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Net Neutrality Voted Down in U.S. House Committee
Ana10g writes "Business Week provides a look at the recent vote by the House Committee on Energy & Commerce, in which the FCC would have been given the power to prohibit discrimination of Internet traffic. The battlefield seems to be centered around which group has the better funded lobbyists, with companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and many others competing against the well funded Telecommunications lobbysts. The committee voted the amendment down, 34 to 22."
This just reinforces the fact that the common public interest is not correctly represented by congress.
me jumping with kites I make...
As the old saying goes, the opposite of progress is Congress.
So long as we're clear: it's just big companies with lots of money fighting each other for the right to make money off of us. God for-fucking-bid the "battlefield" should in anyway involve some kind of consideration of what might be best for the human constitutents the congresscritters are elected to serve.
The idea of giving the FCC more control over things they probably shouldn't control doesn't make me happy, but missing a chance to explicitly prohibit a tiered Internet is kind of a bummer... Oh well, in cases like this consumer always gets screwed one way or another, it's just a question of who's doing the screwing...
As an aside, doesn't the whole "tiered Internet" concept that the telco's are trying to float violate the concept of "common carrier"? Anyone know?
It would depend on the wording of the bill, and given that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon know something about traffic over the internet, I would assume that the bill would be written well enough to get around those problems.
Albuquerque PC
The shame is that we (the voters) don't stand up and say "ENOUGH!" Is it because we don't think what we want is right, or is it because we expect political special interests to win despite what we, the voters want?
The game is rigged, sure enough, just as long as we sit down, shut up, and don't vote. I don't care if you disagree with me, I just want you to vote.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
This is a step towards an extortion economy. I've heard of right wingers playing Twister before but the logic behind that post makes a Pretzel look straight as a pencil.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
If they ask questions and vote their interests, Congress will respond to their interests.
If they spend their time watching TV and vote based on what they see in expensive TV campaign ads then Congress will respond to whoever donates money.
The thing is, without the neutrality bill, the telecom could slow down the traffic of that download or email to nearly zero before building extra capacity to handle both the priority and nonpriority services.
The parent to this post is an idiot.
The FCC is desperately needed to regulate the internet. The FCC needs to ensure a level playing field when it comes to net traffic, whether that traffic is for google or microsoft, or my own server. I don't want to access my mail at dial-up speeds because the provider between me and it decides to that their uncompressed HD content is more important then my 5k file. I don't want my connection to time out to an independant site because verizon decided to shift all their traffic onto "the internet" thus freeing up some of their private lines to save maintanance costs.
Ensuring that the net stays neutral keeps the net more like a town hall and less like disney land. Allowing the telecoms to start charging prices ensures that they only peolpe who can truely serve content are those that have the money, not neccassarily the ones with the best content.
I'm not a fan of regulation, but it's better that the FCC does it then the telecoms.
..will be routed around. At least for the rest of the world that doesn't cripple itself. It could really suck for US internet customers and businesses for a long time unfortunately, if the major copper and fiber owners manage to roll this out.
This may very well mean those content providers and other businesses will move operations outside the USA. Hopefully, this might (not sure on this) make it difficult for US-based major telecoms and ISPs to discriminate against foreign traffic because of international treaties and agreements.
Combined with restrictive IP laws and high taxes, this could add significantly to pressure forcing innovative technologies and the corporations behind them to base themselves outside US control.
As Princess Leia said about a possible future powergrab..
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Once more, it seems (relatively) short-term profits win out over longer-term strategies that would benefit everyone in many ways, including even themselves, and to a much greater degree over time than this self-defeating quick cash grab.
Seems they never learned the old adage about not crapping in ones' own nest.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
In fairness a plethora of consumer group's pleadings and petitions were filed into the official record - but the only 'man speaking for the people' at the hearing was a guy from Columbia Law.
The only guy on the panel who felt net neutrality was unnecessary was the telco guy 'McCormick' who repeatedly assured the panel they would never 'limit, degrade, or block service' to anyone - all while agreeing that one congressman's analogy that suggested exactly that was 'apropos.' How bout that.
Meanwhile republican bobble-heads were nodding in agreement nearly the entire time with the 4 other panelists who FAVORED net neutrality and seemed to understand the issue. Vote time comes - only one republican voted for it. Another 'gee, how bout that' moment. What I think surprised me the most is that they actually seemed to grasp the necessity of net neutrality throughout - but they're such whores they voted against it anyways when the attention was elsewhere (see gas prices.)
Please remain on your side of the pond.
In most big technical companies, it's tough enough to get your *management* to understand the critical technical issues. (If you work in a small startup, there's a good chance that some of the main players do understand, but if you're big enough to have VC-funded management and an HR department, it's pretty likely that have the management aren't technical enough.) Getting *Congresscritters* to understand anything technical is much tougher, and the FCC are a variable set of political hacks, ranging from occasional people who are outstandingly good to other people who are more concerned about regulating TV coverage of Janet Jackson's boobs.
The MoveOn.org petition-distributors don't understand the real issues, so the things they're telling the Democrat Congresscritters aren't helping their ignorance any. Some of the big customers understand some of the real issues. The telecom company managers have demonstrated that while they may understand some of the issues, they'd rather do a bone-headed arrogant "It's Our Money" regulatory play than try to talk technology to the public.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Reps and Dems are in this together, so all you gotta do is vote for some alterna... oh.
Hmmm...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
10mb or 1Gb doesn't matter, as long as someone else dictates at what speeds you may go where.
I don't care if I got 1GB speed when accessing a port 80 (http) server, when at the same time I get 50kbit for streaming content, P2P or secure copy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You're almost certainly joking, but it's worth pointing out that a lot of corruptions start with well-intended abuse. It may seem reasonable to encourage a politician to do the right thing by unorthodox means, but that only leads to further corruption. What we need to do is expose any failures in the system that lead to politicians doing the wrong thing.
Everyone's belyaching, nobody here is thinking!
r 2006/tc20060307_164289.htm
...
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/ma
Democrats are just constantly reinventing Econ 101 in the wrong way.
Telcos can not cut off the traffic, because connectivity is the very thing
they sell. Candy store refusing to sell candy situation.
They obviously would like to prioritize and discriminate traffic on basis
of profitability. The point is, if they can't do it, but are forced to
essentially subsidize cheap bandwidth, they will cut it. It's the same
situation as 'rolling blackouts' in California, where energy companies
forced to provide energy below costs have been doing "maintenance" of
their generators for 25% of operation time (right).
Bandwidth is cheap, but not free. You can "overgraze" bandwidth, just like
you can overuse energy. The years of overinvestment during dotcom mania
and subsequent glut in the bandwidth have indeed created abundance of
bandwidth, but simultaneously stopped investment and development of this
market. The bandwidth and fiber will be utilized; but the moment will come
when it will be necessary to invest further into it. If companies cannot
increase their revenues dependent on who uses how much bandwidth,
clearly discriminating depending on usage, we're going to find ourselves
in situation of overcrowded public road. Being stuck in traffic jams is a
pack of fun!
Bandwidth hogs obviously love he situation - at expense of the rest of the
users. Their traffic willget through - they are smart enough to arrange this
to happen. The legislation intended to help start-up garage will eventually
end up as a massive, politically forced subsidy from users to Google.
Bandwidth becomes public good. And every half-witted economist is
capable to demonstrate that scarce public goods that are used up tend to
be overused and unverinvested (there are public goods like time signal
or tech standard that do not get used up the more people use them, but
bandwidth is not this type of a public good).
The classic countermeasure against overgrazing such public goods is - you
guessed it - subsidizing it from taxes.
The half-witted wonkish instinct is to subsidize the public road while
neglecting the cost of subsidy to the opportunity cost: ok, we took that
much money on taxes for public roads; hmm, people are unable to pay the
energy bills now; ok, we'll increase taxes and subsidize energy; hmm, for
unclear reason now people somehow find it increasingly difficult to buy
housing; ok, let's subsidize housing for the least wealthy by taxing
You get the idea? The doogooder instinct of a wonk requires that at all
times implementing the sum of his good intentions would have to cost, say,
150% of GDP. The higher level of wealth and GDP, the more he exceeds it by
more or less the same ratio.
This, of course, is impossible in the long run: you can't sustainably
spend more than 100% of GDP unless the foreign loaners are willing to
subsidize you (something that current Bush administration should take into
account - in spite of being formally conservative, they spend taxpayer's
money like a drunk sailor).
Our beloved Dems again demonstrate Reagan was right: if it moves, tax it;
if it still moves, regulate it; if it stops moving, subsidize it.
When you think of Google, Amazon, Ebay etc. ... their whole business depends on telecommunication, so that what it's worth to them to have their data sent is basically their entire profit margin, which is non-zero. So ... at the moment they are enjoying a benefit which is known as "consumer surplus". Consumer surplus is the area between a demand curve and a given (fixed) price (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_surplus).
Any marketeer knows that to get the maximum amount of money out of a market, you have to deal with each consumer individually, and price your goods to exactly what he's willing to pay. You can do that if his negotiation position is completely transparant to you, i.e. if you know his demand curve.
Now that extreme is too bothersome, so what do you do? You segment the market into sections that have approximately the same willingness to pay. For each segment you then negotiate a price close to the minimum willingness to pay for that segment. You won't get all the revenue you would have if you were able to charge each consumer the maximum price they're willing to pay, but you're getting close.
The trick is to identify the segments in the first place, and to gain a strong negotiating position. Identifying your customers is the basic step to figuring out their willingness to pay, and of late we have seen Cisco routers that do exactly that. So that's one hole plugged.
The second issue is to gain a strong negotiating position. That's all taken care of because the telecom companies have ensured that all electronic traffic must pass through their infrastructure.
The only remaining problem was that it wasn't legal for them to bluntly start pricing each individual customer what they would pay. Now with the removal of "net-neutrality" this is taken care of as well. Telecom companies can simply induce unacceptable delays as follows:
- (1) allocate reserved bandwidth channels on their infrastructure for customers that are prepared to pay more (got to provide superior service if we're going to charge more, right?)
- (2) route traffic in those channels with priority over existing infrastructure
- (3) watch natural traffic growth of priority traffic squeeze the performance of the non-priority traffic
- (4) politely but firmly negotiate large price increases with large customers such as Google, Ebay, Amazon who can't live with the now much reduced performance of their services
All legal, all neat. Telcos increase their profits at the expense of the (large corporate) users of telecoms facilities. Of course it won't stop there. Individual consumers and small businesses are next. Not satisfied with your Internet performance? (hehehe) Subscribe to our Deluxe service!
If you think I'm making any of this up, then see Cisco's pitch of its routers that can identify traffic here http://www.corecom.com/ftpdir/pub/corecom/iprev-bi lling.ppt. as powerpoint and here as html: http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:dt-ljUr4k5QJ:w ww.corecom.com/ftpdir/pub/corecom/iprev-billing.pp t+cisco+routers+identify+traffic+tiered+charge&hl= en&gl=uk&ct=clnk&cd=8
The only cloud in the sky is the fact that the Telecoms companies don't create value in this way. They simply take away consumer surplus. Gi
>I sometimes wonder if it isn't just time to move to another country.
Ain't no other country want your lazy ass, and even if it did; name any that ain't already as corrupt and bought out as america is.
Ain't no where to run to, so you might as well bite that pillow.
I respectfully disagree. I'm inclined toward free market capitalism, but the model just doesn't work when public funding has entered the equation and there are institutionalized monopolies in that market. Your independent ISPs STILL have to go through networks owned by the big Telcos or cable companies. If the Internet is fully "de-regulated" as you suggest, those companies will be able to slow down the service you get from the little guys, and/or make it more expensive. Consumers will definitely gravitate toward whoever provides the best service for the money. "De-regulation" is a nice buzz word, but when the consumer is locked into a market where a monopoly dictates availability and price of the service, "free market" capitalism is broken.
Yes. But only in the same way we're violating the power companies' right to property when we tell them that they're not allowed to charge the telecomms and cable companies for all the traffic going through those wires they stuck up on all of the power companies' big, expensive, wooden poles.
And the same way we're violating my property rights by not allowing me to charge the power companies rent for the parts of my property they've stuck those poles into.
Oh wait, am I not buying into Ayn Rand's syphilitic delusion of corporate self-reliance?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
A fact that the general public does not realize that if oil wasn't so high that the government is now taking action against the Big Oil companies (who have anally raped consumers at the gas pump while raking in record profits), the government would be taking action against Big Telecom (which has been leaving dirty messages in our voice mail like a drunken Pat O'Brien).
Given that the House Committee on Energy & Commerce has done little to stop Big Oil from buttf*cking us, it is more than certain that they will allow Big Telecom to do the same.
Big Telecom's arguments for wanting to make the Internet it's b*tch.
First, they tell us that they "want to provide more services to consumers" and "are woking hard to bring it to consumers." For those who were not born yesterday, this is BS. The telecom industry generally says these things because they are also trying to take over the entire cable industry, not just part of it which they already own. They don't want a slice of pie, they want to whole thing.
Secondly, they tell us that they "want to help the government apprehend online predators". It sounds like a noble objective, but what Big Telecom doesn't tell the goverment is that this goal is at the bottom of thier list of things to do, which probably looks like this:
When I was in the kindergarden and first grade, AT&T and some energy gave the school these fliers to pass out to children to teach children about energy conservation and tell children about some of the technology that is out there that AT&T used to help others especially the disabled and the deaf. In retrospect, this is nothing more than corporate propoganda. If you have children who come home with this sort of materal, file a complaint against the school board for allowing major corporations to sell out your children!
Generally, Big Telecom does not report any records of predators who work for Big Telecom. They also won't report anyone who works for any government agency in order to influence the government, at the right price no less. They will also hide any evidence that they themselves are engaging in these illict acts. Industries often use altrusism to coverup any corruption they are currently engaging in (see Big Tobacco).
Finaly, Big telecom also tells us that they "want to pr
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
I really can't tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing. We can agree that it's bad if the telcos achieve a monopoly. But does this laissez faire move on Congress' part help, hinder, or neither? If the markets work, then I feel hands off is best. I think the markets are working currently. Even that Whitacre character of SBC has conceded that forcing discriminatory service on customers would be economic suicide.
If the market doesn't work, then it seems to me Congress' best move is whatever is required to allow the market to function. It may be as simple as a requiring a little daylight, so the telcos cannot hide things and customers can inform themselves. That's how sales tax is done in the US on everything except gas. A store must mark items with the price _before_ taxes are added, so that when we get to the cash register, we see exactly how heavily we are being taxed. A bad law has many edges and unintended consequences. Think "chilling effects". It would be the height of irony if we passed a law intended to preserve net neutrality, but which had the opposite effect by perhaps unwittingly raising the barriers so high there is no competition because only the biggest can afford to comply with all the regulations. Think SOX.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"