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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 wonder if Joseph Stalin took time away from killing 20 million Soviets to blame all his troubles on the free press. Oh, wait a sec, he didn't have a free press.
Talk about an ungrateful nation. Don't complain about the fact that your press is doing its job by being a watchdog. It's one of the few things left that's keep the States from slipping into a dictatorship.
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.
Yeah, I hate it when they said "EVIL" and "RUIN".
Oh, wait. That's not in the article, its solely your invention.
The actual article makes no comment on whether its good or bad, and gives space to both pro- and anti- viewpoints.
It's a factual article with little evidence of bias.
And you're an idiot.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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
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.
Just a little FYI, "our press" isn't really interested in being a watchdog. They're interested in making money.
It just so happens that their preferred way of making that money is by providing the news.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. People just need realize what they're watching, reading, and hearing to make informed opinions.
But don't kid yourself into thinking that freedom of the press means we're always getting the complete truth.
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.
Except, when literally dozens (if not hundreds) of ISPs try to make side deals with Apple so the content from iTunes doesn't get way-layed en-route to you, Apple will be forced to pass the cost on to you. And, since Apple will charge more, the record companies will try to sneak in extra costs for the tracks so they get a bigger cut of the pie too.
Look at a traceroute some time
The way packets are routed on the internet, this will be a free-for-all of people trying to gouge a little extra money. The whole concept of peering -- since our packets travel over your network, and your packets travel over ours -- will all go to shit. As packets get rerouted around individual places that aren't playing nice because they haven't been paid, all of your traffic will be sent through congested chokepoints.
The sum total will be an overall reduction in service and relibility for everyone.
Your downloads of Mozilla, or Linux, or iTunes, or things from sourceforge, Microsoft updates, or whatever -- all of them will be subjected to intermediate 'road tolls' by people who feel they should get a cut for reliably delivering your data. Every single one of them will be approached little-by-little to cough up or experience packet loss/delays.
Then, your Earthlink service you're so happy to allow charge Apple extra money to deliver packets at a good bandwidth will eventually turn to crap as every site you're visiting hasn't paid someone intermediary their cut. Anyone large enough to show up on radar will be subject to huge numbers of companies trying to gouge them.
Have you really thought this through? To me, this sounds like the end of good internet access, and the beginning of separated, specialized networks. This is like travelling through some third world country where armed groups stop you and charge a fee to be allowed to continue.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
If you'd RTFA, you'd see that the headline and writeup are actually taken more or less directly from the article - if there's spin there, it's not from Slashdot.
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
Luckily "being a watchdog" and "making money" practially go hand in hand now days. What's one kind of story that sells very well? Now, of course, they're going to cover a bunch of other bs too just because its sensational, but you know they're going to come down on anyone or any group that's been doing something "scandalous".
A sample paragraph, emphasis mine:
The rest of it is essentially laying out an emotionally evocative argument for the "free market" and against government regulation. I'm suprised they even bothered to throw in the halfassed "They're breaking teh internets!!!!~1" quotes from the Democrats that they DID manage to find space for.
I don't know which ISPs CNET intends to "partner" with, but they're sure as hell a video content provider, and they obviously have a dog in this fight. I don't think I've ever seen an ostensibly straight news story from an ostensibly objective tech news site where the corporate bias was so blatant.
Shit, they closed with a quote from Grover Fucking Norquist. That's just lame.
hang brain.
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
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.
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".
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.