right? Oh well I guess you have to pay extra $$ for a less than 500 ping time for your favorite quakeserver.
If you dont like it? Then roll out your own line? Oh wait we can't
SBC is fucking evil. They are the worst and most vehimingly opposed to any regulation at all. They are the ones who refused to light up dsl routers until state legislators deregulated them. Then afterwards they raised the rates of competing ISP and totally undercut everyone out of business. Now they are becoming a monopoly as more and more smaller ISP's go out of business.
With the republicans in office and the vast lobbying dollars you can bet they will win and get their way. Meanwhile the Koreans keep their $15 a month 100 meabyte pipes and laugh at us!
http://saveie6.com/
The House of Representatives last month held hearings on a preliminary draft by two GOP congressmen, Joe Barton of Texas and Fred Upton of Michigan, that would give the telecom companies the freedom to establish premium broadband services. The telecom bill is due for action early next year. If your rep. is on This List be sure to drop them a line.
And when you cable company (don't think this traffic shaping is only for DSL carriers) starts degrading all VoIP services except for the one they're selling for twice the price you're paying otherwise and your calls even across town get all choppy well then...
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It confuses me as to why Congress should have any say in companies creating additional networks. Interstate commerce clause? What a joke.
Oh Good Lord, another uninformed, Libertarian knee-jerk response.
The reason(s) Congress has a say over how the telcos behave include the fact that
1) The telcos wire runs across public lands
2) The telcos are local monopolies (at least in terms of last-mile copper, and in many places, in terms of telecom services in general)
3) The telcos received subsidies to build their network from public money, then were given (read:bribed the government) ownership of infrastructure built in no small part with public funds.
When the telcos give up that portion of their network built with the help of government subsidies and incentives, remove every last inch of wire from public lands and access ways, and have real, level-playing-field, true competative-free-market-style competitors, then maybe congressional oversight can be revisited. Until then, please accept the fact that most of the rest of us are going to laugh at and openly mock your reactionary Corporate Interests ueber Alles rhetoric, probably while rolling our eyes and shaking our heads.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Actually, I read slashdot and post to slashdot from a packet network -- GPRS. Good luck getting comcast or SBC to try to affect that :)
Your point is well taken, but my point is that there is so much competition and so many access points to the bigger Internet, there is no single point of failure except ICANN.
In answer to your question, I present an essay written in 1944 by George Orwell (writer of 1984, Animal Farm, and others):
Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: 'What is Fascism?'
One of the social survey organizations in America recently asked this question of a hundred different people, and got answers ranging from 'pure democracy' to 'pure diabolism'. In this country if you ask the average thinking person to define Fascism, he usually answers by pointing to the German and Italian régimes. But this is very unsatisfactory, because even the major Fascist states differ from one another a good deal in structure and ideology.
It is not easy, for instance, to fit Germany and Japan into the same framework, and it is even harder with some of the small states which are describable as Fascist. It is usually assumed, for instance, that Fascism is inherently warlike, that it thrives in an atmosphere of war hysteria and can only solve its economic problems by means of war preparation or foreign conquests. But clearly this is not true of, say, Portugal or the various South American dictatorships. Or again, antisemitism is supposed to be one of the distinguishing marks of Fascism; but some Fascist movements are not antisemitic. Learned controversies, reverberating for years on end in American magazines, have not even been able to determine whether or not Fascism is a form of capitalism. But still, when we apply the term 'Fascism' to Germany or Japan or Mussolini's Italy, we know broadly what we mean. It is in internal politics that this word has lost the last vestige of meaning. For if you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people -- certainly no political party or organized body of any kind -- which has not been denounced as Fascist during the past ten years. Here I am not speaking of the verbal use of the term 'Fascist'. I am speaking of what I have seen in print. I have seen the words 'Fascist in sympathy', or 'of Fascist tendency', or just plain 'Fascist', applied in all seriousness to the following bodies of people:
Conservatives: All Conservatives, appeasers or anti-appeasers, are held to be subjectively pro-Fascist. British rule in India and the Colonies is held to be indistinguishable from Nazism. Organizations of what one might call a patriotic and traditional type are labelled crypto-Fascist or 'Fascist-minded'. Examples are the Boy Scouts, the Metropolitan Police, M.I.5, the British Legion. Key phrase: 'The public schools are breeding-grounds of Fascism'.
Socialists: Defenders of old-style capitalism (example, Sir Ernest Benn) maintain that Socialism and Fascism are the same thing. Some Catholic journalists maintain that Socialists have been the principal collaborators in the Nazi-occupied countries. The same accusation is made from a different angle by the Communist party during its ultra-Left phases. In the period 1930-35 the Daily Worker habitually referred to the Labour Party as the Labour Fascists. This is echoed by other Left extremists such as Anarchists. Some Indian Nationalists consider the British trade unions to be Fascist organizations.
Communists: A considerable school of thought (examples, Rauschning, Peter Drucker, James Burnham, F. A. Voigt) refuses to recognize a difference between the Nazi and Soviet régimes, and holds that all Fascists and Communists are aiming at approximately the same thing and are even to some extent the same people. Leaders in The Times (pre-war) have referred to the U.S.S.R. as a 'Fascist country'. Again from a different angle this is echoed by Anarchists and Trotskyists.
Trotskyists: Communists charge the Trotskyists proper, i.e. Trotsky's own organization, with being a crypto-Fascist organization in Nazi pay. This was widely believed on the Left during the Popular Front period. In their ultra-Right phases the Communists tend to apply the same accusation to all factions to the Left of themselves, e.g. Common Wealth or the I.L.P.
Catholics
Common Carrier status is granted when the provider doesn't filter content. However misguided this attempt is, it does not violate common carrier status, because they are not passing judgement or denying certain content. They're still allowing it all, albeit at different levels of service.
They,
Are barking up the wrong tree.
They would achieve much quicker success by just petitioning the FTC, the FCC, and/or the court systems.
Any one of the three organizational units above has consistently shown the propensity to gladly hand over to proviate hands assets the public has repeatly entrusted as public property.
Personally I'm fed up with providing right of ways, local monopolies, etc. only to see the courts, etc. say that those things suddenly exclusively belong to a private company.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Holy Christ!
I hate to see myself reduced to grammar nazi, but can't people get THIS ONE FREAKING THING RIGHT?
Learn the damn difference!
And making it law is what they are trying to do.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Looks like I'll be finding another internet service provider... Maybe like comcast who disables your account after you have surpassed your download limit.
Nathan
N_Woodruff(despam)@(despam)bellsouth.net
Here's what carries weight now:
A check.
You got to pay to play in DC (or any state capitol, for that matter).
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Telcos are really looking to stop cross-carrier communications. Companies like ebay are rightly worried, and have an obvious problem with segregating customers. The real motivation from Telcos is more likely technology like VOIP, which is already killing local Telco's here. Anyone familiar with Sun's 1-800 access line understands the clarity that VOIP brings to long distance. Projects like Asterisk threaten every traditional Telco. They should be quickly finding ways to enable that, rather than compete. Providing, for instance, local numbers to Asterisk users with a subscription price much lower than a traditional phone line would be a good start. If they keep doing things like blocking ports, they are going to create one big fully meshed VPN, where they have no idea what their customers are doing. The bottom line. Competition is healthy. I expect to see Telcos, who are unwilling to adapt to new world of software replacing hardware, to dissappear into the fold.
This seems to be the old argument that Wired wrote about many years ago. I wish I still had the article. It was basically, Net Heads vs the Bell Heads. Bell Heads want to control traffic on the internet. Prioritze everything, charge for higher priorities. Subdivide the bandwidth. Net heads believe that everything should go much as it does today. Screw QOS and make a best effort. Problem is, money is made based on the size of the pipe. The Net Heads are winning and the Bell heads are trying to go to Congress to get a leg up. The reason for this is that everyone along the lines would have to agree on a common QOS scheme. No one does and some don't implement it at all. They are trying to get Congress to force the issue. And do these guys not yet realize the Congress controls nothing outside the US? Or, is this a first step before approaching the ITU or EU?
Geez, It looks like i've got to disagree with everyone here.
I think the aforementioned telco ideas are probably some of the worst ideas telco companies have come up with yet. But that's not the point here, they built wires to your house, why would they not have the right to setup whatever services they want and offer them to you for purchase?
Why does the fact that currently they make the internet accessible via these wires make the wires suddenly not theirs? Why should they not be able to withdraw their internet access plans and instead sell plans wherein internet access is available, but with varying priority given to sites? It seems like a legitimate offering... It's certainly not one that I, or anyone else here, would be interested in purchasing, but why should that restrict them from offering it?
I assure you, if they decide to sell service that no one wants over their wires, then someone else will sprout up and sell the service that everyone DOES want. These are telcos after all, anyone who gets their internet access via a telco should already be searching for other options, and these other options will undoubtedly sprout up if customers are dissatisfied with the "prioritized" internet access telcos want to provide.
How would you feel if you paid to build a wire from your house to mine, and when you were done I told you that you no longer had rights to send what you wanted through the wire because the internet somehow magically removes your ownership?
I understand the underlying idea here is that there are a limited number of methods for connecting to a persons home, and people feel as if these methods have been monopolized, there for we must take control of the connection methods to ensure we can have the access we want. ---- That however, is complete rubbish. For instance, I will use cable access, not telco access, and if the cable companies do not suit me I will use satellite access, and if these technologies all turn sour, the demand will be so high for a new connection method that it will easily/undoubtedly become available, either by someone laying new wires, or some new wireless technology, or simply the telcos realizing no one will buy their service if they don't offer what we want.
Instead of thinking about how upset you'll be if your DSL stops working the way you want, try to realize that you have no right or privlige to your DSL, it is a service that you have chosen to purchase from a telco, and if they want to provide a different service you will have the choice, as always, whether or not you want to purchase it.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
I agree that Bellsouth and AT&T are trying to gain an advantage that will stick it to smaller companies and consumers...
I also think it is interesting how words change slightly as you change sources:
Article Title:
Telecoms want their products to travel on a faster Internet
Slashdot Link:
telecom carriers' own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently... than those of their competitors.'
Notice how the article title makes them sound like benevolent companies looking to improve the Internet for us all?
I think the Slashdot assessment is closer to being correct. (The truth is always somewhere in the middle.) But these two companies don't have a lock on the infrastructure like AT&T once did. They just happen to have very large customer bases which would give them tremendous short term influence. Given enough time and the revelation to customers that they can get better and cheaper services from other companies... Their customer base will erode. AOL tried to devise cute proprietary ways of delivering media to their customers. That didn't mean enough to retain customers...
Bellsouth and AT&T can fight over goofy ways to re-structure how data moves... If it doesn't get shot down, someone will deliver content faster and cheaper outside of their proposed plans.
I don't think this will hold up, or be a relevant solution for these companies long term... But feel free to write a congressman.
You don't get it.
They OWN all our access to the internet. We don't have a choice, because it's not ours to change or not change.
It's sad. Before, everyone had access to lots of information regardless of their economic or social status. You could get free access a bunch of ways and just connect to anything out there. Now, not only is certain content going to be shut off completely (when the Bells have a fight and decide to close down peering sites and prevent the east coast from IMing the west coast) but it'll cost more to get access to other content because the competing Bell will tax access from separate ISPs.
I hope wireless technology progresses quickly, since this will probably become law in about a year and be implemented another year from that. Wireless technology will allow us to create high-bandwidth links between different Bells and provide access in local communities, however we need T1s to become cheaper faster.
Yeah, because NPR is really a reliable and fair site for news. Oh, you mean this was only a stupid ploy to bash Republicans. Good one.
how much do you pay for a long distance call? in the 70's it was 39 cents a minute, more in prime time. now its 5 - 10 cents a minute or free if you use cellular. hard to see how things have been bad for the consumer.
They're not saying that ATT and BellSouth will "slow down" any traffic. They want to make a 2nd network that they can control that will be faster (via priority queueing and the like). Nobody will be slowed down, but they will be able to offer faster services. As much as I don't like the Bells (I used to work for SBC), I think this is something that the market will work out if passed. How successful has any paid video service been online?
This is scary because it is intended as just a first step, and because the present administration of the U.S. government sells government policy to the highest bidder.
--
Who has killed more Iraqis? Saddam or Bush?
Boo hoo. If you don't like it, build your own network. Stop complaining!
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
I agree. I may be mistaken but isn't this what Speakeasy does?
This sig rocks the casbah.
You may think it a success, and 99.9999% of internet users may consider it a success, but in the eyes of monopolists who can't make a dime off that dumb internet, it is a colossal failure. You have to see their point of view to defeat them. Fuck what is right and good for people, they only care about what increases their bottom line for the next quarter. Fuck five years from now too. They want to be a bigger frog even if it means shrinking the pond to squeeze everybody else out.
For that matter, there is a logical reason for their attitude. The people in charge, from middle managers on up, never knew real competition, where you try to please your customers, where you have to fight to get custmers and to keep them. No, they grew up career-wise in a monopoly, where customers are guaranteed, all you have to fight is the government regulators, and the only decisions are how to squeeze ever more money out of your customers. The very idea of having to retain customers and get new ones is not even in their vocabulary.
Infuriate left and right
Joe Barton was also the partial mastermind behind the "Energy Bill" that provided tax breaks to energy companies (during a record setting profit quarter).
Go Joe Go!
Sounds like we're pretty much there...
http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.p hp/Fascism
Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
I think the solution is to not make it happen!
Me too!
A few years ago, I read an article where they talked about ISP vs OSP. An ISP was an Internet Service Provider. An OSP was an Online Service Provider (think AOL, Compuserve, or Prodigy).
It seems like ATT and BellSouth are talking about an OSP. They will have an online experience, with a gateway to the Internet. Fine with me, just don't call it "The Internet". Perhaps we need some truth in advertising rules: 1) how much bandwidth does your service have to other Internet providers? 2) do you prioritize packets? 3) do you block ports? 4) do you block addresses? 5) can you provide results of independent tests for RFC compliance?
New laws affecting gas and electric companies are forcing a split into energy production and energy delivery. Perhaps there needs to be a split between bandwidth providers and content providers.
I can see where this 2-tiered internet is heading, more political scandals and tighter regulations of the internet. No thanks. Well, there will be fewer political scandals because they will change the ethics laws to make what they do legit ;-)
Then they will have to make some laws to prevent the meida from having them look bad... but they will just take bribes from the telecom companies to degrade the QOS of any service saying anything, in exchange for enacting the laws allowing them to degrade everything.
My ideal ISP will give me in IP address and a fast connection to the Internet.
My ideal ISP will not care what I have on my computer or transmit over their network.
My ideal ISP will not care if I run a server filled with pirated movies or software, because that's my problem.
My ideal ISP will provide me with symmetrical bandwidth in the tens of megabits per second.
My ideal ISP will never exist.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
I'm so glad that control over the internet rests firmly with the US.
For a while, I was worried that an international democratic process
was going to be involved in decisions about stuff like this.
Thankfully, I can see it is still in good hands.
My god...
internet backbones expand exponentially over course of 10 years
POTS maintainers drag their feet regarding internet telephony
POTS maintainers decide to start hauling their audio over public internet to save money
POTS maintainers decide not to spend money on extra pipes, instead want to prioritize traffic to get more bandwidth for free
Government regulates something else that should not be a law at all, and sticks it to the little guy yet again.
Yay capitalism.
Enough with the complaining! What are we going to do about this?
slimeballs
"When costs are being driven into an equation, they have to be recovered somewhere," said Bill Smith, chief technology officer of BellSouth. ''Why do fundamental business economics not apply to the Internet?"
if this is the case then go ahead and build your fricken separate network for your iptv crap. leave the internet alone. or is it you are also using your network that is carrying the internet for your iptv and you want it back so you don't have to deploy more fiber.
if the above statement is true then all this is a non issue if you are building your second tier network with all this expensive fiber than go ahead an use it for iptv just leave what we go alone.
these guys are lying through their teeth and they can all go to hell.
But it should be customers that pay for access, not the service provider. Have it kind of like long distence service. And it should be a choice to use the QOS settings or not, like making a long distence call. The telco's should be required to negotiate and settle prices amongst themselves so that there isn't a bunch of toll road fees. But when a connection is established a provider must be able to contractually gaurantee the conection to stay up and it's quality remain the same at whatever price rate the service provider offers. This would be a major boon for video games which compared to video doesn't use as much bandwidth but needs stable connection. Also I can see internet phone devices and video phones exploding onto the market and in fact POTS would die at least within the united states. Then I'd imagine that the telophone companies would finally replace telephone lines with broadband ethernet or fiber wires.
But again this should be an end user change, it should have nothing to do with service providing web sites although they can choose to pay the cost of the premium conection when they establish it or maybe we can have a protocol equivelent of collect calls. The telco's should have no right to be able to block any provider you choose to establish a connection with.
Internet pricing these days mostly comes down to bandwidth, usage, availability, and less importantly service. A few customers may also consider going with a particular provider for hosting, security, customer support reasons, etc., but it's really become commodity market.
Telcos want to be able to use price discrimination, service differentiation, control of content, etc., to create more profit for themselves. They expect more profit for themselves at both ends of the pipe. Of course, they justify a 2-tier scheme by suggesting investment into infrastructure costs money, but it has always been the case with any other utility company that people/communities demand more electricity, water, gas over time.
In a Telco-centric world, the Internet would look more like the cellphone networks of today, where carriers sell 15 second ringtones for $2.00 or $3.00 on web sites hosted by themselves.
The "3rd party" content providers (Google, Microsoft, etc.) won't let this happen.
"This is in reference to the article at http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles /2005/12/13/telecoms_want_their_products_to_travel _on_a_faster_internet/. I sent you an
email previously on this topic, with tracking number 4388420. While I
think that telecoms such as yourself should have the right to run
their business as they please, I think it is very unfortunate that you
think so little of your customers. As I stated in a previous email, I
own my leased bandwidth at the price of $40.00 per month, and I expect
to be able to access any services I please without you charging the
service provider. It's my bandwidth, not yours. I am looking forward
to terminating my business with you when my contract expires in nine
months. Charter cable will be a welcome change."
(End of Email)
I believe Telecoms should have the freedom to make this happen. It is their company and their phone lines, after all. However, SBC customers, as members of a free market, should recognize that this decision by SBC is a slap in the face. I wonder how long SBC would run their 2-tier network if every content provider on the internet refused to serve SBC customers? SBC would reverse their decision so fast, it would make your head spin. Too bad I'm stuck on my contract for a while.
FTA: "The telecom companies said that since they are spending billions of dollars to build new fiber-optic networks that can carry more data"
Hey, in a few years, that's more dark fiber for Google to snap up.
It seems to me (optimist that I am) that this could simply be a proposal to allow the Telcos to take the huge bandwidth they currently have locked up for SONET, DWDM, etc. currently used for private data, video, and voice services and open it up for use by anyone using an IP based transport. Of course they want to be able to make a return on this expensive infrastructure. Without a means to get a return on their investment, it isn't going to happen. We need to assure basic services are widely and cheaply available, a universal services function for the Internet. But if we want the infrastructure to grow and support next generation services we have to provide some means to get a return on the investment. Right now there are still analog relay driven telephone switches in reasonable large markets because the telecommunications act removed the ability fr incumbent telcos to get a return. We don't want to remove the incentive to grow the IP network we have all become so dependent on as well!
It's about the backbone, not the last mile.
How is NPR unreliable exactly?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I would say okay the telco can do this, if the telco informs the user everytime a page/video loads that the telco has limitted loading speed of the page/video or degraded images on the the page/video. Users need to be aware of what is happening. Also all their advertisements have to explain how the telco requires payment from other internet companies for the faster service. People need to aware of the money and the whole story.
I think if they are forced to be totally transparent, they will think twice and other companies (cable or wireless) can advertise that they don't do that. I can see ads that say "Slow internet, use ours and get the maximum speed for any site."
The changes Carriers are going to try to make boil down to QoS. Check out the TISPAN standards or 3GPP IMS on which TISPAN relies heavily. There are other standards as well.
Remember the Whitacre comment about "mah pipes"? He was talking about an SBC GPON network. They'll offer "triple play" services to consumers... sure... but the "video" and "telephone" networks won't run on the web... they'll be running on a private network. That means the "data" network is essentially just one of three QoS networks coming into the house. Which means they can control the bandwidth, priority, etc. of that traffic. Do you think SBC or Comcast is going to allow a fat data pipe into their customers home so Google can "steal" their IPTV/VoIP customers?
What can we do about this? Throw up our hands up in disgust and switch to another ISP? Who? Comcast? Verizon? They'll be doing the same thing. What's left? A Wifi provider? Please. WiMax? Yeah right. No wireless standard is going to compete with Fiber for at least several years. The only way Comcast/Verizon/SBC will give the "data" slice of the GPON network a fat bandwidth/priority is if I pay out the wazoo for it. Either that or make web companies foot the bill:
Look for this same QoS battle to unfold in the mobile world as Carriers roll out IMS. Carriers are nuts for ARPU and they're running around trying to deploy "instant messaging" and "video services" in their own walled gardens. Do you think they want to allow some web company to use "mah pipes" and "steal" the customers from their ARPU generating services? Just as there is a QoS bottleneck in the home so too is there one on your phone (when IMS is deployed, your phone talks SIP, etc.) via the PDP Context.
I wish I could have seen the reaction when Google announced their GLM service. You can be sure the phone companies would much prefer to charge for this type of service... and believe me they'll try everything they can to do so. The similarities between what's happening in your home and will happen on your cellphone are abundant. Wireless carriers own the spectrum to provide you services... just as Carriers own the GPON (other similar) network they're deploying. If they had their way there may be no internet... they'd provide all the major internet services themselves via "walled gardens".
If you have Cingular Wireless (soon to be rebranded *AT&T*), dump them in favor of T-Mobile. You can carry over your GSM phones to T-Mobile, and you won't be stuck in a 2 year contract. Ditching Cingular is a double-whammy to both AT&T and BellSouth since Cingular is co-owned (60% AT&T, 40% BellSouth) by them.
I went from a Sony Ericsson T616 with Cingular (formerly AT&T Wireless) to a Motorola RAZR with T-Mobile and I couldn't be happier in terms of the reception I'm receiving here in NorCal. I'm getting the best signal quality (in terms of no dropped calls) since before the switchover from analog to digital.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
The telcos are scared. As the Internet develops and gets faster and goes wireless the end-to-end nature of the beast means that anyone and their dog can come up with a birght idea that competes with any app the telcos may write. Media companies like TV broadcasters are also scared. A fast enough ubquitous end-to-end net means that anyone can produce full video and sell for consumption by anyone else with no differentiation except its quality and content. Telcos racked up huge costs in the dot.com era by building out an incedible amount of infrastructure and by paying huge costs for segments of wireless benefit (which it turns out is techologically pointless). They are seeking to recoup those cost by being content and service providers. With this proposal they are seeking an unfair advantage to tehir offerings over everyone elses.
As it is I am sick of being nickeled and timed for web access on wireless devices like cell phones. I want full interent connectivity on all my wireless devices including open APIs to do anything I can do on general broadband. The ploy is to keep us "consumers" instead of providing full access to the net for all of us to be producers as well as consumers of content. This is the same ploy as broadband offerings that attempt to forbid us from running servers (i.e., being producers of content).
All of this is missing the huge promise of the Net. It is attempting to keep the centralized creation and distribution of content to the "masses". It is detrimental to the creation and viability of countless possible web based businesses. It directly limits the "global mind" and group submind possibilities of the net.
Say NO LOUDLY.
Actually physical letters don't carry the weight they did even a few years ago.
Sure they do! So long as the letters are addressed as coming from $MajorCorp and include a check they carry plenty of weight.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
how much do you pay for a long distance call? in the 70's it was 39 cents a minute, more in prime time. now its 5 - 10 cents a minute or free if you use cellular. hard to see how things have been bad for the consumer.
It would be bad for "me" the consumer if they started forcing me to use their voice services instead of much cheaper alternatives.
While 5-10 cents per minute doesn't seem like much please put it in perspective.
My bill is $.02-$.05/min to most developed nations and $5/month for a line in.
1. Telcos will very quickly alienate whatever customers (both business and residential) are still feeling predisposed to deal with them
2. Content companies will introduce a selective charge mechanism, where anyone coming from designated corporate networks of the Telcos will have to pay through the nose for any content whatsoever (and if you think Google can't do that to SBC think again), thus raising whatever money is necessary to pay the Telcos access fees
3. If that fails, and this degenerates into an all out war, Google will simply turn on it's dark fiber, provide peering points with other content companies, and bypass the Telcos alltogether
Everything rests on a simple reality: Google can re-build the Internet sans Telcos, but Telcos can't live w/o Google. And if you throw in MSNBC, CNN, and the blogosphere, the Telcos a seriously misguided if they think they have a chance in hell of winning.
And they know it. And that's why they're going to the Capitol Hill to get some leverage, any leverage at all.
In short: they're bluffing. Let them come!
I just checked over my long distance bill.. there was one call that has to be an error, 150 minutes, to my mother, (which is out of state long distance) 5 years, 10 years ago, I would have called to dispute it, and likely gotten credit for it readily. this time, I'm not going to bother- why? the charge for that call was 1.06/.// it is not worth my time for a dollar..
think about that, 2.5 hour call, AT&T, and the charge was a dollar six....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
So much of the Internet either goes through the few companies left or through companies just like them. Try starting a wireless ISP in a rural area. Your back end from the PHONE COMPANY cost a fortune, so you have to have a huge number of customers just to break even on the cost of the T1. So you sign up people and get them off the phone system. So what? They are making a fortune off the T1 and they don't have to deal with end-users anymore, so they don't care. And to top it off, if you are in an area with DSL, you have to compete against the same phone company that provides your T1 line for customers!
With all the talk of grants and stuff for bringing high speed Internet to rural areas...one of the things that would really help is dropping the cost of business connections for WISP startups. But the phone companies aren't going to do it unless they are made to do it. They have everyone bent over a barrel and they could care less about changing things.
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
The problem with the US market is it isn't as democratic as we all think it is and we don't let regulation take it's course because we are more concerned with profits than people.
Our democracy isn't the driving force for our existance as it was 200+ years ago. It's now SUV's, large TV's, large credit card debts and the influx of extreme evangelism of hatred, non believers and hard rightwing faith.
Capitalism is an economic system, not a form of government. In a democratic society the people have spoken and regulation is a natural course of the will of our nation; to believe otherwise is to be imperialistic and fascist in manyways, hardly democratic and compassionate person as our president likes to think he is.
Regulation is fairness represented through our democratic institutions. If corporate america thinks they are above our will or those who believe in imperialistic capitalism think capitalism is form of government and government only exists to protect imperialistic economic powers then that is an America that i dion't think "Freedom loving Americans" would fight and die for.
Only if the only "citizens" benefitting from your "socialism" are corporations.
Hell, we don't even have universal health care. We barely have a safety net for citizens at all.
Ours is a plutocracy, where two candidates with the same views are elected, campaigns paid for by crporations and the rich who can then dictate what laws they demand be passed. All legislation in the US uis bought and paid for, your vote is a joke when you have two candidates both being bribed by the same MNCs.
i really do not see logic in their argument of how much it costs to lay new pipes. Why not simply charge a higher price? so instead of charging $39.99/month for 5Mb/2Mb, they should charge 69.99 or whatever it takes to make a profit. Price it so it works out.
If they can not make it pay, then their business model is flawed and they should not be in the business to begin with. But that is the problem. These telcos simply do not have a viable business plan; all's they have is the pipe to the door and they are trying to milk it for every penny they can via legislation. Why innovate when you can legislate?
As soon as your business model revolves around lawyers and lobbists, you are a failed business looking for a life preserver. Look at SCO as a case in point.
If we allow telephone companies to go under like we apparently want to (using cell phone's as primary phones) we are going to end up destroying the entire internet infrastructure. The small telcos have trouble competing as it is, but they get money from the universal service fund that pays them back 80%. If they get that kind of money and still can't compete with cable modems, cell phones, and voip long distance, you know that they will have to turn around and charge us more, forcing us to go to alternative sources and finally bankrupting them all. Most of the internet is carried and used over telcos. We need to let them do what they do best otherwise we may end up with $1200 for 1.5mbps service like the telcos pay now in order to provide internet to customers.
I can see a way that this could all work out to everyone's benefit, but Congress would need to be VERY careful in how they set it up to avoid abuse.
The basic problem the telcos are trying to solve is that of providing a guaranteed quality of service for certain applications (mainly video, but I can see how other applications could use it as well). To accomplish this, they want to build a separate, high-bandwidth network over which to route the time-sensitive traffic.
This could be done as follows. Each backbone provider that wishes to do so sets up a high-speed network in addition to their general purpose network. At the gateways, routing rules are set up such that traffic is routed through the high-speed network if and only if the following conditions are met:
- The QoS field is set to designate that high-speed service is requested.
- The traffic is arriving via an adjacent ISP or peer network provider that has subscribed for high-speed service (and hasn't already used up all the bandwidth that they paid for). The source and destination of the traffic is ignored. All that matters is which "neighbor" of the high-speed provider the traffic arrived from.
An ISP or backbone provider that has subscribed for high-speed service is responsible for ensuring that the appropriate QoS flags are set for all traffic they deliver to the high-speed provider to ensure that their purchased high-speed bandwidth isn't wasted on traffic that doesn't need it (or was sent by a customer that hasn't subscribed for high-speed service). This may involve downgrading QoS at their own gateways if necessary.
Each high-speed "customer" would sign up for high-speed service with their respective ISP, who would purchase bandwidth from their backbone provider(s). Packets that the customer sends with the QoS flags set would be routed to the backbone provider with the QoS flags unchanged (or altered to fit the high-speed provider's specifications) and routed to the backbone provider, who would then route the traffic through their high-speed network to its destination's ISP. Data not flagged for QoS, or being sent by a customer that has not signed up for high-speed service (or has exceeded the bandwidth purchased), gets downgraded to standard service before being routed to the backbone.
In all cases, "customer" refers to an entity such as an Internet television station or other generator of time-sensitive content, and NOT a consumer. In general, traffic sent from a consumer to a content provider does not need high-speed service, and therefore can be sent via the general purpose network (not many cable TV watchers send video back to the cable company, after all).
In this way, everyone wins. Consumers can get high-quality video over the Internet from providers that are willing to purchase premium service without the need for the entire Internet to be upgraded. The only technical caveats I can think of are that they ISP's and backbone providers would need to carefully manage how much high-speed bandwidth they purchase from other providers so that their own customers can have high-quality end-to-end connections regardless of whom they are connecting to (within reason), and that ISP's on the receiving ends of high-speed traffic could find themselves overwhelmed if their consumers start receiving content from high-speed providers (even if said ISP's didn't purchase high-speed bandwidth themselves, since it's the content providers and not consumers that are signing up for service from their ISP's!).
There are, of course, a few gotchas:
- Pricing needs to be done fairly so that everyone pays the same price for a given amount of bandwidth. No predatory pricing, price gouging, or revenge price hikes (or denying service to a competitor). Most of these things are illegal anyway, but enforcement needs to be strict.
- Providers need to cooperate to some degree in how they handle the QoS and routing.
- High-speed service providers really should avoid being content providers themselves to avoid the temptation to hike up the prices for their competitors in the content market.
There are probably a few other issues I'm not thinking of, but I think most of them can be worked out (at least in theory, anyway).
cp /dev/zero ~/signature.txt
If, long ago, dereg was done differently, many of today's service deployment problems would not exist.
The division should have simply been made on the service: You can sell/maintain either pipes or content, not both.
Congress doling out huge sums of welfare to those who CHOOSE not work and would rather have another child so they can collect another $900/month instead of finding a job and supporting their self/family. And don't cite that "victim of the system" shit; there are plenty of people who have made themselves from nothing - they're all around you.
Corruption exists on all levels, despite the top-down diatribe we are constantly bombarded with in the media. Look close enough, and you will find corruption everywhere.
The answer is simple:
its not about them becoming more efficient for their network users, its about squelching competition unfairly. Once that happens and we lose choice, us consumers normally end up getting the shaft.
You have to remember the power a virtual monopoly gives you.
As a disclaimer, i didnt approve of the original breakup, as i think the consumer lost in the long run, and that AT&T, at the time, was benevelent.
Things are far different today, and these actions worry me.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
not. Well of course its more complicated than that. Nothing is an absolute. Terms such as capitalism, socialism, mercantilism are absolutes.
Why would we come out and admit we want socialism? I agree 25% of the population (and closer to 45% of politicians) want that, but nowhere near 100% do. 25% want the mercantilism a sibling poster referred to, 25% want "freedom from government" (libertarianism) and the other 25% shouldn't be allowed to vote.
The thing that i hate is that the two-party system we are sort of stuck with creates this gravitational pull of the politicians to either be republican or democrat. Doesn't leave much room for what I personally consider to be more worthwhile world views. The result of this polarization is more visible today than any other time in my memory of politics (which doesn't go that far back unfortunately, didn't really care about it till '90 or so).
So what I see (somebody correct me if I'm wrong) is that the wingbats are leading the parties because the moderates are not en vogue right now. That of course alienates the moderates, makes them think the ruling class are extremists all. One house having a majority means there is not as much pull back to the middle as there should be for this "real world".
I'm proud of America, the land of the free and home of the brave and whatnot, but damn its frustrating sometimes.
90-100% of the junk they spew if far left and very biased. Have you listened to them recently?
The article mostly talks about the telcos trying to offer Video services at a "premium" to subscribers, not much else. This way they can take a huge chunk of the next-gen Video-over-IP market, by having better quality videos (and most likely live video feeds) over their network. How they would stop video.google.com if Google decides to up the ante and offer H.264 quality videos is beyong me... that would probably be illegal.
So basically they are asking Congress to let them bundle a Video & Internet in one package sans the legal troubles. In my opinion, Verizon (a TELCO) is already doing something like that with their FiOS service (Broadband + Video), although in limited areas.
Mozilla stole tabs from NetCaptor. So what? Right?
... the US had no political control over the internet, so the telcos are obviously morons in petitioning US politicians for change right?
spend extra money to make a product less useful so that you can charge more. an excellent way to further society. seriously, ruining one of the strongest points of the internet would take more energy than doing nothing and it would be used to charge more. the only benefit to something like this is that it could spark some creative workarounds.
-Tim Louden
Now we know why google was buying all that dark fiber
You are so correct!
Some of this is embedded in the peering arrangments - but a lot of this was showing its ugly head about 1998 when the Telcos started "CONVERGING" with content providers. The merger of AOL/Time Warner is a good example. While in this case AOL is not a Telco - they were a large ISP with at the time a large user base and a distribution system in place. Now with Broadband the Telco's are moving into the role of trying to be ISP's and they have a very unfair advantage.
The idea is that if you have a stranglehold on the content and the delivery system then you can force your own crap down people's throats.
AOL/Time Warner is just one example. And when I write here that you _can_ force feed your own crap - I am not suggesting that AOL/Time Warner were delivering crappy content. All I am saying is that with control of the pipes that deliver the content you can chose to a large extent what content is to be delivered. So of course - aquire through merger or aquisition or however you can a pool of content and choose to deliver it preferentially over everything else.
What this new strategy is about is not a hell of a lot different than the convergance that took place a few years ago. It is just that to a considerable extent this did not provide the leverage they were looking for so they are out to try it again!
Now lets look at this from a business standpoint. Clearly the content side of the business (of a combined content provider/content distributor) must have some revenues. The distribution side of the business needs to attract the surfing public and they can't do this without content. So this means that in one form or another we end up with money being transfered from the distribution side to the content creation side.
And that is where the peering arrangments come in. Effectively all small and middle players are left out in the cold. This is because a peering arrangement has to be negotiated before any money is remitted for the content needed by the Telco side of the business. This is obvious because an ISP with no content is not a viable business. This is why regional Telcos/ISP's pay HUGE peering fees to connect to POP's.
So whatever content providers have been lucky enough to "converge"end up with an inside track and are paid for what they do. Meanwhile independant content providers such as those who run webservers end up paying for their content to be distributed and its called amoung other things: bandwidth charges.
You can visualize the cash flows this way:
converged telco/content provider:
$$$(customer) -> local-isp -> webserver/telco (converged/peered)
independant content provider:
$$$(webmaster) -> local-isp -> webserver/telco (converged/peered)
It is against this stacked playing feild that the average webmasters, blog creators etc. are working.
Now - the Telco's propose to increase charges as well. In the past to get static IP"s typically meant paying upward of 3x or more for "static IP charges" and "bandwidth charges" and "managed connections" and "managed hosting" and so forth. However if you were able to do exactly the same thing from the inside of the converged organisation you would be paid for all of this. However to get to the inside you have to be bloody ass big - and be able to thus negotiate - or you would have to sell your business for a song.
This is one reason the dot.com's imploded. They had no workable revenue model.
The thing is that fair trade practices legislation and anti-combines legislation prohibits this sort of colusion. I do not know why the laws that are on the books have not been applied - other than perhaps the content creation industries and content distribution industies (which by the way include the RIAA and MPAA) have enough political clout to attempt to create a whole new legal vocabluary that somehow suggests that a spade is not a type of shovel.
So - the above post is dead on the mark.
I seem to recall something about some other baby bell, can't remember right now but its name started with V?
Where did you hear that?
1.5 Mbit cable internet connections only use about the same amount of space as a two television channels (one up and one down).
Each channel already has it's 6 mhz reserved space, they will never conflict.
You could torrent all night and watch all the HDTV you want without having any problems.
Cable companies have the same set up as the telco's currently have with adsl.
They separate cable from internet as the telcos separate voice from data. What the telcos are asking for here is to end the seperation, and promote prioritization (and attach a prize).
The phone lines are getting clogged, but the coax cable is not (nor will it ever be in the forseeable future), so the cable companies don't really care.
Wouldn't this make the telco's in question lose their common carrier status, what with them discriminating between various data stream? This would then make them responsible for the data that travels accross their networks, as well as open them all sorts of wonderful lawsuits.
The truth: Laborers choose their employer voluntarily, and can leave at will.
I'm not even gonna argue this point, and I dare say that I fully believe that 100% of people reading this post know in their hearts that there is no slavery here in America at least, and even very little elsewhere.
So why has such a statement survived as a propogable meme? How is it that such ridiculous lies are continually retold?
I think I know the answer...
Many people don't have enough self-discipline to distance themselves from the paycheck-shackle. That is, they spend as much money as they have, and are thus shackled to their jobs. With no buffer, they have no opportunity to shop around for another employer. Thus they feel enslaved. Thus they develop a resentment for their employer, or the stockholders, or whomever... thus they develop a resentment against corporations... thus they develop a resentment against capitalism.
They choose to believe that Capitalism is an institution, something created by us as one way of organizing, as a policy... rather than the truth that capitalism is an inherent emergent property of any group of humans that wish to trade things.
Rather than choose to see the truth, and benefit from a working knowledge of the truth, these people choose to decieve themselves... to lie to themselves about the nature of the world... just because it makes them feel better about themselves... just because they won't have to accept the truth that they have no self-discipline.
But there is a way out. Everyone has the opportunity to save up a buffer and become free from the paycheck-shackle. It is not a matter of how much you get paid. You can always get by with a little less. ALWAYS. Especially in a country with such handouts as America has.
So save up, break free, and realize that your entire set of political beliefs was motivated by a silly little thing.... and then come be a Libertarian, for god sake.
Rather than fight losing political battles to have oversight of the Internet somehow internationally mediated, we ought to just abandon DNS and build better resolution systems. One potential starting place: http://grinfs.org/
So now SBC and AT&T don't have to share the copper. Remember the FCC ruling?
To me this really stinks of AOL, They should just buy them out. Or are they trying a under handed take over?
Capatialism only works when there is competition, and the only way for there to be competition is to mandate competition.
Free markets work fine with monopolies. The "competition" to a monopoly in a free market is the threat of a new entry into that market. A monopoly can't raise its profit much above that of the overall economy or investors move in to reap the excess and bring it back down to the prevailing value.
The problems start when a monopoly declares itself "natural" and demands that the government protect it from competition.
Call it like it is ... SBC and Bellsouth are lobbying for this. AT&T is AT&T in name only.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Don't use it. The Internet is based on the participation of individual machines.
Companies who try and do things like this forget that they only make revenue from consumers when they satisfy consumer demand. They obviously haven't got the message yet, but we see it proven over and over again that the only thing they end up doing by trying to dictate demand is destroying themselves.
We need to send a very clear message to any companies contemplating this that for them to participate in it will be an act of suicide on their part. We as consumers will demand service providers that utilise the existing, open Internet, and thus, they will get our money.
Do not fear companies such as these who seek to bind things up, because no matter what, they cannot do anything ultimately without our consent. The reason why is because they are ruled by their bottom line...which we as consumers provide. Hence, if they want to maintain said bottom line, they are required to fulfill our desires...not their own.
If a portion of the Internet is broken it will be routed around.
If the telcos charge too much, the independant backbone providers will do what Google already is. They'll buy dark fiber. More than they have now. When the telco raises the rates they'll slowly eliminate the telcos from the equation. When the telcos then want to reach thier customers the ISPs will have the regulations in place to charge the telcos approriately. The seeming chaos of the Internet can and will work against them. Someone at a peering point will always attempt to offer a better deal for transit of the traffic. Google is the tourist trap, ultimately they and places like them, or well P*rn Sites as well realistically, are why people are on the net. They have the ultimate power. "Hi, you are an XYZ Telco IP address, we ration our access to XYZ customers due to XYZ tarrifed costs we pay to support their customers. Do you have another Internet access account, please use that for faster more reliable service. Sorry for the inconvienience. XYZ officials need to know you're not happy. Call them at +1 800.555.1212" I could just see this on some site (maybe not successful ones, but enough that it would smart to be XYZs service department). It will be fun to watch the reaction of the collective intelligence of the Internet et. al. in opposition to the Telcos. Really. It will be fun.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
No single company has the money to invest or support a seperate Internet over the long run. There are too many ISPs and backbone providers competing in the open market.
You misunderstand the issue.
This is not about creating a separate internet. This is about giving some packets priority over others in a single transport - and the regulated transport operator being able to assign their OWN packets to the higher priority - and to include others' packets for an extra fee, when contracted to do so.
No "second network" creation at all. Just first-class and coach-class packets. (Actually: Packets with confirmed reservations and packets "flying standby" or in "overbooked seating".)
This sounds unfair. But actually, it's an economic necessity to enable a technical necessity.
Normally, IP packets get best effort service. They're forwarded if there's bandwidth for them. But when there's a traffic jam packets are randomly picked to be dropped.
This works FINE when there's lots more transport available than packets to use it. And for things like file transfers and terminal sessions it's still OK when things get tight: The TCP layer sits on top of IP, detecting the lost packets, retrying them, and throttling back until traffic flows smoothly through the traffic jam. Your data gets through - but slowed down to fairly "share the road".
But for real-time things like real-time voice and video, retry takes too long, causing stops-and-starts, stuttering, echos, and a host of quality issues. (Even the delay necessary to insert slop to handle the hole-filling is a horrible problem in two-way communication.) Yet not retrying makes holes in the stream that have to be filled in by guess - and losing information when too many packets are dropped.
IP had hooks to let you flag packets for special handling when needed. (They're the Type of Service (ToS) bits - intended to indicate what aspects of scheduling are important to the packets, intended to be mapped into Quality of Service (QoS) - how the scheduling decisions are made.)
But protocol stacks have already cheated. (Notably Microsoft, which released an IP stack that improved its own performance by lying about the traffic's requirements - giving its packets priority over others that were more truthful.) With many cheaters deployed the ISPs and backbones just don't honor the ToS bits, or rewrite them at their own edges - to their own specs - when they do. (Thus, now that Microsoft wants to get into VoIP they find their past behavior hosed themselves. B-) And everybody else. B-( ) But even if ToS were honored and used honorably, there are no guarantees. So too many calls through a network node and they'd all deteriorate.
Telcos write service contracts that guarantee performance levels for their phone calls - or for customers (like radio and television networks) that require reliable transport. High probability of establishing a connection (for dynamic things like phone calls), still higher performance guarantees once one is established. If they want to turn the call into packets and ship it over a shared IP backbone while still meeting the guarantees, the VoIP / stream packets themselves must have guarantees higher than "best effort". In particular they require virtual certainty of delivery and tight control of transit time variations. That means they must have higher priority than the competing packets that are doing less time-critical stuff (such as file transfer). Fortunately, VoIP streams are low and essentially constant bandwidth, so they can just reserve a tiny fraction of the bandwidth for them. (Video streams are 'way bigger - but not as transient. So you can design in bandwidth for them.)
But if some packets are given priority over others, they have higher claim on system resources. They can bump other traffic. So it's appropriate to charge them extra for the privilege. (It's the same case as flying with a confirmed reservation vs. standby.) The bandwidth on the network l
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The truth: Laborers choose their employer voluntarily
Apply to 100 local companies' HR departments and get one job offer. Where is the choice?
With no buffer, they have no opportunity to shop around for another employer.
How much of a buffer would you reasonably suggest? I've been out of college for 33 months and still haven't found a job that pays more than 0.00 USD per hour (volunteering 15 hours a week at a hospital).
Everyone has the opportunity to save up a buffer and become free from the paycheck-shackle. It is not a matter of how much you get paid. You can always get by with a little less. ALWAYS.
I earn nothing. How can I get by with a little less than that?
failed capitalism doesn't kill millions of people
O rly?
This will happen sooner or [a bit] later. Perhaps even with pretense for National Security. Say, if you're "qualified customer" then you live on a nice fast network. And if you're "untrusted" (read "cheap") you live on "general purpose network" that has latency and jitter issues due to "traffic monitoring to assist national security matters".
At which point I would really start rooting for Google buying dark fiber all over and trying to throw together some sort of network. Even if not everywhere, it'd be enough to disrupt major evil plot.
Hyperom.com
No technical changes are needed - IPv4 has had QoS (the IP Precedence field and 6-bit DiffServ codepoint that has superseded it) for decades, and virtually every router has QoS support. The hard part is the political/commercial agreement, and after that, agreeing on what the QoS levels should be. Telcos already run IP networks for use by business IP VPNs (MPLS not IPSec) this way, so they have a lot of experience.
As Google's spokesman said in the article, this might not be a bad idea as long as it's fully open-access - anyone who wants to pay can send high-QoS data. I think it also needs some regulation, so that the high-QoS packets don't completely squeeze out the best-effort Internet packets. Actually running (parts of) the Internet like this could be a big challenge, but it would mean that PSTN (the normal telephone network) and TV broadcast networks could finally go away, and that any VoIP or IP TV company could just set up, buy suitable amounts of QoS transport, and start delivering high quality voice and video.
Telcos may try doing this, but actually Backbone providers will retort with slowing their bandwidth to access the rest of the Internet. So, if telcos want to play hardball, so can the Backbone Providers. And the Backbone Providers could essentially charge 5000% more to the telcos for their OC-192 connections to them to give them the QoS they are looking for.
What does that have to do with the fact that they want to regulate the internet?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Long Distance Voice used to be the cash cow for all the LD telcos, but the prices have been in such total free-fall for a decade that there's no margin left in consumer LD, and only a little in business voice, where there are value-added services supporting call centers. Most LD voice bottoms out around 2 cents/minute, but in reality that's because of telco settlement rules left over from divestiture - the LD companies have to pay the local companies by the minute for delivering the calls at the destination, at least in the US, and that cost gets passed through to the customer, but the amount of money that the LD company gets is a lot smaller than the telco's cut.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The mid-90s split initially had three parts - AT&T (which got the communications services and a small part of Bell Labs), Lucent (which got the Western Electric manufacturing and most of Bell Labs), and NCR (which continued to do cash registers, business computers and databases, and equipment management, though it was substantially changed by the AT&T period.) Later Lucent spun off Avaya (I mainly run into their PBXs, but I think they make other things) and Agere (semiconductor business, making things like DSPs and modem chips) and probably some other pieces.
Bellcore was never part of post-divestiture AT&T - when the 1984 Divestiture happened, the seven Baby Bells got a chunk of Bell Labs, which they renamed "Bell Communication Research", called Bellcore, and funded it for a number of years, after which it had to fly on its own. Eventually, SAIC bought it and renamed it Telcordia.
Qwest was a merger of the US West telco/RBOC and Qwest, a long-haul fiber data company started by ex-AT&Ter Joe Nacchio.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A morally pure capitalist might resist regulatory frameworks that benefit private interests at the expense of the market, but historically a large fraction of actual capitalists would happily encourage regulatory frameworks that benefit _them_ at the expense of their competition, and that's part of the trap the Bell System was in for a hundred years, especially once FDR's New Deal gave the Bell System a monopoly in return for regulations that guaranteed them a profit. The New Deal also effectively locked them out of the radio business and marginalized non-amateur non-broadcast radio, which pretty much guaranteed that rural areas wouldn't get telephones until somebody ran subsidized copper wire down their roads, instead of having the telcos do innovative things with radio in the 1940s-1960s. There were amateur radio phone-patch things in the 60s and 70s, often run by volunteers connecting overseas military people with their families, but you couldn't run them as a business competing with the telcos.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
According to articles I read on the web at the time, the telco fiber-to-the-home thing wasn't talking about giving better service to some ISPs than others - it was talking about some part of the fiber being dedicated for video while other parts are dedicated to voice and data, though it did sound like the telco wanted to either sell video themselves or more likely sell that bandwidth to video providers, and was mostly a combination of out-of-context quotes and telco execs who were clueless about how soundbite quotes would sound to data people. Big websites _will_ get better performance if they buy bigger access pipes and put more hosting closer to their viewers, and telcos would like to sell that kind of ISP service to them, but that's true regardless of what ISPs they're using.
The issues with Class of Service on the internet are really straightforward except for figuring out how to price it, how to implement it without burning lots of router CPU, and how to get different ISPs to cooperate. There are applications like ftp and BitTorrent that really don't care about latency and will maximize their throughput over whatever media they can find. There are other applications like Voice over IP that care a lot about latency, e.g. sound lousy if stuck behind a big FTP file transfer or even just behind a couple of 1500 byte packets, but have relatively small and predictable dataflows of their own. There are applications that are really sensitive to packet loss and applications that aren't - most TCP rapidly adapts to loss by adjusting its transmission rate to whatever the bottlenecks allow.
Prioritizing packets appears to be the way to deal with this, usually on a weighted-fair-queuing basis or sometimes strict priority queuing, and it's most sensitive on small internet connection in the downstream direction from the ISP to the end user - if you've got DSL, you'd really like your ISP to deliver VOIP packets to you before delivering email or web packets. (Upstream matters too, but that's under your equipment's control, and you'll also want to prioritize your VOIP packets over your BitTorrent upstream. If you've got a VOIP service's router on your broadband connection, you've probably noticed that it's configured for that.) Priorities make much less difference in the network backbone, because it's typically OC48 or OC192 (2.5-10Gbps) and not full, except occasionally in regional concentrator networks, mostly found in smaller cities, and even there, that's mainly an occasional-burst problem, because most ISP engineer their networks to perform reasonably well. Private networks for businesses are already deploying a fair bit of prioritization, especially on MPLS networks, because it lets companies know that their mission-critical applications (which are often more performance sensitive, especially databases) will work well, and makes it easier to move from telco voice services to VOIP. ISPs are starting to deploy QoS services, but most of them that I've seen only support that within their own networks, especially because you can't easily give anybody a Service Level Agreement for latency, jitter, and packet loss on packets that are delivered on somebody else's network, and because different networks often use different packet marking mechanisms, e.g. DSCP vs. TOS, how many levels of service, how to police excess traffic, and different pricing mechanisms. Also, unfortunately, most packet marking standards handle packets marked "0", i.e. not explicitly marked, as their lowest-priority "Best Effort" class, and don't have a way to prioritize something as "Worse than Default", which would let you make ftp and bittorrent and such always wait for other applications.
Thanks; Bill Stewart
Stonger-than-usual disclaimer: This is my
Offering multiple classes of service for different prices doesn't violate common-carrier provisions - if your favorite package delivery company is a common carrier, notice that they'll still sell you different grades of service with different handling procedures, prices, and speeds. The technical issues are different, obviously, but your ISP also charges you more for bigger pipes, and telcos charge ISPs more for bigger raw-bandwidth pipes, and most people know enough not to complain about that (though it's sometimes surprising how much cheaper big pipes are per megabit than small pipes.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
HP's new teleconferencing solution does pretty much the same thing ...
r net-future/
http://www.gilgamesh.ca/index.php/2005/12/14/inte
I'm not to worried. If the telcos push this, they'll just lose even more clients.
No one will probably ever see this comment anyhow, since the article is like 3 days old. But, to answer your question, they probably would *not* lose common carrier designation. Airlines, cruise lines, and trains, generally all have the concept of tiered pricing. In the case of Airlines, first class gives you better seats, better food, and possibly some other perks, because you pay more. But, an airline is still a common carrier.
The US Postal Service has 3rd class mail, 2nd class mail, 1st class mail, and Express Mail. Yet they are still a common carrier.
The main criteria for a common carrier is that they will accept content/passengers from anyone *who is willing to pay* (just because an airline is a common carrier doesn't mean I can fly free). That is, for example, internet providers don't screen content and allow some and deny other (well, outside of stuff that has been reported as violating copyright, child porn, etc - and that only gets blocked after a complaint has been registered and verified).
In this case, the phone co's are still saying they will pass content for anyone - but the level of service given is determined by how much they are willing to pay.
Don't think from this article that I am a supporter of the Telco's on this. I'm just trying to answer the question about common carrier. I think if the Telco's get their way on this, it will be more of a problem for them than anything.
Time for a little lesson. A Libertarian is someone who believes in maximizing personal freedom. It is a, and this is important, POLITICAL party esposing a particular political belief. You seem to be confusing it with Capitolism, which, once again important, is an ECONOMIC theory.
Time for a little reality check. Libertarians ignore all power centers other than governmental, from the local bully threatening your wife in a restaurant to the private "security forces" cults like the Mormons employ, to the powerful multinational corporations that can (and do) create and destroy entire communities.
Libertarians are usually the first to point out, on this site and elsewhere, that businesses, churches, private clubs, etc. aren't restrained by the U.S. constitution, and do not have to respect freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, or any of the other basic freedoms enshrined therein (notice a word repeating frequently?).
Individual FREEDOM is lost when you replace a democratically elected government with any of the above, which is exactly what happens when you persue the libertarian lassaiz-faire approach to regulation. Those policies were followed in the 19th century, with such wonderful results like child labor, employer massacres of disgruntled workers by private armies such as the Pinkertons for no other reason than that said workers had the audacity to attempt to organize into unions, and of course everyone's favorite, and the logical extreme when government imposes no restrictions at all on the treatment of people by other people, religions, or business entities: slavery.
Libertarianism isn't a recipe for more freedom, its a recipe for vastly less freedom beneath the heal of an unrestrained coporate and/or religious dictatorship (depending on where you live, and which unrestrained bully gets ahold of the reigns of power). In short, it is a recipe for disaster that would make the current appalling situation in this country look like a picnic by comparison.
So please accept the fact that the rest of us are going to laugh at and openly mock your reactionary, ignorant inability to parse even the most basic facts of reality, probably while rolling our eyes and shaking our heads.
But don't let that keep you from pulling your head out of the sand.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy