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Why The Net Should Stay Neutral
Dino wrote to mention a BBC opinion piece on why tiered Internet setups are a bad idea. From the article: "What is being proposed is more like building two roads into every town and up to every house, one smooth and well-maintained tarmac and the other a dirt track, and then letting Tesco and Waitrose bid for the right to use the good road. This issue just the latest round of a long-running debate about how much government - of whatever type, in whatever country - should be involved in the growth and development of the internet."
Here in the Washington, DC area, they are considering a tied road system where you would have the option of paying more to travel in lanes with less traffic. The more traffic on the roads, the more you pay, and the less traffic, the less you pay. Sounds a lot like what the ISPs want to do.
non-US countries?
I have heard for years about the "Digital Divide" that separates those with computer/internet access and those without. To offer multi level internet access would actually physically impose such a divide and make the internet a place for wealthy elitists. The low end internet would get worse and worse as companies wouldn't want to advertise to the people that don't have enough cash to get the higher level internet in the first place, thus you would get less content.
Yes, that damned WIFI being shoved down our throats. It's nearly as intrusive as those damned telephone cables. Yes, it's true the telephone cables are owned by companies, but there is also a telephone tax to make sure telephone services can be used in parts of the country where there are less people. So it's nearly the same thing. Do they have a *right*, to use your term, for telephone service?
I think we can all agree that telephones are essential to modern day living. If we want all our citizens to be in a level playing field (i.e. such that it's not the case only rich people get the benifits), then it's a good service to provide. Additionally, it can *help* make money for the municipalities as a whole. It makes people actually go outside more, and more likely to spend money. Finally, it's not something that companies will ever do -- in NYC Verizon does have WIFI hubs in all of their payphones, but then you have to use Verizon's services, which I completely, and utterly, refuse to do. Why? Well, to get back to the original subject of this story, it's because they are the type of company to do tiered payments.
It's an unnecessary evil. It doesn't cost them anymore, they aren't partcularly hurting for money, so the only reason for them to do so is to make even more money. I understand that's what companies do. But it doesn't mean I should be happy with it, or help feed their addiction. I will do everything in my power, as an informed consumer, to pay what I actually value the service for. But it's difficult to do with near monopolies like Verizon and SBC.
So, is it a right? Well, if the US is a capalist country, then the free market is supposed to help decide what we 'have a right to'. But, unfortunately, with the FCC relaxing it's definition of monopolies, it's not exactly a free market anymore.
The problem with arguments like that is that they are almost always made after an infrastructure is created using government funding in one way or another and using government powers to create monopolies in that infrastructure.
Then the "owners" of that infrastructure start yelling, "It's mine, mine, all mine. I'm a greedy little miser."
If you don't want the government meddling in your infrastructure, don't rely on it to create it in the first place, particularly if you live under a government of, by and for the people who have paid money and sacrificed rights for the supposed benefit that infrastructure will create for them.
KFG
I think the problem is that the companies that want more money out of the internet have a mis-conception about the internet. It's a useful tool for me at home, but I can live without it when the cost exceeds affordability. I could have a gigabit line but I can't afford it, and when my broadband cost exceed my budget, I'll drop it and go to dialup, and if that is too costly, then I'll use regular mail. They think that if they are charging google, then the multi-billion dollar company will just give them money, but they miss that the source of the money is ultimately individuals using a service. That's why I switched from Compuserve to Prodigy, then Prodigy to a dialup bbs while out of work then to a Dialup provider for internet, up to isdn, then to DSL, then cable, then dsl, and now cable. It's all about what consumers are able to pay ultimately, not what the companies want to make in revenue.
This is the same reason why I don't buy CD's, I know that at the same $14.99 that they have been charging for the last 15 years, that they are making obscene amounts of money. So I don't buy CD's and I just listen to the radio. But they see that change in my spending and decide I must be pirating music because no one is allowed to change habits in their worldview. Their marketing machine says that once a customer always a customer. So if you aren't buying from them, you must be stealing. This is the same worldview that the telecom networks that built the backbone of the net have, if they want more money from the system, they should just ask for it and people should give it to them. They think they are entitled to it.
So let's all just cancel our internet access for a month. No one use the internet at all for anything.
Why are women so complicated? Find out how little I know here.
I seem to remember back when Napster was hitting its stride really well, analyst were saying that ISPs were going to reap the rewards because Napster was that golden application that was going to magically get everyone to sign up for high-speed Internet. Well, people did sign up in droves to use Napster, but as it turns out, ISPs wanted customers...but NOT the customers that actually used what they paid for. Yes, taking their cue from the insurance industry, ISPs want to sell every single person on the face of the earth an Internet connection, but they don't want everyone to actually use it, just pay for it.
And now they want the customer's to not only not use it, but they want the content providers to pay them as well!
It must be nice to have a business where everyone pays you, but you don't let them actually use your service! Now wait a minute, what exactly are we paying them for?
I work at a small WISP and it's brought up constantly to filter out traffic. I always say, we sold this person high-speed internet...and this is what they want to do with it, why should we filter it?
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
> I'm sorry, but no one has the right to have broadband.
Do you have a right to good roads? clean air? power lines strung to your home? a crime-free neighbourhood? Come on, I am as much of a minarchist as the next man, but this is ridiculous.
The point of progress is that conglomerations of people create more and better services for themselves. A hundred years ago it was New York getting wired to the elecric grid, why should it not be wired (or unwired) to the Internet today?
Go somewhere random
... to me, anyway.
There's a conflict here between private companies, who should be allowed to structure their pricing and services any way they like, and the public good, which seems best served by undifferentiated transport. The author of the article believes that regulation is the right approach, that the government should tell ISPs how they can and cannot structure their business. I'm not so libertarian as to deny that government regulation is sometimes necessary, but I prefer to see it as a solution of last resort.
In this case, I don't think it's necessary at all. It seems to me that we already have this notion of a "common carrier", which is a carrier of information who is not responsible for the nature of the information transported. If we simply establish the rule that ISPs that attempt to favor one sort of traffic over another lose their common carrier status and become liable for the content that flows across their networks, I really doubt that many will want to take that route. Non-common carrier ISPs will be a target for copyright lawsuits, defamation lawsuits, criminal charges for child pornography, etc. Any ISP that wants to provide preferential access to specific content had better carefully control *all* the content.
Problem solved, IMO.
If only the world were that simple...
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If the networks you're using aren't what is your ideal image of it, create your own. - I'm pretty sure nations like China will soon introduce their own version of the Internet. They're not too happy about the idea that the US still dominates it.
This tiering idea has many good aspects, if you have a certain corporate stand to look at it. Of course, we would then have these corporation owned networks, as well the good old Internet.
I think we already have a tiered system, alternative root nameservers and such, but they lack recognition from ISPs. It would be interesting to create this type of a system and gain public interest towards it. Gradually operators may want to start to support that network of rootservers as well. - I think there are many misconceptions about this issue. It is like intranet, very large intranet. Like when Google now plans their own version of the Internet, to cut bandwidth costs.
Globally, I do not see this tiered system to cause any threat to this system we now have. - Let us consider this free service, and the rest will be content-delivery channels for corporations - or whatever they want to with them.
Ignore for a second the fact that it's mainly the Telcos who are pushing for non-neturality... Imagine that you're the cable company and you're considering whether to invest a lot of money in taking your broadband internet service from 5 Mb/s to 100 Mb/s. If you do so, one of the main things your subscribers will do is watch high-quality video, including pay-per-view, over the Internet and they will stop buying your own pay-per-view service and may even cut back on their cable TV service. So, the total cost is the price of the roll-out plus the resulting drop in your video revenue. Will you do it?
The answer depend on whether you can get enough new revenue from the service to pay for that total cost. If you are limited to getting the revenue from your subscribers, will that affect your decision? After all, the more you charge, the fewer people will want the higher-speed service.
Telephone companies are in the same boat as cable providers -- they want to use the network to roll-out television as well.
Also recognize that video is much less tolerant of network problems than web-browsing -- if you miss a video packet, the video quality diminishes. If you miss an HTTP packet, it'll get retransmitted and you won't even notice. There has to be some way of distinguishing who gets the higher quality. If it's free, then everybody will mark their traffic as high priority and nobody will get priority.
Telecoms already do this. End users pay a fee to access the internet, hosts pay an even larger fee for the bandwidth to ship data down to end users. Telecoms want to drop their common carrier status in favor of being able to charge preferentially based on the type of content shipped, instead of just how much bandwidth is used.
I think that telecoms are going to find that in dropping common carrier status they are going to lose a lot more than they gain; naming them in kiddy porn suits is going to be the next Big Thing.
On the other hand, they may be somewhat delusional as to the real value of what they purport to be intending to provide. Fast access to the net is not a necessity for home users. In truth, neither a land phone line nor a cable connection with or without broadband is a real necessity. When my last marriage fell apart, I was on a shoestring for about 18 months. To be sure I had power, water and food, I dumped the cable. Had to dump the phone in favor of a cell with pay as you go cards. Tried to save the phone but Sprint wouldn't negotiate a payment plan so I could retire the whopping long-distance charge my ex had quietly run up. I found that I did not really miss the tube and that the cell was more reliable and cheaper. I'll always be grateful to Sprint's "customer service" reps for being such intransigent, "all or nothing" assholes.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Everytime I sign up for an unlimited service, I end up paying more than for a limited service. Let them charge per bit per mile and make it dirt cheap. Then companies that want to hog bandwidth with streaming video can pay a premium, while I can check my email and download patches for a lot less than my current DSL bill. Quit being a bunch of reactionaries, and pay your fair share. You'll probably find out you're being overcharged currently. Of course the overhead is a pain in the ass with this solution, but it's a simple example to illustrate my point, and to show you reactionaries that you're thinking about the problem the wrong way.
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