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.'"

Comments

It's a shame

[jcostantino]

What a shame that laws need to be created to keep companies from acting like greedy assholes.

Re:It's a shame

[Divide By Zero]

Companies ARE greedy assholes. A corporation is a legal construct with the rights of a person and none of the morality, a construct whose sole purpose is to make money.

The shame is how often they get away with screwing over real people by having deep pockets to buy legislators and outlast plaintiffs in court. I haven't read the bill, but I'm glad somebody with some power is looking at this critically.

Re:It's a shame

[ROOK*CA]

a construct whose sole purpose is to make money

Pretty much the same are you're run of the mill Gen X'er, huh?

Re:It's a shame

[josecanuc]

Laws don't prevent anything from happening. They just give us a method of recourse that fits within our societal structure (rule of law). If murder is illegal, a law doesn't stop someone from dying when shot in the face. But does allow a regular structure for dealing with someone who commits murder.

A case can be made that laws can have a deterrent effect, but it still doesn't change the fact that a law (words on paper) has zero physical power over anyone in real time.

Re:It's a shame

[Kadin2048]

Sure, but in this case the corporation is solely controlled by you, so it's limited by your morality. (Assumedly.) The corporation -- the legal construct itself -- doesn't have any sense of morality, or anything else.

It's when corporations are so big that they're not really controlled by a single individual that their true amorality becomes obvious. Everyone has a very slightly different idea of what is right and wrong, so unless you have one person who is in a position to pull the plug and say "no, that's wrong -- stop," it will basically do anything that's profitable. Unless the action is so grievously immoral that everyone involved in the company's operation can agree that it's wrong. But that rarely happens.

It's really just semantics whether it's the people or the legal construct that are amoral; the point is that the construct gives people the framework necessary to comfortably check their morality at the door.

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?

So while I'm not normally a fan of big government, I could support a piece of legislation like this, because it fixes the playing field to produce fewer undesirable outcomes. That's the right of a capitalist democracy; if you can't do that, what's the point in even having a government.

Re:It's a shame

[Valdrax]

I'm pointing out that free markets can't solve the problem. You're pointing out that free markets didn't create the problem. You're right, but you haven't disproved what I said with that. You've just played the old card of "your side was wrong too."

Now, for the audience, please explain how a free market can solve this problem now that it's been created if given a chance. We don't live in blank slate world where the free market could've somehow avoided the problem of physical exclusivity in the first place, so you're going to have to explain how it can fix the world we do have.

Don't forget to account for the difference in costs between the established monopoly and free market competitors in gaining new customers (assuming of course that the monopoly pursues its rational self-interest and denies the competitors access to its infrastructure).

Re:It's a shame

[causality]

I think the point was that instead of screwing us, a large company took an action that could threaten other large companies and was smacked down.

As opposed to taking an action that could threaten our rights (i.e. those of the general public, the DMCA being a great example) etc., because when companies do this they are rarely if ever smacked down.

Re:It's a shame

[lynx_user_abroad]

[T]he cable companies own the fiber.

Yes they do. But they do not generally own the complete right-of-way where the fiber lies. That's the part the carriers want to gloss-over.

Proponents of network neutrality should remember that fiber (copper, cable, wireless packets, etc) are being run across right-of-way (poles, roadsides, or spectrum) which belong to the public. The public, therefore, should demand a right to a portion of the bandwidth that right-of-way makes available, or the public should exercise it's right to terminate those carrier access rights.

The carriers are (as of right now successfully) arguing that the "public access" portion of that bandwidth is just 56Kbps. They argue this on the basis that only voiceband connectivity is provided-for under Universal Service Fees funding.

So, do you want to pay a Universal Service Fee tax in order to fund broadband deployment out to every farm in Nebraska, or are you willing to cede everything above 56Kbps to the whims of the carrier shareholders?

Your choice.

Pay For Play

[ExE122]

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.

Re:Pay For Play

[mrchaotica]

Let me explain to you how the Internet works: I subscribe to an ISP, and I pay a monthly fee to connect. The host I'm trying to connect to also subscribes to an ISP, and pays a monthly fee to connect. Now, here's the complicated part: our ISPs have an agreement with each other (called a "peering agreement") that they'll accept connections and transfer packets between their two networks, for free. That's a fundamental mechanism of the Internet, and in fact what makes it an "internetwork" instead of just a "network."

Now that you understand that, I'll explain what's going on here with Bellsouth et al.: They're trying to (effectively) end the peering agreement by charging both ends of the connection, instead of just their own subscribers. The net result is that everyone gets charged twice for the same service. If you can't see how that's unfair, and more importantly, harmful to the design of the Internet itself, you must not be paying attention.

Fantastic!

[vslashg]

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

[shoptroll]

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.

Re:Good

[drinkypoo]

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.

This is all because the telcos are on a sinking ship. Wired communications (for anything other than long-haul, high-bandwidth) are on their way out. The simple fact is that some bigass high-gain omni antennas (which can be built cheaply if you're on a small budget) are a fuck of a lot cheaper than a bunch of poles with bundles of copper wire on them or, god forbid, a bunch of poles with fiber on them, and a bunch of equipment to split that fiber out to subscribers.

By the time the cable companies have gotten fiber to the door, you'll be able to get just as much bandwidth as they'll give you wirelessly. Sure the fiber can handle more traffic, but it's not like they're going to let you saturate it anyway. You'll have a higher equipment cost, but a lower recurring cost, given that the wireless system both costs less to build, and costs less to maintain.

We the people built the majority of the telephone infrastructure through subsidies. That's one of my two objections to all this. The other is that in many areas they currently have a monopoly on internet access, so it's not possible to go to another provider. Hell, in a lot of places, you can't even get satellite due to having a hill in the way. Regardless, wired communications are going to be restricted to high-demand before much longer.

Bribed?

[TubeSteak]

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.

It's All Relative

[gidds]

AIUI, these companies aren't proposing any absolute increase in speed -- they're simply going to give your bits better treatment than those who don't pay.

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...?

Re:This is BAD legislation

[Valdrax]

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.

I'll be equally blunt. Competitive with who?

Telecoms want to do this. Cable companies want to do this. Cell phone companies are mostly owned by the same telecom companies who all love the idea. That's pretty much the entire forseeable broadband market outside of municipal WiFi projects. Every middleman gatekeeper to the internet loves this idea because it lets them charge both producer and consumer. This also gives them extremely powerful leverage to pick what kind of services should thrive and which should die. Let me give you a hint on the latter -- 3rd party VoIP is the big thing that they all hate. Even cable companies are getting in on the anti-competitive action.

This is a raw power grab by an infrastructure monopoly, the purest form of anti-competitive deformation of the market for voice services. This all about turning a competitive market into one ruled by back-room collusion with companies that are willing to do business with the thugs setting up checkpoints on the information superhighway. Maybe you want to use iTunes to download some music but maybe someone like Bell Canada decides to buy a music service and would prefer for you to use their service instead. Therefore, they simply don't prioritize iTunes traffic like they do their own music site. Oh, it's not deprioritizing, it's just not giving highway access for competitors, forcing them to stick to surface streets instead.

Allowing this allows eyes on the internet to be monopolized, which they currently can't be. If you allow companies to treat their customers as a resource to sell to preferred partners, then the customers are the ones who lose out.