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Pay-to Play and the Tiered Internet
Crash24 writes "According to an article at The Nation, "industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received." " Tiered internet service may be inevitable folks. Brace yourself.
There are companies fighting this, trying to get policies put forth requiring network neutrality. According to the article, both Google and Amazon are against it, along with other special interest groups. I'm willing to bet that Microsoft would oppose it as well, since they're getting more and more into internet applications. Same goes for Apple.
Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T may be powerful, but they're going to have a hell of a fight if they're going up against Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon.
Is this possible proposed policy to establish equity? If so, I'm okay with that. I've often wondered that for the same $30/month as my neighbor I can download five of the latest linux distributions, sample 20 or 30 trial software packages (large).
What would bother me, and bother me greatly, would be if they established pricing baselines the cheapest of which match what people pay today. In other words, a money-grab.
People have long paid more money to make more long distance calls, that only makes sense. Why not for heavier internet usage? It makes sense that heavier users pay higher fees.
There also could be additional benefits (assuming this is a fair and balanced idea) -- that being a more moderated approach to internet usage. I don't doubt a significant slice of internet bandwidth is absorbed by indiscriminate downloading and uploading, and streaming. I know I don't think twice about downloading Photoshop Elements to trial for a couple days (~300MB) just because I can. I'm also just as likely to stream my music to whereever I am in the country from my server at my home, again, just because I can. How many others approach the internet in the same way? I'm guessing "many".
If users used the internet as a finite resource (which it is, by the way) the usability of the internet would improve almost immediately and expansion costs and needs would attenuate (my opinion). All of this would help keep costs and increased charges down (again, assuming businesses are here to charge us a fair price).
But, based on everything else I see in business, this may not pass the smell test. Sigh
Guess I'm over my slashdot article limit...
Seriously, we in Europe have finally gotten rid of the Pay Per Minute system with cable/adsl. You that have had it for so long, want to move to Pay Per View? You're not evolving, you're degenerating...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If spam could be eliminated look at how much bandwidth would be saved. When my ISP (BellSouth) stops all the spam entering their network, then they can talk to me about how they need to prioritize my traffic because of limited capacity.
Well, except for the fact that MSFT, Google, Apple, and Amazon need the telcos more than the telcos need them. By a wide margin -- and especially true for Google and Amazon (and eBay).
If this is successful, it will be the single largest "limiting" factor in the online world. What if this was the case 10 years ago? We wouldn't have the plethora of online stores we currently have, that's for sure. Or blogs. Or online games. Or P2P for that matter. Or VOIP. NONE of these "cool" technologies would have ever gotten out of the starting gate.
I could go on an on about how bad of an idea it is but I fear I am just wasting my breath. Until internet access is treated as a utility, this nonsense will continue to go on unchecked.
It seems to me that there are plenty of contenders out there vying for the home broadband market, and with upcoming wireless standards more contenders will emerge. We're not going to be stuck choosing between cable and DSL. Unless the main providers can create an illegal cartel (and evade government prosecution for doing so), I can't see that tiered service will ever harm us.
I'm sure that there are light users out there who would love $8/month tiered service for the 8 megs of transfer they might use in a month. But for the rest of us, I bet we'll always be able to switch providers to an untiered service the moment our current provider offers an unattractive tiered plan. Bandwidth is only going to get cheaper and more of a commodity, even at the local level.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
My wife is in the Real Estate industry and I am in the Banking industry. Both have, in recent years, been the target of legal action for price fixing, which, as I understand it is fixing the price of a product or service in agreement with another individual or business, which is illegal. The general rule provides that a vendor may not in combination with another vendor agree to set a certain price thereby creating a fixed price within a certain market. The original article appears to be down, of course, but the summary sounds a lot like price fixing to me.
if i get a dial up modem, or a cable modem, or a t1, i have different levels of service
if you are saying they are going to offer me less bandwidth for the same $, then we have a problem, but i'm sure a competitor has something to say about that
but if you are saying if i pay them 2x$ what i am already paying for a significantly bigger pipe, i don't exactly see what the problem is.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... that was when Internet connections were subject to the per-minute charges levied by the local phone loop owners.
Am I missing something, or does this just smack of wanting to roll back time?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The cat is out of the bag and competition will keep it that way.
Saying that they will charge per e-mail or download is as unrealistic as the electric company charging you per piece of toast, or load of laundry that you wash. What they can charge you on is the bandwidth that you use. Similar to how the electric company can charge per kilowatt hour... Also... They could only ever charge you for what you downloaded. Can you imagine how pissed you would be to find out that all the responses to incoming zombie requests to you computer racked up a $400 "Internet" bill. Even then, people will not be happy with the idea that they have to pay $15.00 extra dollars this month because a Microsoft error led to a giant ass patch they HAD to download.
It will not happen, the die has been cast and you can't repurpose this airplane as a clown's scooter.
[i]"Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"[/i]
Two thoughts here.
Why should L3 allow at&t's backbone to route traffic across their pipes or vice versa? Are they idiots or would they seriously rather have no interconnects and have the internet break down to multiple WAN's?
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Google or Yahoo! or basically any other web site out there pay for their bandwidth and on top of this, the consumers pay for essentially the same thing on the other end. Basically they're double dipping and still complaining that they aren't making enough.
$sys$droids
Most consumers of broadband already have a sliding pay scale that depends on the size of their pipe. For example, 1.5 to 6.0 Mbps DSL costs more per month than 384 Kbps to 1.5 Mbps.
But how can it even be legal for Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T to agree to discontinue free service, or reduce output (where "output" is service to the customer, in this case)? Seriously, IANAL, how can this be legal?
The idea of competition is that, when Verizon does something stupid that punishes customers, I can go somewhere else. It's a real problem if all the gatekeepers can legally get together and decide to give us all the shaft. And not even to try to hide their cooperation against consumers?! Messed up.
I'm probably going to get it for responding to "egg troll", but anyway...
Yeah, they own the pipes, but they are already charging people for the data being sent across it. If you make a long distance phone call, lets say, to your grandmother, would it be fair for the phone company to charge both you and grandma for the call? What about if they charge you for placing the call, and then charged grandma extra if she wants the sound of her voice at normal volume, instead of restricted to 10% volume?
Content providers pay a huge amount in connectivity already (I've worked for some, and have seen the bills) and my internet access at home isn't what I'd call cheap either (~$50/month). The backbone providers get their money from the connection providers that the content providers and users, like you and I, buy bandwidth from. So, they are already being paid for the traffic going across their pipes by the parties involved in the transfer.
I don't know about you, but I personally would prefer not to be double billed.
My karma is in a nose dive
I know I have already sent messages to my (small) telco saying that if they attempted something like this they would lose me (landline and DSL) before the next billing period.
All the small ISP's have gone away due to illegal moves by the big carriers who owned the last mile.
Now there are only a handfull of players left with a financial interest to screw you. Why not?
http://saveie6.com/
...there is a well known mechanism already in place for them to oppose it in a straightforward way. It's called the 'market'. If they want our business, why don't they pay for our connections to them?
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
Wireless will be so cheap that we'll just make our own wireless freenet. People won't even need to understand why. "Just put this thing on your roof, and you can have free Internet for life." "Sure, OK!"
How is this a 5, Insightful? The point is being missed completely. It's not about metered access it's about metered access to specific applications. It's about telling someone they need to pay more to reliably to get point X. Who cares about metered bandwidth if that's what they want. It is the fact that they are trying to make the internet into private internets where you have to pay to play to access services.
The telcos may own the pipes, but the internet is more a series of protocols than the infrastructure that supports them.
... maybe the internet has to be destroyed in order to save it.
If the worst case happens and the telcos "destroy" the internet, why couldn't everybody with a wifi card get together over a metropolitan area and create an internet-like ad-hoc wireless network? It would be a little more complex because the nodes would be constantly moving around (so the routing tables would be hard to handle), but in principle it could work, and there would be no "pipe" for anyone to "own". Maybe this afternoon I will do some cocktail napkin calculations to see if this could work, but if anyone has a reference to something similar I'd like to hear about it.
Co-operatives could get together and arrange for microwave links between cities (or, they could buy some of the "dark fiber" that we keep hearing about).
No central servers, no routers, no single points of failure, no central logging facilities, no closed ports
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
if they should go tiered, I think they should lose their 'common carrier' status, and be liable for any and all illegal activities that occur on their networks.
I'm sure that's fine for the average slashdotter, but what about the average slashdotted site? Now instead of having your server crumple over the volume, it'll be your bank account too.
I'm not for a net where only the rich can afford to be popular.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
This will never happen. A few big corps that still don't understand what the Internet is are trying to buy it. Even if the megaISPs buy into this scheme, it'll fail because it will become such an important thing to so many people that you will have local miniISPs flaring up all over the place. One HOA that I've lived in actually purchased their own T1 and ran cable to all homes and the ISP service was part of the monthly HOA fee. It was faster and cheaper. The more you see these mega corps trying to force themselves into a controlling position, the more they will loose control. The reason... the very Internet they are trying to own. People are more educated and are communicating to defeat these things before they happen. We are a more aware public than we once were.
It'll never happen...
The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"
This line struck out to me, as well.
Google, Yahoo and Vonage aren't using their pipes. The telco's own customers - the ones who pay that ratty bill every month - are the ones using the bandwidth. It isn't as if content providers are pushing the stuff down the pipes. The insidious aspect of this is that the telcos understand this and are clearly misrepresenting the situation.
What happens if Google, Amazon, eBay, Apple etc decide to blacklist a telco? Bellsouth limits access to them so they respond by blocking all views coming form that network, and launching a media campaigh letting you know that you need to switch to another network to access them. I think I can tell you who would win that one. I persaonlly care little who provides my access, I care only about the content that I'm after. If I can't get it on one network, I'll go to another.
ESPN successfully broght pressure on Cox in a similar manner. Cox didn't want to pay as much as ESPN wanted and so threatened to take ESPN off the channel listings. ESPN in turn let all Cox customers know what was going on. Cox customers got mad and said they'd switch to sat service if this happened, ESPN is still on Cox.
You're a little off on how they'd do things.
New model:
500 power user customers @ $100/month = $50,000
4500 email and light web users @ $50/month = $225,000
New Income: $275K
They own the pipes, so they have every right to charge what and how they please. If you don't like it, install your own pipes and network. Otherwise quit complaining.
It won't. They'll just DROP the packet.
The big technology companies (such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc..) will erect alternate backbones and most likely will cover metropolitan areas with wifi. Expect major wars between the tech and data carriers if this were to occur.
Information will always get cheaper. it is inevitable.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
It's not going to be "treat everything as gold unless we know it's lead" but rather "treat everything as lead until we know it's gold"
If you pay, it means you get the privlege of having your RTP packets treated to a better QOS than the rest. If you don't pay, you get to fight over bandwidth with everyone else, whether your packets contain encrypted RTP that is indistinguishable from noise, or an unencrypted slashdot post (which, incidentally also is indistinguishable from noise...)
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
According to Deploying Premium Services Using Cisco Service Control Technology, cisco looks at the application-layer aspect of each packet in order to determine which pricing strategy / routing technology to use. The solution is simple: use an encrypted transport protocol. This is really kind of silly - with privacy concerns completely rampant, I don't see why in the world we haven't widely adopted an encrypted transport protocol to begin with. Sure, we'll generate more traffic, but is that really a big deal? Of course, governments wouldn't like that solution for obvious reasons. And if cisco wanted to be an asshole, they can deny routing any transort protocol besides tcp and udp. We can still do encryption, but then it becomes an application-specific thing.
It's not any better in other countries; they'll just screw you over in different ways. Pick your poison.
Canada and France restrict "free speech" to what they consider to be politically correct.
The UK puts cameras everywhere they can get away with, and makes sure that all of the real arms in the country are either in the hands of their police or people who are already criminals so that they'll always be in control.
And Australia does it all as soon as another country gives them the idea.
Don't know about Ireland, but I'm sure they've got some sort of civil rights problem as well.
Let's do what we can to push for community-based fiber and wireless projects.
It's critical that we are represented fairly when it comes to making use of the spectrum to be given up when analog tv broadcasting shuts down. Think of spectrum as our atmosphere to breathe and speak electronically.
Don't let them sell our "air" to the monopolies.
No, it's more like David, Goliath's brother, and an amy of pitbull laywers vrs Goliath.
Afterall, with M$, Amazon, Google, all pulling for net neutrality? I would hope it would would stand out a little better.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Do it to the first one who adopts the policy as soon as they do. If they do it all at once, pick the most egregious violator or rotate.
Better than blocking them would be to return a stub web page that explains exactly why customers of a given network don't have access to those sites, as well as the phone number to that network's customer support number. ;)
What the carriers don't realize is that consumers are paying these ISP's upwards of $50/month to get to Google and Amazon.
The carriers realize it perfectly. They're just selling their line of BS to the politicians and public. Make no mistake, it's not about "paying for the pipes", it's about gaining control over content and making money hand over fist off it.
In other words, they want to turn the internet into AOL.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Switch! There's plenty of independant ISPs out there that have NO intention of charging for crap like that. The telcos can't control bandwidth when the bandwidth isn't purchased from them. So why don't we just buy bandwidth from non ILECs....in otherwords, buy from OTHER places. SCR can service almost all of CA and we will never pull this kind of crap. Nor will our upstream providers. The customer pays us for the bandwidth, the sites they go to pay for THEIR bandwidth. I don't see the problem. I'm making my money and I'm not a greedy @#$%@#$%.
There are over 5000 Independant ISPs in this nation, pick one and switch. Most charge the same as the ILECs and they don't even route their support overseas if you need help. Plus, they'll actually be happy to help instead of feel like support is a burden they shouldn't have to bare.
If more people did this, the more honest companies out there would quickly start seizing control and the ILECs would lose even more power because the independants don't have the $ to do anything but bend over and take it. Help us help you by using our services so we can afford to invest in R&D and/or new tech to avoid this kind of crap in the future.
Sure, there are some equipment costs, but if these types of connections are used on just the primary backbones that still would provide a LOT of bandwidth.
Look at it this way. Is your Internet access slowing down steadily as more people go online? Not likely. If we were using all available capacity it would be. Requests would get queued up and delayed.
If Hong Kong can offer 1 Gbps Internet access for $215/mo and Japan can offer 100 Mbps access for around $40/mo or less, I certainly think Verizon could manage to NOT need to change teired rates on 3Mbps lines.
If the telcos push this too hard I can't wait for GoogleNet. Pay for unlimited service, or enjoy the Internet, free of charge, witha google ad on the top of every page or some such.
Generally, Google can be said to do great things because they find information that isn't currently being used and then utilize that information at a huge scale. That produces some amazing results. Everyone wins (except for maybe their competitors).
This is a question of policy, not a technical advancement. Some users are being subsidized by other users. Yes, that's you with the P2P client. Probably many Slashdotters are being subsidized by other users today, which is probably why the idea isn't popular here.
However, in terms of efficiency for the industry, it's a good thing. You want to not force people to pay for what they aren't themselves using. My parents barely use the Internet at all -- why should they be forced to pay for the dozens of gigs a month the kid down the block is pulling down? You want to encourage people not to waste bandwidth -- this will help promote network-friendly software and behavior.
Plus, if the tiers get fine-grained enough, they'd be great for techies. Right now, there is a very, very rough-grained tiering currently happening at most ISPs. You have "business class" and "home class". Unfortunately, most techies wind up uncomfortably best fit by "business class" service. They'd like to have multiple static IP addresses, they don't want any ports to be blocked in or out, they don't really give a damn about the ISP's webmail, and so forth. They don't need technical support, and don't really want to subsidize the cost of having some minimum-wage worker repeat -- for the thousandth time -- his troubleshooting flowchart to Joe Sixpack.
The problem is, "business class" service is expensive. Bob Techie isn't actually much more expensive to service than a typical residential user, but he currently gets lumped in with businesses in terms of what he values.
Second, I'm hoping against hope that maybe some ISPs will start offering QoS as part of their tiered packages. That would be *fantastic*. It's in everyone's interest to provide a little extra information that lets routers handle their data more efficiently. If I get, say, 100MB of high-priority data (ToS bit set in the IP header for minimize latency, a la ssh, ftp control, and so forth) a month with my tier, I can get really good performance on the things that I care about -- like, say, playing network games with extremely low latency or sshing into another machine. I don't really care, in comparison, how long it takes my mailserver to shove some mail out. I'm perfectly happy to mark that as "low priority" (or rather, just use software that already does so). P2P software doesn't need high priority, and is there to soak up any available excess bandwidth, and should definitely be low priority.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.