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

Makes me glad I voted for him

[PIPBoy3000]

The kicker, of course is this:

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.

This very much seems like a Republican/Democrat stand-off. Are you pro-business or pro-consumer?

Re:It's a shame

[lbrandy]

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

Allow me to welcome you to humanity. You must be new here.

Guess what else we have laws to prevent? Theft! Fraud! Beating! Murder! Rape! Isn't it sad that we, as a species, actually need to have laws that enforce all these things. Man, what a horrible creature we are.

I wonder

[GmAz]

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.

They would have to write this very carefully

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Diffserv and Intserv

[jd]

Differentiated Services (the ability to route packets differently according to type of service) and Integrated Services (the ability to group packets together according to the relationships between types of service) are theoretically unaffected by this. As most QoS is done through Diffserv/Intserv classification and not by source or destination, it follows QoS should be unaffected.

• HTB, HFSC, SFSC, CBQ, etc, predominantly use the type of service and not the endpoints as the basis for packet classification. You can specify endpoints, and the LARTC HOWTO has examples on how to do this, but it's not an exceptionally useful application of the technology.
  
• RED, GREEN, BLUE, BLACK and the other packet-dropping schemes either use type of service or select packets at random. It makes no sense to drop packets more for one source than another, except as a DoS jamming scheme.
  
• ECN, FECN and BECN use endpoints to cap excessive streams and are only impacted in that the law would prohibit anti-competitive abuse of these algorithms.
  
• It might make buying RSVP'ed bandwidth illegal, but RSVP doesn't scale over the Internet and should only be used on local networks anyway. Besides which, RSVP is probably the least-known of all QoS technologies.
  
• If backbone providers kick up too much of a fuss, intermediate providers will likely switch to a mesh-based Internet, which could kill off the backbone entirely. The backbone will only endure so long as it can provide better service for less money than a mesh would. With copious amounts of dark fiber around for relatively little money, repressive ISPs are a short-term threat to America but a long-term threat to themselves.
  

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.

Re:It's a shame

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Well, that may be true of some folks, but, it is a very GOOD thing to do, if you want to work in the US, and keep more of your hard earned $$'s.

Uh, yeah, that's the very definition of being morally bankrupt. Taking something (working in the United States with a government-supported fiat currency, infrastructure, and economy) and not being willing to pay for it. But yes- from the point of view of greed being good, I completely agree.

For example, an "S" corporation, which I have formed, allows you to write off a ton of things used in the course of your business. Also, you can more easily contract to other corporations rather than just try to 1099 with them. They feel much more cozy about a corp to corp contract....not as easily sued for not paying benefits, etc.

Funny, I'd call that second a major downside- that it allows other corporations to take advantage of you...

Also, you can keep from paying the insipid FICA and medicare on all of your earnings. You pay yourself a small, 'reasonable' salary....and you pay employement taxes on them...grant it you do have to pay both halves...employer ane employee, but, only on what you pay yourself as salary. The rest of the money is just taxed normally to you as if falls through the corporation to you in the end....

Yep. Thus removing the money the government needs to protect you from such things as foreign invasion.

Say your billing for $75/hr...that's approx. $140,400/yr. the corp collects on you. So, pay yourself a salary of maybe $35K...employment taxes only apply to that $35K.

Yep, thus freeloading off of other taxpayers for the rest of your taxes.

This is simplified of course...but, you look at that, and all the things you can write off...it adds up in a big way. And if you are incorporated, is all perfectly legal...just keep good records, and be honest. It is really about the only way today in the US, that you can earn decent money, and not have to pay it all back in the legislated wealth redistribution system...managed by the IRS.

Yep- you get to take advantage of all the benefits of that "legislated wealth redistribution system" for things like roads, not having to worry about Mexican Hordes invading and knocking down your house, etc, without paying for your fair share of it. Can you say "Freeloader"? I agree it's completely legal- that's not the point. The point is that becoming a corporation allows you to avoid your responsibility as a citizen of the United States- not just for lawsuits, but for a lot of other stuff as well.

I guess you could point out that you didn't ask to live here and be a citizen- many people didn't, they were just born here- but once you start using public infrastructure to earn money, heck, once you start relying on the value of a stable money supply to earn money, society has a right to request payment for that service. We do so through taxes.

So I guess, in conclusion, I'd like to say thank you for proving my point- that incorporating just allows people to skip out on being personally responsible for what they do.

Used to agree with this thinking, don't anymore

[snowwrestler]

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.