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Republicans Defeat Net Neutrality Proposal
LiquidEdge writes "A Republican controlled committee has defeated a bill that would have guaranteed fair access and stopped companies like AT&T and Verizon from charging high-bandwidth sites for allowing their customers to have priority access to them."
I really love the spin this story has... "EVIL Republicans RUIN the Internets!"
Republicans less inclined to regulate the market than Democrats. News at 11.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
Did anyone RTFA?
They basically did not entirely madate it, but they did not outlaw neutrality either. The article is slanted, and inaccurate. While I wish they had in fact mandated for neutrality, they took a middle of the road step, but that is NOT the article headline.
Saying the republicans broke the net with this is like saying that Bush is a great president, both are wrong, and both have millions of idiots who believe it.
I'm not saying that abuses of network access aren't on the horizon. Far from it. It just strikes me that many of the proponents of "network neutrality" are taking the principle too far, aren't looking at the potential benefits of third parties being able to pay for enhanced access, and aren't necessarily that concerned about more important issues fixed first.
It is absolutely right that if I pay for a 1.5Mbps connection to my home, that no external entity should suffer discrimination when trying to get their packets to me (assuming that's my choice - and in some cases, I should be made to make an explicit choice, about letting people access all my ports, for instance. I have no problems with an ISP, by default (but only while the subscriber consents) blocking ports commonly used for hacking.
But at the same time, I don't necessarily see a problem with external entities being able to pay my ISP for better access. If when Apple wants to send me a file, they're able to pay Earthlink such that the data they send isn't part of the 1.5Mbps, but counts as additional bandwidth, then that works to both of our advantages. I can still communicate with Wikipedia, Google, et al, at 1.5Mbps while my family watches a streamed movie from the iTunes Movie Store in the living room. That's not bad at all.
But it's not "network neutrality", or more importantly, it's hard to word a network neutrality law that would allow this kind of flexibility.If you allow this kind of flexibility, then what stops an ISP offering only a basic 256kbps service in an area, without offering better packages, knowing full well this is "fast enough" for basic web browsing, and that it immediately confers an advantage on those third parties that pay the ISP for better access? This would infuriate the network neutrality people, yet neatly bypass the laws that would allow the scenario I gave.
Right now we need better standards and more competition. I would much rather see government pass laws proposing minimum levels of service than try to force ISPs to not provide services that in many cases are in the best interests of everyone.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I think the issue here is that ISPs and telco's are going to make your access to google slower if google doesn't pay them. They're confused about who their customers are, and seem to think google should pay them for access to me, while I'm already paying them for access to google.
It's a bit like commercial TV, where advertisers are the customers and viewers are the product.
AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon spent $230.9 million on politicians from 1998 until the present, while Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo spent only a combined $71.2 million. (Those figures include lobbying expenditures, individual contributions, political action committees and soft money.)
When will people learn that laws will only get passed in this 'K Street Project' Congress if you simply spend enough money to bribe them?
Oh well, I guess people will be happy when I finish my life's work of designing and implementing a totally neutral "Internet 3"
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
What the Republicans are doing here is exactly what Republicans ought to be doing, by their charter. They are blocking the Federal government from enacting regulation that would seriously impede the actions of private companies. They are saying, in effect, if AT&T or whomever wants to make available special broadband services at higher data rates or lower cost to certain selected partners, then it is not the government's job to step in and legislate that deal. The limitation sought to force these broadband providers to offer equal or better service to non-partners and affiliates, which would stifle the ability of the providers to generate their own services.
In effect, the law would have put a strict limit on what services the broadband providers could do business-wise. The idea was to keep broadband providers from forming monopolies by keeping other non-partner providers out with high costs or degraded services. However, the Republicans are doing the right thing by their constituents by allowing the maximum freedom to these broadband providers and only seeking legal recourse if there is proof of anti-competitive actions.
From TFA:
A Republican-controlled House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Wednesday defeated a proposal that would have levied extensive regulations on broadband providers and forcibly prevented them from offering higher-speed video services to partners or affiliates.
By an 8-to-23 margin, the committee members rejected a Democratic-backed "Net neutrality" amendment to a current piece of telecommunications legislation. The amendment had attracted support from companies including Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and their chief executives wrote a last-minute letter to the committee on Wednesday saying such a change to the legislation was "critical."
Any time you start throwing regulations at something, you make it harder for everyone to compete. You also make it much easier for the government to start sliding in taxes here and there.
And I'm sorry but anything that those patent-happy companies want for the internet is probably NOT a good thing to begin with. Microsoft and Amazon would patent the keyboard if they could. Just because Cnet and
"Thoughts are more powerful than any weapon, and I don't even let my people own guns." --Joseph Stalin
Here in the United States, we have the best government that money can buy!
THe chairman of AT&T has openly lamented during hearings that he gives websites like Google a "free ride". To his mind, Google is a service that should be paid for. That Google needs to apportion a percentage of its revenue into a general fund, because AT&T doesn't sell bandwidth to Google, but carries a lot of Google traffic. He specifically used Google in his example.
That's called revenue sharing, and you know who does stuff like that? Sports team owners. They divide up the revenue from tv rights equally, despite teams representing unequal market share. You know what the big ISPs want? They want that. They want to see Microsoft and Google, and anyone else THEY deem to provide some essential function to the net to pay into a revenue sharing pool.
You know the only time a free market can allow something like that to happen? When you have a oligarchy. And that's what the big backbones providers want. They want to consolidate the market, and start putting tarriffs in at peering sites. They want to exert influence outside the carrier market, and they see QoS as the first step to getting down the slippery slope. Pretty soon, some carriers decide to de-prioritize packets to Google. Maybe Google works, maybe it's really really slow. The internet routes around failure, but it DOESN'T route around a transit carrier who decides to fuck with the traffic en route.
The Republican mindset has only one edict: Corporate self governance. Regulation, in nearly any form, is bad. THey see liability law and tort reform as key, so airlines can crash and not have to pay the passengers settlements. And they certainly want to reign in the FAA to stop "burdening" the airlines with all those expensive safety checks. Same with ISPs. You watch and see, nobody is stopping the oligarchy and now the carriers like Level 3, AT&T and others are going to collude and force a revenue sharing scheme. Next up: national firewalls. The reason Cisco and Google and others only got a slap on the wrist when censoring the Chinese nets, is that the US republicans want to see how well it works first and then start putting it in here under the guide of the Patriot Act.
But that's not the problem either. If I were requesting a service from Apple and knew that they would be getting my provider to prioritize that traffic over the rest it would still be sort of fair. The point is that my internet connection is going to be slower because OTHER PEOPLE are using video services provided by a company who pays the extortion fee (or more likely, is another branch of the telco giving me access): the free sites which I try to access will be slower because of that.
It's not about MY 1.5MBps on the cable that runs to my home, it's about the unknown amount of bandwidth I am sharing with an unknown number of other subscribers, on a bigger cable somewhere downstream.
When was the last time this Republican congress stood up for consumer rights? Hell, when was the last time they didn't vote for the Corporatocracy?
The problem is that while they once in a while do something that falls in line with their "small government, free citizenry" charter, they have been pandering to the Religious Right on social issues for far too long, and lately have taken to seeking national security through regulations that are decidedly not in the spirit of Freedom. The country club Republicans knew they could generate a lot of votes by pandering to the Religious Right, but that seems to have backfired on them as they are now outnumbered by those groups and have lost control of the party.
Does it seem redundant to make both the sender and the recipient pay for the same bandwidth?
It not just that. Google already pays out the ass for it's connection as would you or I if we uploaded as much data as Google. This is how it should be. What the telcos want is to add an extra charge if Google makes money on any of that data. It's like if I call you on the phone it costs me X to make the call and costs you Y to have the phone that receives it. Now they want X+Z from me if I'm a business and made any money from you on that call. This is not OK. They also want W from me if I want the call between you and I to be more free of static that the call between you and my competitor. This is also not OK.
Reducing costs is right. They will reduce costs, I am sure. Just don't expect any reductions in price.
Which is precisely why the Republicans are wrong here. The first Republican President warned of corporate power, corporate influence in government, and monopolies. Anti-trust law used to be something Republicans accepted as pro-capitalism, and pro-democracy. Current Republican politicians have been bought, it would seem.
Damn.
disclaimer: this post is in no way an endorsement of any other political party, if you assumed it was, then you're an idiot, and part of the problem.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Let me get this straight:
I paid once for taxes that created the internet and supported most of the phone system infrastructure.
I paid again for phone service and use of the lines.
I paid again for all the people who can't afford access to the lines.
I paid again for dsl.
I paid again for the USF (which gets paid to Verizon so that they can pay themselves for using there own lines, which I already paid to use twice.)
Yet the oposition to this bill wants me to think that someone needs to pay for al this service they're providing.
I'm generaly against government regulation, but something isn't right here. It makes me glad we also paid all that money to brake up AT&T in the first place.
don't believe it
America is broke. America is deeply in debt.
These two are not the same. America is one of a few developed countries not to have an economy driven by exports. Almost all of our competitors - Canada, Japan, and especially China run a large trade deficit with us. The US economy is dominated by household consumption and business growth. The large profits made by our partners have to go somewhere. They can invest in overcapacity, or real estate speculation (China doesn't have a functional stock market), or stick the cash in a matress - or they can buy US treasuries. They love 'em! So we in the US get large investment inflows and low interest rates. The fun will end once these exporters realize they are getting ripped off!
America sells protection. Luckily protection frequently breeds violence which calls for protection.
Yep, and a lot of the world needs it. It isn't a big percentage of GDP (
Unfortunately the tax base in America isn't up to the job.
This suggests otherwise.
The short term policies driving markets that push pollutants and climatic change will be changed, at best surperficially, because alternatives require recognizing that America is broke. And waking from the American dream will be a nightmare.
Why so pessimistic? The climate will change with or without industrial civilization. We are in an interglacial period. It should be warming. This isn't necessarily bad. In much of the world there will be increased crop yields.
an ill wind that blows no good
If I am a road haulage firm in Europe, can I charge a different price to move a tonne of steel from London to Paris compared to a tonne of copper? What if the two loads are in sealed standard containers?
If I run a toll bridge somewhere en route, can I charge a different price for the same weight?
I beleive Common Market rules say such differential pricing is barred, and the situation should be the same for the Internet.
In the real world the only way that a haulier (or toll bridge owner) could get away with such differential pricing is if they have a monopoly and that is exactly the case where rules are required to prevent abuses.
Except there's already proof of anti-competitive practices when they blackball vonage. Apparently you missed the part where they're hurting far more private companies than they're helping. DO a quick count on how many sites there are on the internet today, then do a quick count of how many ISP's you have providing your area, do you want to reconsider whether they're helping or hurting private business. You also missed the part where they're supposed to be looking out for consituents... how many small business owners have websites? How many small businesses are affected by this?
This is yet another transfer of wealth from the little guys to the big corporations. The republicans haven't been looking out for their constituents for years, please stop trying to kid yourself.
In London, we now pay for access to the roads. If I want to drive into Central London I have to pay for 'bandwidth' in the congested area [if I use low bandwidth access, like a motorcycle, I don't pay]. This is directly analogous to the fact that I pay for my broadband access at home. [some commentators might discuss other road charges, such as road tax and petrol tax too] The idea of service providers paying the ISP's for preferential access to customers is a bit like charging shops for my car usage. It would be like having a toll booth at the entry points to the City, asking me where I'll be shopping, then charging the shops for my access [potentially allowing me to go on faster roads if I'm visiting high paying shops]. At the very periphery of the real world this might just work [a shop are so keen for your custom that they will send a limo to collect you] but if this policy were applied wholesale, it'd lead to the death of the City's commercial centre. The logistics are simpler in the case of the internet, but the principle applies. Economic dynamism is achieved by having plenty of vendors vying for business. Economies which restrict this stagnate. The internet will stagnate if middlemen [ISP's] try to choose which sites we can visit [they may profit, but the consumer will not]. As ISP's enjoy a degree of natural monopoly, it behoves governments to prevent this potential abuse.
I think you've nailed it on the head -- only I don't think you realize what it means.
Congress shall pass no laws which protect the consumer, because the Republicans are all about letting big business do whatever they want. Unless it's ensuring the companies are doing what THEY want.
In my opinion, any company who wishes to be able to charge certain sites for reliable bandwidth should immediately lose any and all common carrier status afforded to them. They are now liable for every single packet which travels over their networks; since they clearly need to identify the source of every packet for specific billing purposes.
If kiddie porn goes over their wires, they get fined -- if they can track it close enough to know Google's traffic, they are now obligated to identify and block all child porn, left-wing political content, and, um, vegan recipes so we can support the beef industry. All references to b00bies, Islam, and all things not sanctioned by the Republicans will be supressed -- the only place where Republicans DO pass laws that restrict the behaviour of businesses -- forcing their own moral standards on others.
Oh wait, the Republicans already want to make it the job of having ISPs be fully responsible for monitoring the content. So maybe they'd be perfectly happy to see all of that happen. Then, they can be sure that only content approved by the MiniTruth and MiniPac will be allowed to be transmitted. This just lets the companies start asking for it first, and when they realize the implications, it's too late for all of us.
Nope, you've convinced me -- bring on the thought police, and let's continue unbridled, so-called unregulated capitalism. I, for one, welcome our new Big Brother overlords.
The Party is Mother, and Father.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The Internet is a system you pay to have access to - Normally you go by the resources you use (i.e. Bandwidth). So yes it is set up, so both the sender and the receiver have to pay for bandwidth.
However, this is not the issue at hand - with the new bill it is not forbidden to hold certain kinds of traffic hostage, so essentially anyone who happens to come across your traffic can demand you pay him for this traffic again - or else...
Digital Highwayman has thus become a legal profession.
Code is Speech. No to Censorship.
More proof people see what they want to see in spite of the facts.
For instance, some people didn't read down further, to see what the Republicans proposed in its place; namely, to broaden the powers of the FCC to investigate claims regarding net neutrality, and establishing stiff fines.
This bill wouldn't have just prevented a group of property owners from choosing to downgrade service to their competitors; it would also have prevented them from offering premium services to their partners. In fact, it might have prevented your local ISP from offering cheaper rates for service to non-profit organizations.
Throwing more laws at a problem isn't always the best way to deal with it; this was more about attempting to get votes than attempting to protect consumers.
I agree... but this philosophy only works when there is competition. The reason this thing is so bad, isn't because AT&T is going to go off and do something dumb... its because AT&T is going to go off and do something dumb, and the market can't punish them by allowing their customers to switch. For 99% of broadband customers, they only have one high-speed choice.
This is something, sadly, today's Republicans forget. They believe the solution to every problem is "the free market" when they forget that includes "competition".
A Republican committee votes a certain way in opposition to a Democratic position. ./'ers will agree with the Democrats, are suggesting that hiding inconvienent ppositions taken by the Republican majority is NON-biased? Seems to me, deliberately obscuring who supports which side on this to avoid hurting the perception of Republicans is what would be biased. If you think the Republicans are right, defend their reasoning against the ./ default.
What's biased about stating who's on which side of this issue? If what you mean is that it's wrong to state this fact when you think the overwhelming majority of
Yes, this is bad news for regular users, but its also bad for the big telcos. That's because if they start trying to sell traffic prioritization to people, they'll end up with egg on their face due to the very nature of the Internet, and everyone will lose. Regular customers will just lose first, but I think telcos will lose later.
The reason is that telcos think only in terms of their own networks, not in terms of the internet as a whole. For example, suppose I want to go to google video and so does Joe in Iowa. If Joe and I are both are customers AT&T, for example, and we both purchase some kind of fast streaming (steaming ?) video service from AT&T, and Google has direct uplink to AT&T, then we both will get faster video downloads. However, if Joe's traffic ever traverses another network like UUNet, then the fast steaming video service Joe paid for won't be so fast. Unless, that is, AT&T and Verizon/MCI (UUNet) have an agreement to honor each other's traffic prioritization.
Here's where it gets interesting. What if Verizon sells the same traffic prioritation to its customers? Are we to believe that Verizon will treat AT&T's 'prioritized' traffic with the same expediency as their own high-priority steaming video traffic? I think not. The interesting thing is that it doesn't matter if Joe is an AT&T customer or not - the chances of his traffic traversing non-AT&T link somewhere on the internet are pretty good, since there are steaming video providers all over the place, not just on AT&T's network.
The end result is that telcos may sell something to customers that they can't deliver, due to the nature of the Internet. What will happen in time, without 'net neutrality', is that telcos will try to re-engineer their networks to reduce the chances that their customers' traffic will ever traverse other provider's networks out on the internet.
Who will scream first will be business customers. They'll insist on SLAs when paying extra for 'prioritized' traffic, and SLAs nearly always include rebate clauses when things go wrong, and things will go wrong until the internet gets all partitioned up (and functionaly broken). My place of work hosts many hundreds of large commercial web sites, and I'll for sure enforce rebate clauses when the content we pay to have 'prioritized' doesn't move with the specified urgency. And, yes there are ways to determine how to measure whether or not traffic like steaming video is getting the performance promised in SLAs. I think what will happen is that big telcos will be at each other's throats for failure to honor each other's traffic prioritizations.
The Internet is an ocean, not a bunch of lakes. The telcos want to sell good weather and calm seas.
The only thing a 'tiered' internet will result in is poorer service to people who don't pay for 'prioritized' traffic - that you can bet on. Once that becomes apparent, of course people will start coughing up extra dough, and telcos will get a temporary boost to their bottom line. Of course, that is, until the internet starts to break down as telcos start to partition up the ocean into nice, managable lakes.
Well, it was interesting while it lasted.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Another Lincoln quote seems appropriate here as well: "These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel."
"Party of Lincoln" my ass.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.