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

RE

[Alex P Keaton in da]

Because you know when the gov't gets involved... It can't get screwed up...

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.

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?

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?

Re:Fantastic!

[conJunk]

i'm not usually an 'email-your-congress-critter' sort, but your pleas were heard. here's the text of the emails i sent to my (CA) senators:

Hi. I'm writing about Sen. Ron Wyden's Internet Non-Discrimination Act, which I've read is expected to be introduced today. I support this measure in the strongest possible terms. Prohibiting service providers from engaging in pay-to-play shemes with content providers is the only sensible course. Computer technology has at its core an idealized notion of equality and accessibility, and allowing companies to add increased charges for the deliver of certain content is not only anti competitive, but locks many users out of equal use of the internet. If pay-to-play schemes like those Sen. Wyden's bill aims to prohibit had been in place in 2000, the internet certainly would not be where it is today, and companies like Amazon and Google, which are now household names, may have never been able to get off the ground.

mod parent up please!!!!!

[porkThreeWays]

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.

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

[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.

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.