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Senate Bill To Prohibit Extra Charges For Internet
xoip writes "A report in the The New York Times states that 'Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, will introduce new legislation today that would prohibit Internet network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content to consumers or favoring some content providers over others.'"
What a shame that laws need to be created to keep companies from acting like greedy assholes.
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
Because you know when the gov't gets involved... It can't get screwed up...
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
As soon as I read the headline I thought of the payola scandals of radio in the 50's. Its the same idea with this only instead of the radio, we're talking internet.
I really like Wyden's beliefs on fair competition in the internet. Back in 2004, he put a ban on unfair internet taxes. IMO This legislation looks like it will help out a lot of smaller companies compete with the big corporations who would gladly try to team up with ISPs monopolize e-commerce.
I wonder how this legislation would apply to AOL's proposed email tax (I gotta watch out what I say, my comments on that were met harshly).
I personally hope this makes it through congress. The internet is a free service, as is the radio, and I believe it should have some sense of neutrality. I'm very interested to hear how this bill will hold up. I'm sure if we keep a close eye on it, we'll be finding out a lot about where some of our senators are getting their "funding" from.
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
[+] congress, internet, yada yada (tagging beta)
Senate Bill to Address Fears of Blocked Access to Net
Article Tools Sponsored By
By KEN BELSON
Published: March 2, 2006
Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, will introduce new legislation today that would prohibit Internet network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content to consumers or favoring some content providers over others.
The bill is meant to ease growing fears that open Internet access may be blocked or compromised by the Bell phone carriers and cable operators, which may create tiers of service for delivering content to consumers, much the way the post office charges more for overnight mail delivery than for regular delivery.
Consumer groups and Internet companies like Google and Amazon contend that any move by the network operators to levy fees for premium delivery service would harm Web sites that are unwilling to pay for faster delivery.
The Wyden legislation, called the Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006, aims to prohibit network operators from assessing charges that give some content providers better access than others or blocking its subscribers from accessing content.
"You best compete by letting every company play on a level field, but these proposals would tilt the field," Senator Wyden said of the plans discussed by some network operators. "The Net has been about access and equal treatment and giving everyone a fair shake, and people who own these fat pipes, these cable and telecommunications people who say that they can't keep doing this, want to undermine that."
He added that his bill would prevent network operators from giving preferential treatment to affiliated companies. Time Warner Cable, he said, should not be able to give other Time Warner companies better access to the network than their rivals.
The bill more squarely confronts the concerns of consumer groups than a broader bill proposed last summer by Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, which would prevent Internet service providers from blocking access, but would largely leave network operators to manage their own networks, including potentially charging content providers for a premium service.
That bill has won support from 16 Republican senators.
The Federal Communications Commission has largely stood on the sidelines as this debate as evolved. Though the commission has said it supports the principle of open, undifferentiated access to the networks, it has not taken any regulatory action.
"One reason I'm hesitant to have the commission jump in is because we don't want to impede companies' ability to invest," said Kevin Martin, the commission chairman.
Phone and cable companies largely agree that they should have the right to offer Internet companies the option of paying for faster delivery of their content. They argue that since traffic over their networks is rising, companies may want to pay to ensure that their Web sites can be accessed quickly by consumers.
Executives at Verizon, for instance, want to give companies a chance to buy a dedicated link to Verizon's customers so that their data would be set apart from general traffic on the network.
But consumer groups say that creating a "fast lane" for those who can pay would ultimately result in a series of "walled" networks run by the phone and cable companies, which is very different from the open Internet model that exists now.
"We're concerned that even if you have a robust basic Internet and higher-speed lane, they will only make it available to their favorite partners, and that's discrimination," said Gigi Sohn, the president of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that focuses on telecommunications and intellectual property issues.
Of course, the real kicker will be in the fine print when Telecom lobbyists convince their representatives to include examptions for any company with greater than X employees, or Y income, or located in State Z.
That is of course assuming this bill ever makes it to a vote.
I'm paying right now for a much faster pipe on my cable modem. Something like 768kbps up, 5 or 8mbps down. Would this (accidently?) prohibit this higher tier service?
I love our free market, such a load of BS.
This is really good news, because it gives us an actual target for our energies about this issue. Most readers here understand why an anti-competitive tiered Internet is such a bad idea. We've all bitched about it on previous postings of this issue.
Please, please, if you're an American citizen and care about this issue, call, email, write, or telegram your senators in support of this bill. We need them to know they have constituents who care about keeping the Internet a powerful communications tool for all.
Certainly such an important issue is worth the effort?
Good that Washington is taking quick action on this. Well quick action isn't necessary the right term, but at least someone is trying to get the legislation down sooner than later.
Honestly, I don't see a good reason for the telcos to be doing this. It just seems to me that they are trying to find ways to profit while they lose business (internet being a more prevalent communication medium than your standard telephone). If you're late to the party, that's your problem.
Telco companies seem to be trying to undermine the very principles of the internet lately. With having the FCC ruling last year that allowed them to not share their lines, and now seeing this, I've become very wary of anything the telecommunications industry is trying to do lately.
Insert Sig Here
Did this guy not get his bribe?
My guess is that the TelCos either didn't have time to write up 'model' legislation for some Senator to introduce, or they realized that the country isn't ready yet... and this Democrat from Oregon just fuxxored their long term plans.
Listen to see what your Senator says about this Bill. Then you'll know whose interests he's looking out for.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
these companies do the same without making it public. They can favor their own services and nobody would know since they are responsible for promised bandwidth only upto the first hop, which is them.
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
One can only hope that other states/countries follow suit if this bill passes. wouldnt that be nice?
that this kind of throttling is not already going on? I am kinda curious..
I wonder what else is attached to this bill. This will probably pass, but what other things are tacked into it in the small print.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
who is abramoff? and who is this karl rove guy? weapons of mass destruction? never heard of them!
When you try to divide policies between "pro-consumer" and "pro-business", you sacrifice a lot of understanding of the underlying dynamics. Mandating that businesses provide something customers like is "pro-consumer"? Really? Always? What if you mandated that all ISP's also clean your house? Oh, sure, those greedy Republicans want to pass legislation that would permit ISP's to get out of cleaning your house, but the real "pro-consumer" legislators are going to stop this. Are price controls "pro-consumer" even though they've caused shortages or worsening quality in almost every case? After all, opposing them means letting those greedy businesses charge whatever they want. Bad!
People oppose what you deem "pro-consumer" laws, not because, like you seem to think, they don't like consumers, but because they honestly believe it will not help the consumer. Shocking I know. Here's some free advice: those who don't know their opponents' arguments, don't understand their own.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Does this mean I'll have to start meeting my Network Provider in secret, with a brown bag of small, unmarked bills?
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
... if it's not done with Evil (tm) in mind.
I do two demanding things on my network connection: online gaming and bulk downloads. For the former I want rock-solid QoS. I'm using only about 5 KiB/s of traffic, but it's imperative that that traffic get where it's going as fast as possible.
For bulk downloads, latency and reliability is less important to me than throughput. I don't care if I'm at 10% packet loss and 1000msec latency, really, as long as a whole pile of data gets sent and received. However, right now my ISP treats all my traffic the same, and routes my bulk downloads with as much priority and reliability as my game traffic.
I imagine I'd get better value for my bandwidth buck if I could pay by the byte, paying a premium for my time-critical traffic to get there more quickly. Metered service isn't necessarily bad -- does anyone complain about metered electricity bills? -- and could lead to more efficient allocation of network resources. How much money would it save my ISP (that they could then pass on to me) if they could route the bulk of their traffic (people downloading things) with low priority?
...that this might have some effect on Internet taxes that some evil corporations are trying to propose. Contact your representatives if you care about this issue. Who knows whether your voice will be heard, but can it really hurt to try? It only takes a few minutes.
I already did, and you should too.
While I am staunchly opposed to the behavior this bill is targeted to prevent, I have to say the bill itself deeply concerns me.
This particular issue is so complex I'm not sure this law could be written in any way except that which would do more harm than good. For one thing, tiered service is already part of most internet service in many ways, at many levels of the network. This bill is designed only to target new and discriminatory policies which are emerging among ISPs; but is there any way the bill could be written without to some extent scooping up some existing and 'normal' business practices as collateral damage? Moreover there are both legitimate and non-discriminatory reasons why certain kinds of traffic might be given preferential treatment even among those kinds of emerging behavior which any reasonable bill of this sort would strive to prohibit. For example, telephony and media streaming are rife with situations where some packets are crucial and time-limited and others are less so or not at all. It has been shown that more intelligent sorting of packet priority can significantly increase performance of these applications without overall devoting any more network resources to them; I've known researchers who have for some time been calling for support for priority levels in general internet routing for exactly that reason.
Will this bill inadvertantly block emerging internet technologies while trying to target poor business practices? And if it's written loosely enough to allow legitimate types of service tiering, will the ISPs be able to use that looseness to find loopholes that allow them to provide discriminatory service regardless of the bill?
And before you pipe up and say they also give money to Democrats, take a look and their reports. Bellsouth's lobbying is overwhelmingly favorable to Republicans. The best party money can buy.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I know the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce, but the Internet is more than that.
We can punish anyone who messes with it just fine, and reward those who play nice. We don't need your help with this one, honest.
So please, keep your paws off our network. We were here first. You're new. You don't know what you're doing, and what effect you'll have.
Now, about this terrorism thing -- maybe you can think of a way to deal with it. Or maybe find a nice treaty you can advise on or something.
sigs, as if you care.
I've found that ever since I changed my ISP, my connection to online games (Eve Online, WoW, etc) sucked. But...if I connected to my office VPN, somehow the route is better (note: I'm in Argentina). Same when I switched from one ISP to another in DSL (just using a different login name in PPPoE seems to change the outgoing ISP..any other ISP worked perfectly). So... after checking several things, there's no other alternative to a filter of some kind in the ISP (most if not all the ISPs use the same pipes going out of the country).
Now...how can you verify is something is getting filtered or throttled? My guess is that the guys have some kind of traffic shaping that throttles my game packets...which it doesn't see when I use VPN as I'm encrypting traffic. If they allow unfiltered ICMP (ping), how can you verify that some other protocol is being filtered?. With so much crap like transparent proxies and stuff, are there any tools available for end users?
Karl Rove is the President of the United States. He has a front man who reads prepared scripts, but with very little understanding of what he reads.
Well I think this might be a good idea, but also think about it, if the Gov said you have to do fair pricing, charge EVERYONE the same and the business wants more money, all they have to do is up their price. So not only do the big business where they might be able to do this price increase, but even the house holds with get the price incease and they might not be able to pay that much.
TCP/IP has a native capacity to distinguish between different types of traffic so network routers can treat different packets differently. This is a good thing -- some applications are much more real-time intensive than other applications.
Unfortunately, the Quality of Service flags are generally ignored on the public Internet. The reason why isn't particularly hard to discern: there's no way to agree on what should have priority and what shouldn't. If everybody used it in the current environment, then every content provider would flag its own traffic as being high-priority. And, as a result, nothing would be high priority since it's a relative concept.
Money is the way to separate the wheat from the chaff: if your content actually depends on a high QoS, then you should pay for that. If your content doesn't, then there's no reason to.
This wasn't an issue until they ruled in Brand X. Let's hope this passes. I'm concerned however, because AT&T is Mr. Wyden's #1 campaign contributor for 2006. Is he going against the big money, or just indirectly requesting more of it with this bill...
This bill seems almost as bad... Just in the opposite direction.
Theres no reason to have a generic law saying that this is always prohibited. If you own your network, it's yours, do whatever you want with it.
The issue was that the Telco's trying to do this do not in fact own their networks. They were subsidized by tax payer dollars, hence they have no right to enforce these fines. This is a very specific problem, and doesn't call for an arbitrary law restricting what you can do with your own network.
If some new company wants to start up and build a fancy network, and offer tiered service, then by all means let them do it. As long as they are doing it with their money and not tax payer money.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Libertarians are morons!
DIE DIE DIE!
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Has hell frozen over and I didn't get the memo?
who do I pay at /. to get my business tags higher in the tag-list?
Once more, we have a legislator rushing to pass a law to fight something that hasn't even become a problem yet.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm curious if this proposed legislation might affect greylisting and/or RBLs implemented at the ISP level? Both of these pieces of technology could be construed as limiting or delaying access to content, or at least favoring some content over others -- based largely in part on the origin of the content. Anybody have any ideas about this?
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/ senators_cfm.cfm
"Upgrade to Intarweb Gold (TM) today and recieve a complimentary family-sized gift basket 'o dicks!"
Suudsu, that stuff is G-E-W-D.
If you were a company, wouldn't you think of other ways to increase profits? Of course. But it's a good thing we have such a great government to prevent this from happening... Okay, I know, bad job.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Senator Ron Wyden, D-OR, has proposed quite a bit of legislation regarding technology topics. The CAN-SPAM Act was proposed (later passed and signed) by him and another Senator; other legislation proposed includes protecting consumers from spyware, making permanent a ban on the taxation of Internet access and sales over the Internet first put into place by Wyden in 1998 (but set to expire in 2007), and protecting consumers' right to fair use of digital media.
you gotta love oregon
Maybe AOL should rethink it's Goodmail scheme and work on customer service.
Because you know when the gov't gets involved... It can't get screwed up...
That's completely wrong. Everybody knows that it's when governments aren't involved that things can't get screwed up.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Jeez. Remind me again - what does America stand for? Not liberty it would seem, nor rights, nor the creation of wealth. :-(
Notice the "D" next to his name.
The bill will never pass.
No, Actually this bill is designed to inhibit. Try reading the article again. This bill will stop ISPs from providing better QoS to different providers.
Brent
Let's be blunt here. This is the government telling companies they can't try and be competitive, they can't make deals to offer premium services. This curtails competitive behavior. The nit-wits supporting this bill will be screaming their heads off when the government has to step in to bail out the bankrupt telcos in five years.
An Uncomfortable Truth
that the senate has actually done something in the interests of the american people.
Hey tool, the guy is a democrat.
I thought one of the big features of IPv6 was to enable pay-per-packet.
Everyone, please understand how extremely easy it is to contact your senator to voice your opinion regarding this. http://www.senate.gov/
In the upper right hand corner is a "Senator search". Click the state you live in and your two senators websites will be listed. Most (if not all) of the senators are available via email. Voice your opinion in a calm professional manner.
Too many people sit back and watch democracy happen around them. If every single person who read this story voiced their opinion about it to their senator (whether they agree or disagree), there would be tens of thousands of emails (as oppossed to maybe a couple hundred).
It's just to easy to voice your opinion to your senator these days. You would be throwing away a huge opportunity if you didn't.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Although technically it is designed to inhibit. Just in this case, not the consumers (or, as they were once called, citizens).
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
...figures out a smart new way to improve network speeds, but it's expensive, they can't just get together with a bunch of clients who are willing to pay the extra, but instead have to simply dump the technology. This doesn't seem right to me.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178977&cid =14834963
Just like everyone else here I realize that ISPs have no business trying to charge content providers for access to the network their customers are paying for. I even realize that using traffic shaping and other techniques to force customers to use the ISP's VOIP solutions rather than those of competitors is seriously anti-competitive but....
Our congress critters don't know the first thing about how this cyberweb thing works and I have zero confidence that whatever bill they settle on won't do more harm than good. The last thing we need is some law that effectively makes is impossible to responsibly admin a network. If they really want to help they should be focusing on the business side of things (many of these folks actually have some business experience) and help ensure that access to the last mile infrustructure is as open to competition as possible. As long as SpeakEasy and other ISPs have fair access to the end users the baby bells and cable companies won't be able to get away with the things they are proposing.
What would this do to gaming websites that have free, basic, and premium memberships to download content like Gamespot's patches for so many games or Gamespy's movie content faster, for example? Or am I just reading this wrong?
Because it's of their nature. You don't maximize profits then you can be sued by the shareholders.
Actually, it is the law that publicly traded companies need to do everything and anything possible, withiin the limits of the law, to mazimize shareholder value, and by extention, profits.
So, it is *required* that laws be enacted to keep them from being greedy assholes.
The flip side to this legislation is the bill that was being floated to force, by law, a multi-tier charging system. The bandwidth providers need a law that forces all bandwidth providers to use multi-tier charges because if they don't some one will break with the crowd, get more customers, and hurt everyone elses income. If the bandwidth providers don't have the law they would have to form what would probably be an illegal cartel to prevent some company from charging solely by bandwidth used.
It seems that ISPs are getting greedy, not only in America, I hear that one ISP in Germany has been banding about the same idea.
As far as I'm concerned it's wrong. I pay for broadband, a connection through which I can send and receive data. Google no doubt pays for it's connection at it's end, including the data it sends and receives. I want to have access to any point on the internet as fast as possible. If they have a problem because people are transmitting and receiving "too much data" for their networks to cope with, then they should increase the capacity of their networks.
I hear that there's quite a bit of dark fiber about, they should start using it. If that means that they need to put their prices up, so be it, I'll have to reconcider who I use as an ISP. If it means that I have to pay more for the uncapped connection I'll either have to put up with it or concider what level of cap I can keep within.
As a side issue - maybe this is why Google are buying up some of that dark fiber. It will allow them to lower the number of hops data needs to do on the internet between them and the client and thus potentially speed up search results...
I'm more than guilty of not contacting representatives when I clearly should. Thanks for the reminder... I emailed them a lengthy two cents on the issue.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
This bill also includes things about anti-discrimination. Depending on how this was worded it could have a big impact on what ISPs are allowed to do. This could include things like packet shaping, making what some ISPs are doing now, blocking bit torrent, illegal. Thus this could be great for anyone who likes bit torrent!
I've been reading slashdot for four years and never found the need to create an account. I very nearly created one just to have the ability to mod this post up.
Personally, I would not do this through the specific legislation suggested. Crippling the Internet by holding IP traffic hostage is clearly bad for the economy. The Supreme Court has already ruled the Government can seize property via Eminent Domain on economic grounds. If one or two States were to seize the pipelines and routers of beligerant backbone providers and sell them at discount to ones that are more open, the arguments would tone down rapidly.
Is this gross interference? Sure. But so is any law, and at least this wouldn't be a sustainable thing. A law, once in the books, is much harder to get rid of, once it becomes a detriment. Is it totally evil, satanic and everything anti Free Market? Sure. But it would be a one-time correction to an abberition in the Free Market that threatens the Free Market over a much longer term and in a much more insidious manner.
In the end, it comes down to this: Cthulhu or Lawyers. It seems very clear to me which is going to be worse for the country.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Because it takes control from the market (which you are a part of) to an entity that does not always do the right thing.
Umm... so we're more a part of the market than we are the government? The market, where the potency of your vote is determined by how much money you have? The market, where the major actors (corporations) are required to put profits ahead of all other concerns?
I'm sorry, the government has its problems, and frequently sticks its nose where it doesn't belong, but to even imply that the market always does right and is accessible to everyone is total bullshit.
Like wiretapping.
Right. Insert 50 megabytes of corporate transgressions here. Colluding to fix prices. Charging people for rainwater collection. Knowingly marketing dangerous goods. Illegally supporting repressive regimes. Abusive legal tactics. Excessive environmental damage. Etc, etc.
And while you might be a part of the market, there are always going to be companies you're not a part of, and sometimes the only avenue to limit their abuse is that other institution that you are a part of.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Legislating prices always leads to trouble.
Let the free market take care of it. Competition will always lead to the best price for the consumer. Why do you want the government involved in your Internet connection?
If 1 ISP offers differentiated bandwidth for a fee, and another doesn't, the consumer can choose.
Do not vote for one of these idiots. Vote against them. Stupid moronic medelsome politicians always trying to be do-gooders by making up problems they can solve. Idiots.
On the one hand, as a consumer, I am immediately happy that this will stick it to the greedy telcos. On the other hand, I tend to favor less government control and more market forces. I suggest that if consumers keep wanting everything they get now (internet-wise), and keep demanding reasonable pricing, then competition will eventually fill the niche. For example, a parallel internet run mostly by google that bypasses large chunks of the telcos. Though that wouldn't be ideal, even the idea of it might be enough of a threat to force more reasonable pricing. The only problem is that right now communication systems are extremely anti-competitive. Generally, there is only one company that can supply the phone line and one that can supply the cable line. There is not enough competition between DSL and cable to fill the viod.
You're a loon, son. This is an example of GOOD government restricting the multinational corporations from oppressing ME - and you too, moron.
I'll bet you'd call Food Stamps or medical assistance "oppressive government" too. Or having the cops around in case somebody rapes your mom as "oppressive government."
Slashdot doesn't need a capcha, it needs an IQ test to weed out the Fox News watchers. Yes, much of governments' activities are oppressive (emminent domain, domestic spying, drug laws) but believe it or not, government is absolutely necessary.
Anarchy leads to monarchy. Always.
(MRC="minima")
It would be better to introduce a bill to force the split between the line providers and the ISPs, similar what is done in Japan. There's no reason to regulate the ISP behavior like this if they became a free market. However they're currently bundling their services with physical line access which causes more problems than just upstream QoS bundling.
Michael
That's the right of a capitalist democracy; if you can't do that, what's the point in even having a government.
Exactly. I much prefer a government in fear of their citizens - you get more of this kind of action that way.
I was not around (or at least aware of goings-on) when AT&T was split up, but seeing all the traitorous crap the ILEC's are are doing these days, it looks like it's high time to put the screws to them again.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
.... From what I've seen Wyden's pretty moderate, especially for his state (California's Canada), and seems to 'get' high-tech issues.
And yeah, in theory let the companies do stupid things and suffer, but there's a finite limit on the amount of infrastructure to deliver network service (safety/aesthetic, but also in terms of where you can put the plant) so arbitrating that should serve consumers' benefit first.
Of course, when Google starts its own NAPs (and offers content providers cheap crossconnect peering over ethernet by building those NAPs at large colos, as well as cheap but mandatory no-rate-limited connections to ISPs) and builds wireless-to-the-pole, wireless-to-the-phonebooth and/or wireless-to-the-walmart, this will be moot.
This is dangerous business. Those of you who favor the telcos position, allowing them to charge for prefered access to their network bandwidth should think very carefully about how this would effect the dyanmics of internet. First of all, everyone should understand that this has nothing to do with limits on bandwidth. There is plenty of available bandwidth, and technological advancements continue to expand bandwidth capabilities at a rapid pace. The telcos speak of QoS, but what they are really after is an artifically restricted supply market. If they get their way prices for content delivery will sky rocket, over time content will dry up, and in the end we will be left with nothing but large commercial websites controlled by mega corporations (just like cable TV).
Of course, we consumers could always move to Mesh networks, as has been suggested. But I suspect the hurdles involved with such a transition would make it pretty easy for the large corporations to keep them from gaining any traction.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Some people here have likened this to "payola". A better analogy would be high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes:
One of the most recent management concepts - High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes - combines HOV and pricing strategies by allowing single occupancy vehicles to gain access to HOV lanes by paying a toll. The lanes are "managed" through pricing to maintain free flow conditions even during the height of rush hours. The appeal of this concept is tri-fold:
The combined ability of HOT operations to introduce additional traffic to existing HOV facilities, while using price and other management techniques to control the number of additional motorists and maintain high service levels, renders the HOT lane concept a promising means of reducing congestion and improving service on the existing highway system.
If one company chooses to levy a fee for access, does it not follow that consumers would rationally choose to switch to another company, or accept the fee? The idea that the government might pass a law outlawing what should be a simple business policy is frightening.
Play it out. The first person to pay for this will get a substantial speed increase, and no-one else will notice any different. Great so far. But what happens when a substantial number of others join in? It all has to come from the same pipes, so they'll see a smaller increase -- and it'll be at the expense of others. Not only from the remainder who aren't paying the premium, but also from the existing premium payers.
By that point, people will be paying the premium not so much for extra speed, but to avoid the rapidly-declining non-premium service. Ultimately, everyone will be forced to pay the premium, just to get exactly the same service they have now.
In other words, the only people to benefit from this are the ISPs. Ka-ching! Everyone else is paying more and getting nothing for it. Not quite a 'tragedy of the commons' scenario, but with the same sort of inevitability.
I don't like the idea of legislating around problems, but maybe this one deserves it. (Telecoms generally seems to benefit from the odd bit of red tape -- look at the state of the mobile phone markets in the unregulated US and the regulated UK, for example.) I think we need some way to nip this one in the bud, and unless anyone has any better ideas...?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I guess, if you would have turned off the anti-republican static for half a second, you would have realized that Senator Wyden is a Democrat.
Wait - did you just own yourself?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Speech vs Beer
We always bring up the speech vs beer argument with respect to software. In that light, it's common to find free beer that isn't free speech, and it's difficult to concoct free speech that isn't free beer.
An ISP is a service, running on real hardware, so the beer ain't free. But the speech can be, and it's best for the nation and world if it is.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Oh, and did I mention the RIAA isn't keen on it?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Time for a rehash of my same, tired old rant. But because it and I am tired, I'll make it short.
The government has no monopoly on stupidity.
Repeat, the government has no monopoly on stupidity.
I've spent decades in a large corporation, and see RAMPANT stupidity, and this corporation is known for being pretty well run. I've heard stories of places run worse, though sometimes it seems hard to believe.
At some level, governments are meant to be corrected by the ballot box.
At some level, corporations are meant to be corrected by the marketplace.
Both correction mechanisms sometimes work, and sometimes fail. In particular, marketplace correction doesn't work well on monopolies - like telephone, cable TV, or for that matter, copyright and patent protected monopolies. (At least patents expire, though the well-heeled corporation is always buying more.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Do you smell it.... I own an isp... my buddy owns an isp... his cousins own 28 isp's they dictate-off the record of course-what the going price should be for service... Oh, wait, we can charge for this, and create an elitist tier that wrecks the current free(relative) structure.
Sig Hansen?
Prohibiting Google, yahoo, et. al. for charging money for better placement of search results?
The Telco's have an important point, but one that primarily relates to video and voice traffic as opposed to website traffic. Verizon, AT&T are trying to rollout video products that require QoS, something that isn't there today with traditional oversubscription.. They (should) have the right to apply QoS to their offerings so that your IPTV quality doesn't suck. These net neutrality bills make that impossible; and Google and Yahoo can then create competing video products *WITHOUT HAVING TO MAKE IN AN INVESTMENT* in the underlying infrastructure. Obviously, it's not fair for the Telcos to shut competitors out completely, hence the tiered service is simply a way to spread the costs of the infrastructure across all parties that can benefit from it.
It's *NOT* about throttling stateless or bulk traffic IP traffic, like websites dns or mail. Attempts to present the issue otherwise are simply obfuscation by net neutrality zealots and other content providers.
Someone needs to tell this to the RIAA. Of course they're trying to go down the second side of your OR clause, but we always have the free choice I've taken - reduce or eliminate music purchases, altogether. Though I am partial to Indie stuff from CDBaby, and AFAIK they're independent, and not Evil.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
"Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouff?" - Chris Tucker / Rush Hour
Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, will introduce new legislation today that would prohibit Internet network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content to consumers or favoring some content providers over others.
The bill is meant to ease growing fears that open Internet access may be blocked or compromised by the Bell phone carriers and cable operators, which may create tiers of service for delivering content to consumers, much the way the post office charges more for overnight mail delivery than for regular delivery.
Consumer groups and Internet companies like Google and Amazon contend that any move by the network operators to levy fees for premium delivery service would harm Web sites that are unwilling to pay for faster delivery.
The Wyden legislation, called the Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006, aims to prohibit network operators from assessing charges that give some content providers better access than others or blocking its subscribers from accessing content.
"You best compete by letting every company play on a level field, but these proposals would tilt the field," Senator Wyden said of the plans discussed by some network operators. "The Net has been about access and equal treatment and giving everyone a fair shake, and people who own these fat pipes, these cable and telecommunications people who say that they can't keep doing this, want to undermine that."
He added that his bill would prevent network operators from giving preferential treatment to affiliated companies. Time Warner Cable, he said, should not be able to give other Time Warner companies better access to the network than their rivals.
The bill more squarely confronts the concerns of consumer groups than a broader bill proposed last summer by Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, which would prevent Internet service providers from blocking access, but would largely leave network operators to manage their own networks, including potentially charging content providers for a premium service.
That bill has won support from 16 Republican senators.
The Federal Communications Commission has largely stood on the sidelines as this debate as evolved. Though the commission has said it supports the principle of open, undifferentiated access to the networks, it has not taken any regulatory action.
"One reason I'm hesitant to have the commission jump in is because we don't want to impede companies' ability to invest," said Kevin Martin, the commission chairman.
Phone and cable companies largely agree that they should have the right to offer Internet companies the option of paying for faster delivery of their content. They argue that since traffic over their networks is rising, companies may want to pay to ensure that their Web sites can be accessed quickly by consumers.
Executives at Verizon, for instance, want to give companies a chance to buy a dedicated link to Verizon's customers so that their data would be set apart from general traffic on the network.
But consumer groups say that creating a "fast lane" for those who can pay would ultimately result in a series of "walled" networks run by the phone and cable companies, which is very different from the open Internet model that exists now.
"We're concerned that even if you have a robust basic Internet and higher-speed lane, they will only make it available to their favorite partners, and that's discrimination," said Gigi Sohn, the president of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that focuses on telecommunications and intellectual property issues.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
[...]
4)Time doesn't matter. Notice that none of the economic equations have a t factor.
Not true; those for time value of money are the most trivial of such, although there are others (oft related). But you're right, quick-and-dirty supply and demand equations don't usually model this. It can be sort of modeled by factoring in the non-zero costs of information, time delay of propogation of information and resources, and time value cost contributions of the results... but it's not a nice simple "x"-shaped graph. More essential here is the standard assumption of:
5) Low cost of market entry
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
content is disturbing, part of me says, go ahead and let the telcos try to do this. If they try to charge companies, it will only speed up the creation of alternative wi-fi/wi-max networks that provide better service anyways.
No Sigs!
Or, perhaps we could say that the law is all about playing well with others, and that is what we as a society want: for everybody to get along nicely, even the schoolyard bully.
Why NOT have a law that says that as an internet service provider, you set the rated upload and download speeds you provide YOUR immediate customers, and are forbidden to discriminate against traffic based on content type, or which customer-of-the-customer it is.
If a local ISP buys a slower hookup from a backbone company, they of course won't serve their customers well, and will be subject to rejection in the market (unless the price is right (cheap), of course). Otherwise, if an ISP buys a fat hookup to the backbone, the backbone providers have no business screwing over some of that ISP's customers by selectively strangling throughput.
If the local ISP wants to offer different kinds of service and arrange the differing connection types, fine. But the big boys should not be able to look into the traffic and decide that packets coming up from "corporatemofos.com" (or whatever) should have 90% packet loss or be uploaded at at 128 Kb/s, when the ISP is providing a 1024 Kb/s uplink and other sites the ISP services or hosts have 1024 Kb/s uplinks that work just fine.
Spit out the "conservative" (fascist) Kool-Aid, and think of how evil men will screw over pretty much everybody if the majority fail to threaten them with jail time or fees. Like the school yard bully, some of these people only understand the threat that the rest of the kids are going to gang up and dish out some retribution. (a fine use for government, IMHO).
The free market often works, but some people need threats to stay in line.
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
It's really long, but he's toward the beginning of it. Good stuff: http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/witnesslist.cf m?id=1705
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Isn't this exactly what corporate law has been doing for several decades?
Email and Fax tend to be taken comparatively less seriously than genuine hand carried dead trees, although they're not ignored.
If you want to send with an impact, you can still send a letter Registered Return Receipt . Use of RRR is best saved for when you're trying to send your pet^H^H^Hduly elected official the message that if he doesn't pay attention right now, you'll not only vote against him, but be actively contributing to and campaigning on behalf of anyone who opposes his reelection. For a more modest "you're losing my vote" level of "pay attention", a regular snail mail letter tends to work well — a bit more so if it's handwritten with decent penmanship.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I agree - I already fired off a letter to my elected officials.
If you don't know your elected officials, go to www.vote-smart.org . Just plug in your zip code, and you will find out all your elected officials with their contact information.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I really grok your concept of "social barometer":
That said, I don't have a problem with it -- I think that corporations are a useful barometer in society of our incentive structure. When you start to see corporations doing sick things, it's time to revisit your incentive and punishment systems and decide how to fix the basic problem: why is doing bad things more profitable than doing good things?
It becomes even more poignant when you think of all the "good things" that are now "bad" from the law's point of view (expressions of sexuality/sharing information/even congregation) such that you wonder... perhaps corporations aren't broken, but the way the law is implemented and enforced is.
Then again, corporations are not exactly outside the legal framework, are they... these amoral structures now play with the law flagrantly, and even get laws made to support their business model (RIAA corp. constituents?)...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Finally the system works
Yeah, "deter" is a better word than "prevent" in this case.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
No one would be buying your data packet trucking company services if there wasn't content-cargo to ship around. We aren't going to cut you a check just because you own the trucks. We pay you to move content for us, THAT'S IT, and what the relationship is between the content-manufacturer and consumer of this content-cargo is absolutely none of your business. If we buy a ten lb whatever from some company, it might cost us a dollar or a million, but it's still ten lbs for you to ship.
Now that you want to start ripping open all the packages and charging by what is inside, well, fork you charlie, we'll see about that in the legislative arena. You got granted a limited right to use the public roads and to profit from them by offering bulk cargo delivery,you got subsidised, got tax breaks, guaranteed minimum pricing and mostly rubber stamped rate increases even when you failed to get bigger trucks with more fuel efficient engines like you *promised* back in the 90s. You never got granted a right to interfere in our private and personal business relations with third parties, and by our reckoning YOU OWE US the content manufacturing and consuming public a cool 200 billion dollars US in gross overcharges SO FAR..
I'm in favor of getting that money back and rescinding your business license to offer data trucking services. To outright have the US Marshalls seize it, absolutely no compensation, walk in and lock it down to start to look for more evidence of gangsterism, and then have the DAs levy some serious RICO criminal charges against the executives and majority controlling interest stock holders, and then put it back up for auction so maybe the next managers might think twice before engaging in massive fraud against the public.
If it means the net is down for awhile or goes through some re adjustment changes, who cares? If in a months time all this noise gets straightened out, in the long run it would have been worth it. We broke up ATT for being COMPLETE GREEDY ASSHOLES before, we sure as hell can deal with a new crop of complete assholes. Maybe the next time the lesson will stick, DON'T FUCK OVER THE PUBLIC WHEN YOU ARE MAKING BILLIONS. If you can't be content with billions, then too bad, someone else could run it and be happy with that.
Does this prevent traffic shaping of any kind, or just traffic shaping that targets specific hosts?
I'd like to be able to use BitTorrent again...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I've heard of ISPs who disconnect or throttle back the speed of customers who use too much bandwidth. By too much, I of course mean well within the limits of what they're told they can do. Also heard of ISPs blocking certain ports, or types of traffic (torrent, anyone?). I don't think this falls under the same category, but it's close, and that kind of crap shouldn't be allowed. I pay $35 a month for 5 megabits downstream, why the crap flipping hell shouldn't I be able to use it how I see fit?
Even the most successful and important companies are run by a leader or core group of leaders with vision, charisma, will, etc. These people determine the direction of the company as a whole and thus dictate the company's ethics and morality. That's why I think it is wrong, in a practical sense, to say that companies have no morals. They have the morals of their leaders.
Consider the near-demise of the bond trading company Salomon Smith Barney in the nineties. When it was led by risk-loving, gambling ex-trader John Guttfreund, the employees gambled with the company by skirting (and crossing) the moral and legal limits imposed on it. It was caught and was nearly wiped out by the Justice Department. When Warren Buffett took over the reins it became an upstanding and moral company almost overnight, and remained so under the leadership of the man Buffett hand-picked to lead afterward.
Likewise there are numerous examples of companies that act very morally, for example Patagonia, Ben and Jerries, or Malden Mills. They enact the morals and ethics of their founders and leaders.
In this respect I do agree with you that companies make excellent barometers--they can be powerful mechanisms for amplifying the decisions and morals of those the people lead them, yet they are susceptible to public influence. They can therefore serve as mirrors of their customers and the public who are aware of them.
The problem is that they are not instantaneous mirrors. In fact there is a pretty significant delay in corrections. Stories like Enron IMO do not illustrate a failure of the system, but rather illustrate the system working properly--just slowly. After all, the executives did get caught and the company suffered (essentially) a death penalty. However there was a pretty significant delay between the immoral acts and the societal response.
One of the toughest things for humans to deal with cognitively is a delay between action and effect. In one psych study people were given the task of adjusting a thermostat to keep a steady temperature in a refrigerator as it was opened and closed. They did not have too much trouble with it until lag was secretly introducing into the system. This created chaotic oscillations as the participants continually over-compensated. More revealing, none were able to correctly deduce that there was a uniform delay at work. To them it simply seemed like the system was acting erratically and unpredictably. Thus so can the oscillations seem between morally right and immoral corporate behavior.
The solution to some is legislation, in part because it is thought to be a fast and sure way to solve a problem the market does not seem to be able to (at least not yet). However legislation is its own messy system of delays and is neither fast nor sure. No bill passes without extensive compromise and complexity, and no meaningful legislation is implemented effectively without first passing through many rounds of interpretation and litigation.
Legislation also is inflexible in that it is a permanent solution. It can only be replaced or revised except through the same tortuous process that produced it in the first place.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
It will only stay alive until the senators involved get home and find the suitcases full of unmarked bills with the big bell on the side.
I know its hard, but if you want your voice to be heard, do it by hand.
A written letter has ten, maybe one hundred times the strength of an email.
Oh, and make sure its printed on a laser printer - there's nothing quite as underwhelming as a big 'ol inky mess.
This sort of commentary needs to be preserved and brought to everyone's attention, somehow. Ever thought of running for office?
I see a much less pernicious motivation for wanting to have tiered internet service. First, you need the motivation to build faster backbones in the first place. If you can't charge more for faster service, why bother improving it? Think about how well rent control worked out.
Second, I can see the telecoms' frustration with not sharing as much in the success of Internet companies like Google, after building (or over-building in some cases) the infrastructure to make it possible.
My guess is they are just looking for ways to get a bigger piece of the pie, more than they are looking to control content or block competitors. And, we *do* already have anti-trust laws that would likely cover the most egregious cases.
It's an IP-level feature, not a TCP one, and the flags are the "Type of Service" flags, not the "Quality of Service" flags. You can try to provide quality of service using those ToS flags.
ToS flags are incredibly valuable. Sure, they aren't very useful for end-to-end use (since, obviously, people will abuse it), but they are phenomenally useful for prioritizing traffic in broadband routers. Right now, people often have residential setups with very little upstream bandwidth, heavy downstream bandwidth, and multiple computers hooked up to a broadband router. Sure, maybe you can run a traffic shaper like the one above to fairly allocate upstream bandwidth, but you still have the problem of anyone who wants to actually run both a BitTorrent client and a Web browser on one computer having to deal with incredibly long page load times. Sure, there are horrible hacks, like trying to rate-limit the BitTorrent client, but since the machine running the P2P client doesn't know how much bandwidth is available (that's the responsibility of the broadband router), this means stupid decisions will be made. Not all the available bandwidth will be used some of the time, and if usage spikes up on the network, you'll have the same "overloaded network" symptoms.
ToS flags weren't very useful for end-to-end use, but they allow people to solve the "overloaded upstream" problem on home networks, which means that they can use all their excess bandwidth without impacting the performance of interactive applications (Quake, ssh) and semi-interactive applications (Web browsing).
All you need is either a properly-configured Linux box or a broadband router that understands ToS flags and can prioritize outbound packets based on hard priority bands (so that Minimize Latency packets from host A always get priority over regular packets from host A, and Maximize Throughput packets from host A always get priority below regular packets from host A). And bam -- you can suck down all the bandwidth you can eat.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Now, for the audience, please explain how a free market can solve this problem now that it's been created if given a chance.
Free markets can't solve this problem. That's because, despite the fact that free markets *are* a powerful tool, they break in the presence of a natural monopoly, like telcos and power companies. That's why we regulate said natural monpolies.
One of the other problems with free markets is that they kinda rely on informed consumers (though theoretically mechanisms like Consumer Reports can help fill the gap, they don't even begin to address all the products available to consumers). The typical consumer does not understand routing prioritization schemes.
I don't like the government regulating those areas in which people might want to do research or work (such as restricting use of encryption, or in sending voice over IP, or so forth). However, network providers *do* possess a natural monopoly and as such do need to be regulated to prevent the market from failing to fill the consumer's needs as efficiently as possible.
I support this regulation, forcing network providers to be content-agnostic, wholeheartedly.
Now, if we could *just* take one more step and force cell providers to just be data-agnostic network providers -- so that anyone can provide applications, high-level services and the physical phone product that interoperate with those networks, we'd massively improve the cell phone market.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I think it is more properly:
"Set a man a fire and he is warm for a night, set a man afire and he is warm for the rest of his life."
I also agree 100% that legislation is often the only way to deal with such problems. I'm not afraid of so-called "Big Government" or adding more laws. I do feel concerned that the proposed law may be too easy to bypass - corporations are notorious for finding loopholes - and I do feel that this issue is SO pressing and SO urgent that loopholes are completely unacceptable.
If the only solution to this is to terrify corporations into being honest, by simply confiscating equipment and handing it to competitors when an abuse occurs for example, then I would be far less afraid of such a solution than I would be in the existing monopolies and the threatened hijacking of Internet bandwidth.
My number one concern is that, at the end of the day, the Internet is safeguarded against what amounts to corporate banditry and bandwidth hijacking. It might be best to simply confiscate the entire US side of the Internet backbone and place it back under the control of DARPA. As much as I distrust quangos, I distrust unfettered industry far more.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In this case, I think I'd rather take my chances with the dogs in congress than the ones on wall street.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Front-line providers, like DSL or cable carriers, have a monopoly on the format. It's VERY hard for multiple DSL services to co-exist in the same area. Because DSL can only run over dry copper (you can't have fiber in there ANYWHERE), cable companies can disenfranchise DSL providers by simply getting phone companies to "upgrade" sections of their infrastructure. All it would take is for them to use fiber in a junction box or a patch panel, and all DSL past that point will die.
Broadband-over-power causes way too much radio interference to be usable. Even if this could be resolved, all it would take is for some existing ISP to sweet-talk the power company to install a noise filter and the entire system is kaput.
WiFi is fine, but WiFi is slow. Ethernet gets up to 10 gigabits per second, with 100 gigabits coming soon. Optical networks are already at the 100 gigabit level, and 4 terabit network switches exist. Wifi isn't even remotely close to these kinds of speed. It never will be. For true broadband, 802.11 WiFi is a dead-end technology.
(Hell, DSL is dead-end, as optic fiber becomes more widespread. Also, SDSL is generally not sold to domestic users, only corporate users, and ADSL sucks for providing any content.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)