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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."
Reduce cost? You're new to this, aren't you? ;)
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.
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
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
"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..
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.
Well, this bill was to support the idea that "no external entity should suffer discrimination when trying to get their packets to me".
What's going on is that packets from/to Vonage, and other voice over IP companies are being marked by Comcast, and Verison as 3rd class mail: if they are even permitted. This law was to prevent this pratice.
This law had nothing to do with providers charging more for a T3 over a T1 for a web-service company. That would be brain dead to argue against. This was about network neutrality: that *infrastructure* companies can pick-and-choose what content you can get to and what content you cant (and what content is so damn slow you won't ever use it).
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.
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!
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.
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
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
"regulate the market"
If there was perfect competition in the ISP market, then fine, let market forces rule! However, the 1st tier ISP market today is far more oligopolistic than free market. You can bet that if there was perfect competition, this idea would not even have the slightest chance of gaining traction. Free market capitalism only works in competitive markets, that's why price fixing is illegal in the US. Sadly, the ISP market is beginning to resemble the telephone market, highly concentrated ownership, limited competition.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
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.
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.