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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!"
Because the free market economy has done so much for improving the free flow of information. Does it seem redundant to make both the sender and the recipient pay for the same bandwidth? What if other countries ban this type of thing, how could you regulate speed in one area, and not in another?
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.
Reduce cost? You're new to this, aren't you? ;)
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
No Internet Packet Left Behind?
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.
Pretty much.
EVERYTHING is starting to have extra charges towards it and even extra charges on those extra charges. You need to pay for absolutely every possible tiny thing. And thanks to all the modern companies bribing officials left and right, unless the mass "sheeple" actually get off their couches and do something about it there is little we can do to stop it. Eventually only the extremely rich will be getting the same level of "service" that normal people are getting now in just about everything. Welcome to the modern dark-ages: kings, nobles, and pheasants all over again.
A train station is where a train stops. A bus station is where a bus stops. On my desk I have a workstation...
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!
That would be a sensible theory wouldn't it, one suspects however that it'll create a tiered system that costs the end user more.
/. would pay more to provide a better service or those that use are the type of people who'd pay for a faster connection. Would you then really want a fast site with lots of links to slower sites?
Think about this; would something like slashdot be able to work? Obstensibly
Would you then host all your images and shared web services with a "fast" provider and embed them into your sites hosted on "slow" providers. You'd then have a market for providing lots of "fast" images for embeding into your "slow" personal page. Lot's of technical implications to think about there, smells like someones "wealth creation" plan to me.
Regards, Phil
Is this similiar to how people compain that Comcast has a lower QoS for VOIP packets and this law says that is OK because they can prioritize how their own network functions?
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." - Ralph
If republicans support a bill backed by the largest of corporations, they're evil.
If republicans defeat a bill backed by the largest of corporations, they're evil...
Just making sure I have it right..
If you think about it, you might come to the conclusion that this already happens in other domains.
Compare to cable television, for instance. If you subscribe to CATV, you are paying for the bandwidth (all those channels) to access the content, while at the same time, the CATV company is paying (slightly less) to carry those channels, and the network (CNN, Fox, TLC, SF, etc.) are charging advertisers for sending that content to you.
If you don't have subscription television service, the advertiser alone is bearing the cost of assaulting your eyes with their commercials.
This is analagous, I think, to a Tier {1,2} ISP charging for priority access. If you want the CATV equivalent (millions of channels, digital content, high speed), you're going to pay for it. So is the content provider on the other end of the session (after all, they need a connection to the Internet as well). If you are happy with over-the-air quality (quality, quantity and speed of delivery...not so much), you don't pay.
Essentially, the chains would look like:
CATV subscriber (-$) -> CATV provider (-$) -> Network ($$$) <- Advertiser (-$)
-or-
Local ISP customer (-$) -> Local ISP (-$) -> Backbone provider ($$$) <- Content provider (-$)
--
Just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean you should do a thing.
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.
Actually, you've probably got that slightly wrong. It's not so much "who their customers are" as "who their customers *were*". All Amazon, Google, Yahoo! et al need to do is agree not to cave in to the telcos demands for more money (they *are* presumably paying for their own connectivity, yes?) and sit it out - Google has pretty much stated they are going to do this anyway. After a while, once the word gets out and customers start to leave for alterative "single tier Internet" providers, the telcos will either have to quietly drop their demands and rate limits or suffer the inevitable stockholder backlash when their profits start to slide.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
And some of you support these dirtbags.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Reducing costs is right. They will reduce costs, I am sure. Just don't expect any reductions in price.
All Amazon, Google, Yahoo! et al need to do is agree not to cave in to the telcos demands for more money (they *are* presumably paying for their own connectivity, yes?) and sit it out
This would be great. But let's not forget that one of the et.al's in this case is Microsoft, who seems determined to do everything possible to defeat Google at the search game. They have gobs of cash and as a convicted monopolist have a proven history of being willing to do unethical things to get ahead. Maybe they'll decide they dislike the telecos syphoning off money more than they dislike Google being king of the search engines, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.
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
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.
I wouldn't equate predictability with "making sense".
It hardly makes sense to allow an ISP to charge other companies to allow their companies to access the other company's website, when the ISP's customers are already paying for that privilege.
It only makes sense in that it is predictable that Republicans would go for this.
Republicans always vote for big businesses above small businesses and individuals. After all, that's where their bread is buttered. But in any substantive sense, it doesn't make sense at all.
In the words of Patrick Le Lay, the asshole CEO of the crappy, highly commercial french TV network TF1 (translated from this article):
"TF1's job is basically to help Coca-cola, for instance, sell its product. For an advertisement message to be perceived, the brain of the viewer must be available.
Our shows' vocation is to make it available, that is, entertain and relax it to prepare it between two messages. What we sell to Coca-Cola is available humain brain time."
I have seen on many occasions the wonderful folks here at Slashdot completely butcher the facts and place into an article's title or summary certain statements that just don't mesh with reality. In some cases, they don't even mesh with the actual article that's been linked. This is a case where the article's authors suffer from a guilty conscience about trying to paint with a very broad political brush. Of course, no one here who would be responsible for submitting a summary of the story seemed to care that it was not "Republicans" who defeated the proposal.
Some of the more logical among us, who do not as often subscribe to political stereotypes, might have asked themselves whether or not the "House Energy and Commerce subcommittee," which is actually called the Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee (but why do research?), would be distributed along 23-8 partisan lines. After all, that's the vote count for the proposal, and both the article title, the post title, and the article summary are quite confident in their claims that Republicans defeated the net neutrality proposal. So it was 23 Republicans versus 8 Democrats, right?
Not really, If you bothered to read on (I know, I know--I'm asking too much), you'd see that one Republican voted for the amendment. Three Democrats voted against it. But just the Republicans defeated the proposal, according to the folks here. Sure, if those three Democrats voted for it, you would have had a 20-11 vote, and then Republicans would have defeated the proposal. But that didn't happen.
And those Democrats, who apparently feel so strongly about this proposal and are so deserving of the support of the Internet community, had no problem going along for the ride and voting 27-4 in favor of the final bill without the Markey net neutrality amendment. Wow! So principled!
Markey, who is clearly an expert on such topics, declared, "We're about to break with the entire history of the Internet. Everyone should understand that." Indeed, because the entire history of the Internet has been based around the ability of broadband providers to offer high-speed video services. What?
Let's go even more abstract: the entire history of the Internet has been one that prohibited the prioritization of network traffic. What what?
It also would have been nice if the people at CNet News would have gotten an interview with Fred Upton, the chairman of the actual subcommittee that did all of this, instead of going to the full committee chairman Joe Barton. In many cases, the full committee chair doesn't have nearly the same kind of expertise on the issue as the subcommittee chairman does. Though with the way CNet News framed this whole thing, maybe they did interview Upton, but he made too good of a point, so they just trashed it and went instead with "Republicans Defeat Net Neutrality Proposal." Alright, got my mini conspiracy theory of the day out.
I think the jury's still out on that. Those who are making the case that this is (or would be) a bad thing are doing so based only on historical precedent.
Ever since the development of Strowger's automated (as opposed to operator-driven) call switching, an underlying principle of telecommunications (long since codified into law) was the ideal that the switching system should not make routing decisions based on the content of the call. (It's considered fair-play for a carrier to, for example, route a over a satellite circuit vs. an undersea cable based on whether it is a FAX/DATA call, but not based on wether it's a business vs. personal call.) This is the fundamental basis behind the concept of network neutrality.
One could argue that without some concept of network neutrality, we can't really say we even have a telecommunication system. I'm not sure there's a good example of a system akin to what the Republicans are proposing here, which is a system where public rights-of-way are privatized into a handful of companies with monopoly control. The closest I can come-up with off-hand would be what was done in the era of the railroad tycoons. Not a perfect match, since in that age the railroads did not lead into every home, nor was the economy as dependent on them as ours is today in the Internet.
My opinion only, but yes, you're wrong. ;-)
The fear is that these companies will be driven by the interests of their shareholders, rather than the interests of the society. The two points of contention seem to be:
History (both railroad and telecommunications) tells us that when a single entity is in control of the network, evolution of that network proceeds slowly, and only in a way as to increase control and profitibility. Let us not forget; between automatic switching (circa 1890's) and the 1984 breakup of AT&T, the two big telephone company innovations were DTMF dialing and the lighted dial Princess Phone(TM)
The railroads fell only when an alternate infrastructure (the Interstate highway system and, to a lesser extent, commercial aviation) was built along side the existing network infrastructure. The Internet, as we commonly know it today, took-off as a result of the break-up of the Bell System monopoly and legislated network-neutrality. Prior to the 1997 Telecommunication Reform act, the Carriers were prohibited from offering data services (like AOL or CompuServe did) specifically to prevent them from favoring one provider over another. AOL, CompuServe, Earthlink, and the like, using modems and the fact that the telephone companies were required to carry these calls even though it prectically bankrupted many of them, were the impetus behind the
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Heh, I read the article (as evidenced by me quoting the article). I agree with you. Did you read my post? I was providing quotes which are clearly biased to make the telecom companies look like they're NOT double-dipping. The author of the article was trying to make us feel bad for the 'little' telecom companies against 'big bad Microsoft and Google.' I tried to show that in my post. I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough for you to understand that.
McCullagh's (the author) views on this are well-known. He is against nearly ALL regulation. He WANTS the telecom companies to be able to do whatever they please, including double-dip. I was trying to call attention to his own words that show he's not doing a good job covering this stuff.
Still alive: Senator wants to ban 'fast lane' for Web.
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.
First, your statement could have been said if they ruled for Google, AOL, Yahoo!, etc.
Second, you're saying that Democrats aren't in the back-pocket of corporations either? Clueless or naive?
If we geeks could get enough of a lobby (and if Google couldn't buy the vote, who can?) together to fund large campaign donations to buy votes we like, maybe we'd have a chance at nixing crap like this and the Patriot Act and get some patent reform and...and...and...
But, there has been too much money over too much time creating too much counter influence.
Perhaps it would be simpler if they just setup two blind donation bins for all votes (for/against). Let the morons vote and then whichever side of the argument wins, all who voted get to split the money (for their campaigns) on that side, with the rest going to pay down the national debt. Over time, the politicians would have to start picking the correct side or face no campaign funding.
Mind the gap...
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.
Is there any way we can have articles with more spin please? Maybe: "Republicans kill bill that saves cute ponies from slaughter"!
Thanks!
~nate
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".
Next, Google puts up a page that Verizon DSL customers see if they try to access any Google resources at all which says something like "Verizon is deliberatly degrading your connection to our pages. We cannot assure reasonable response to any requests you may have. Please contact Verizon DSL customer service at XXX-XXX-XXXX if you find you cannot access Google, or alternatively switch to provider Y ".
Now imagine that Google teams up with Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and a few other biggies to do the same. (I assume MS would pay, seeing it as a chance to overtake Google) How long do you think Verizon could stand up to this? Nobody gives a damn who carries the packets, but take away their eBay access and people will scream bloody murder
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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
From what I have read, they seem to think that the solution is for companies to buy bigger data pipes. That's not what this net neutrality is about! As I understand it, it's preventing what amounts to "data access surcharges" from being applied in lieu of not having your service downgraded.
Simply buying a bigger pipe isn't going to do anything as far as I can tell when some other party is artificially decreasing the performance of the service you provide because you don't pay the troll! They can do nothing to improve your potential service based on what you currently have... they can only degrade your service and allow you to pay to have the roadblocks removed.
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.
In short they're shooting the messenger rather than phoning up their Congressman and saying "Hey, you goddamn whore!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
More often then not, those huge investments they made were only done because they were granted a monopoly in specific regions. Without a monopoly, another ISP or broadband provider would be able to step in and offer a different service and price that may benefit you in some why but that can not happen now. I have Comcast, if they decide to limit me to 512 kbits/sec, I have NO choice but to accept it or move to Verizon DSL (which is not in my area because the CO is too far away). I could go back to dialup but my only choice is Verizon or Comcast for POTS (I don't have POTS now, I use cell and VoIP over my broadband). Wow, look at that would you! The same two companies are my only choice for phone service as well. Imagine that and they can charge whatever they want and provide whatever service level or features they want and there is nothing I can do about it. Great.
Here is an example or what competition without a monopoly can provide...
My average POTS phone bill with Verizon was $50/month.
With MY choice of VOiP provider, I pay about 1/3 of that AND have two numbers (one in a different area code), built in voice mail, find me call forwarding, voice mail to email, unlimited US calling (long distance), and a few more features I'll probably never use.
The ONLY reason and way that this rate setting and preferential treatment of bandwidth in question would work is because the local bandwidth providers have a monopoly. Without that monopoly, people would go elsewhere in a heartbeat. That is why they need to be watched and possibly regulated.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Funny...I read the article and I saw this:
Democrats but forward a suggestion to protect certain companies from those that control the access to the internet. Block AT&T from giving Microsoft.com 50% of its bandwidth, for example, while all of AT&Ts smaller customers share the other 50%.
Republicans block suggestion, stating it is bad for the economy to stifle competition and cronyism. If MS wants to pay for that much bandwidth, let them. Otherwise AT&T isn't making the profits it might.
My conclusion: What the Republicans have done is essentially deregulated the Internet and allowed big business to take over. If you don't include clauses like the one the Democrats suggested, companies will think, "How can I make more money?" and you'll get ideas like, "I can throttle bandwidth to all but the highest bidders, regardless of how much the consumers pay to get like service between content providers!"
If "stifling the economy" means throwing consumer rights in the toilet and flushing twice, I'm very excited about the 2006 Republican sweep in the congressional elections (not).
No it's not a good thing. It's the complete commercialization of the internet and the death of the internet as we know it. It culminates in your inability to access most sites at any respectable latency or speed unless you belong to this inner group. If your ISP or the site you visit doesn't play along, well dude, yur outta luck.
;)
hmmmm, it might be a dampener on kdpr0n and spam sites tho
oh what the 43ll, let'r rip
Sure, they're on the side of Yahoo!, Amazon & Google NOW, but do you think they're going to take a stand and refuse to participate in the new tiered internet? When the bidding war for express "delivery" of content starts, they'll steamroll Google and Yahoo! with their hordes of cash. Having the best search engine won't matter anymore. Having an "adequate" search engine that works the fastest will be enough to rule the market, and MS will make SURE that nobody will be able to have their content "delivered" at higher speed.