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The Future of the Internet
bariswheel writes "An important piece written by a Columbia Law professor addresses sensitive questions about the future of the Internet: "Is it a problem if the gatekeepers (i.e. a duopoly of the local phone and cable companies) discriminate between favored and disfavored uses of the Internet? How would you take it if AT&T makes it slower and harder to reach Gmail and quicker and easier to reach Yahoo! mail? What if I-95 announced an exclusive deal with General Motors to provide a special "rush-hour" lane for GM cars only? Is there something special about "carriers" and infrastructure--roads, canals, electric grids, trains, the Internet--that mandates special treatment? Should content providers like Google, or subscribers like us, pay for the bandwidth consumed?" Here's hoping that sites like Google Techtalks and Channel 9 remain 'free' and available for the next 10 years."
"...Should content providers like Google, or subscribers like us, pay for the bandwidth consumed?""
Again, both consumers, via the monthly charges to their ISP, and Google, via the presumably large charges from whoever provides their bandwidth, are already paying for bandwidth consumed.
Why do people keep repeating this absurd claim?
Three Squirrels
Just another persona totally irrelevant to internet and speaks on things he has no clue about.
Can you imagine what would happen if such things, filtering, seperate pricing, access procedures etc should be done, with hundreds of thousands sites erected each day, maybe 20 thousand and more isps active around the world, hordes of networks, satellite and telecom operators, datacenters ?
The result would be an INFINITE and ever increasing number of protocols, prices, agreements, disagreements, filters, etc and stuff !!!
How much cpu power would the operators need to determine what goes to where and what goes not if such mess was introduced ? Google would have to erect a new server farm to process 'filters', and it would be one that is comparable to the one it uses for search processing.
'Pay for bandwith' my arse. The profits from bandwidth would go to maintaining endless server farms all around the world to process access limitations.
I repeat : people should not be allowed to propose laws in an area they have no expertise, training or experience in.
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"What if I-95 announced an exclusive deal with General Motors to provide a special "rush-hour" lane for GM cars only?"
GM doesnt pay for the roads. Taxpayers do. Now if GM went a built a series of roads with their money and only allowed their cars to use those roads, would you object?
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Do this: Traceroute to your favorite sites. Understand that traceroute is no longer the tool it once was, ICMP ttl-exceeded messages are not always handled, and you aren't seeing things like paths over MPLS where there are tags that created switched paths across the net. But... it's the best thing the end user has, unless your broadband provider or ISP disallows it.
On average, how many carriers did you cross? What would happen if a carrier started using Class-Based Queueing techniques just across their sections? What if they started creating tariffs, quotas, import fees of classified "bulk traffic', or started using the differentiated services model at internet peering points? I'm not talking about rate-queues and other things that guys on NANOG routinely do now, I'm talking about corporate sponsored refusal to carry types of traffic.
A complex system of MPLS paths based on traffic types would result, BGP tags would get processed to have implied meanings (i.e. AT&T won't carry my SMTP messages unless they are destined for email servers in the AT&T network) and on the whole, it would get pretty messy.
Now, the economic result of this would be that carriers would set up trade barriers to each other, not unlike nations do. And the net-net would be... market consolidation. How could it not? The small ISPs and regional carriers would eventually fall prey to larger groups who would create mutually beneficial arrangements to carry traffic and create cartels to approach the major websites, esp. the search engines, and demand that they pay up. Google would need to pay into formed groups like "the Consolodated Tier-1 providers of North America" to allow broadband users to reach Google services.
The end result would be the fragmentation of the internet. Large parts of it would be unreachable from certain parts of the world. And that's over and above national firewalls like the Chinese have, this wouldn't be censorship - this would just be business. The board at AT&T now has the technology to really implement differentiation, and now they want to use it. To make money, at the expense of content providers and value-add information sites. I don't see how that is a good thing.
"GM doesnt pay for the roads. Taxpayers do. Now if GM went a built a series of roads with their money and only allowed their cars to use those roads, would you object?"
Now, if GM paid for the roads themselves out of monies earned via a legally granted monopoly, say, that only GM cars are allowed to be driven in the region, would you object?
If the roads were partially funded by a special assessment on all drivers of GM cars, regardless of whether they choose to use those roads, would you object?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I pay my ISP to provide me with a connection to the internet.
Google pays their ISP to provide them with a connection to the internet.
Why exactly should either ISP be allowed to charge extra for me to connect to Google?
Look at it this way: If I pay for a 3 Mb connection and Google can deliver a 3 Mb downstream, I expect my ISP to allow that. Otherwise, I am NOT getting what I pay for. So basically what a number of ISPs want to do is promise their customers a connection which they will not deliver unless a given website *also* pays for their customers to get that connection.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
It seems like there are suddenly a lot of lawyers writing about the future of the Internet. So we've gone from ambulance chasing to Internet chasing? I can see the commercial now: Have you been the victim of an Internet crime? Spamming? Identity Theft? Bad romance from Match.com? The law office of Swindle, Swipe, and Obfuscate are here to help!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Should content providers like Google, or subscribers like us, pay for the bandwidth consumed?
Both of us already pay for our connection. I pay $45+tax+fees+basic_cable per month for a decently fat pipe coming into my house. Google pays something I don't even want to imagine for the bandwidth it consumes - and that includes the bandwidth for which I also paid to connect to Google.
But now the telecoms have said they want even more??? Greedy bastards we should do away with, for certain. But do we need to worry about non-net-neutrality?
Everyone talks about "imagine carrier-X favoring MSN over Google"... But Google already pays for a guaranteed bandwidth. My connection at work pays for a guaranteed bandwidth. Although I currently pay for peak bandwidth rather than guaranteed on my home connection, watch how fast consumers drop ISPs that throttle them for reasons unrelated to congestion. "But I can stream HD video from MSN? Great, fuck you too, I don't use MSN, cancel my account!"
So this leaves AT&T with three options - breach of contract with their "supply-side" customers, or loss of constomers on the "consumer-side". Wait, I said "three", didn't I? Yep - They have one other choice. They already need to provide a certain level of service to Google and to Joe Sixpack. But they have the option of making MSN faster than the competition. Whether they do that as anticompetitive price-cuts for higher bandwidth or as network infrastructure upgrades, both would tend to drive prices down and quality up. End result, they lose their own bone barking at the dog in the stream.
To qualify to use an HOV lane, you must have the requisite number of people in your car. You're given entitlement to use this lane because you are trying to help reduce congestion, help save gas, help reduce pollution, etc. There's no extra charge and no vendor lock in. It works mostly because many people would rather get to work fast, even if it means sharing their car with others.
It's not at all a parallel situation with what AT&T wants to do. Your analogy may call attention to the one value of tiered interenet, but completely ignores that they way in which a greedy monopoly will use it as a weapon to lock down consumers. The government, the only authority for HOV lanes, may be a useless bureacracy but we can control the proliferation and governance of HOV lanes easily with our votes and angry protests. We have absolutely no control at all over AT&T...unless we want to live without a phone or internet.
There's a huge difference between blocking specific protocols and blocking specific content providers. Bittorrent and Google are as similar as apples and red.
Market forces can't balance the problem. It's a matter of civil liberties. Perhaps you could cast your vote for a Pirate Party of some sort.
TANSTAAFL.
As I see it there are three big "supply and demand" things on the net:
connectivity, high-transmission-speed, and low-latency.
Connectivity is a no brainer - that's maintenance on the wire going to your house, the cost of billing you, etc. etc.
Transmission speed is easy to understand also: The "pipes" just aren't big enough to let everyone max out their connection all at once. If everyone got on their high-speed connection and started downloading stuff at the same time, things will slow down. This provides an opportunity for the pipe-owners to say "if you want more megabits per minute when it's congested, ante up."
Latency is guarenteed delivery of a particular packet. This also gives the pipe owners an opportunity to say "if you want to guarentee that x% of your bits to go through within t milliseconds, ante up."
The question is who pays - the source, the destination, the person who initiated the conversation, a third party such as an advertiser, or some combination of the above?
The default alternative is a "non-preferred" internet, where everyone suffers equally during times of congestion and services which depend on low-latency like VoIP are forced to either compensate by sending extra bits, thereby making the congestion worse, or services such as VoIP become unusable. Imagine that during your next 911 call.
Another alternative, one favored by the egalitarians, is that bits that need low latency will be tagged as such and given priority over those that aren't. This works as long as everyone respects the priority scheme and as long as the high-priority packets aren't themselves the cause of congestion. Imagine a future September 11, where everone logs on to watch streaming-video newscasts while at the same time using VoIP to call their friends, neighbors, and employers. All the sudden, the high-priority bits are themselves the cause of the congestion, and the TV gets jittery and the audio becomes unusuable for everyone. With a pay scheme, those customers or providers who have, by paying more into the system, declared themselves to be high-priority will continue to funciton while those that don't will be effectively shut off. Of course, emergency services like VoIP calls to 911, will by law get the highest priority and will not have to pay to avoid congestion-related outages.
Personally, I think the egalitarian system works well enough most of the time and it avoids the greed/power/0wnership factor of the pay scheme that it's the best bet for most societies. However, I fear that the greed factor will dominate and within 5 years you will see large-scale pay-for-play for guarenteed-low-latency applications.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Then how will I download the latest version of Ubuntu?
Meh.
Back in the day when AOL was around (after the BBS died out 1996-2001) you could basically dial into anyone in the nation. I would call this the era of the Mom and Pop Isp. Any person with a T1 could make their own dial up service.
There would be many competitors in your area and if you didn't mind long distance charges you could literally pick any of the thousands mom and pop ISPs anywhere in the nation.
But with Broad band... All those places died out... The telco's and cable companies took over and the only way you could get broad band was to choose between two groups who aren't really competing against each other as much as the mom and pop's were.
So the service quality is down and prices stay high with the new cartels.
If only technology would allow the Mom and Pop ISP days, we'd be better off.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Your analogy utterly fails to acknowlege reality.
To use the same terms as your analogy:
1: The Internet *was* an ocean that ISP's sold boating subscriptions
2: The ocean contains wealth the ISP's have yet to harvest. That wealth will be extracted by turning the ocean into lakes. Inside each ISP's lake they will sell you the "right" to visit other lakes and see/use other features in the lake. This is the natural outcome of privitazation and "market-based" services.
The other sh*tpipe into your home, cable/satellite TV is the proven model. The "internet" that you have grown familiar with, is but a distant memory.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
From the Bell Sympatico acceptable use policy.
The wonderful peer to peer Internet is under attack from many directions; commercial service discrimination is just one - and IMHO, it would be more like the power company deciding how much (if any) juice and of what quality they'll supply, depending on who manufactured my toaster, kettle, TV etc. than the KFC/Pepsi analogy given by Wu.
John Walker describes other, related threats here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimat ur/
So, it's basically taxpayer-funded one way or another. All infrastructure is.
My book, podcast
Already we have toll roads. We have examples of where special lanes are set aside for people who are willing to pay more for better service. So how is complaining about internet providers doing the same different?
Simple. By paying $49.95/month for Road Runner rather than $9.99 for Blue Frog, I am already paying a $40/month "toll" to use the fast lane. I've paid for it, now fork it over.
As for paying a "tiered" toll, I'm already there. I picked the middle tier. I get half the bandwidth for $29.95, or double for some other price ($89.95, I think?).
But none of this, nor your toll road system, exacts a penalty for what I might choose to call my destination.
www.wavefront-av.com
Comparing degradation to an Interstate is the wrong way to go. AT&T is not a government entity.
What we should be focusing on:
- Bandwidth is already paid for. The consumer and producer pay their respective Internet Service Providers. This has already been discussed above.
- AT&T (and other telephone companies) get tax breaks, tax incentives, and right-of-way because they are common-carrier and a utility. If AT&T wants to start degrading service to individuals unless a fee is paid, then AT&T should lose all its perqs granted by government. They no longer are willing to provide service to everyone, only a select few. Getting tax breaks and right-of-way on top of charging an extra fee is just fleecing the taxpayer -- the perqs are no longer necessary. The subsidies should stop, and the playing field levelled.
What will happen (network-wise) eventually:
Level3 (and all the other non-telephone companies) will stop peering with AT&T networks because there will no longer be any benefit to Level3. AT&T will soon be isolated, unless they stop degradation.
To all those who don't understand network peering, it is essentially a *free* service large networks undertake to exchange traffic. Of course, this only works when both sides benefit somewhat equally. When Level3 starts taking on extra traffic from AT&T customers and AT&T is taking on less traffic from Level3, do you think Level3 will not care? Of course they will.
Soon, we'll see the Bells' networks turn into notworks. And the Internet will chug right along without them.
The EULAs already prohibit you from serving content - eventually someone'll start enforcing that.
Actually in my experience, it's been just the opposite. Enforcement of restrictions on servers have become more lax, not more strict.
They'll start refusing to relay traffic that might expose them to liability, such as p2p networks and usenet.
This is unlikely to happen in the near future. A large number of broadband customers have a connection just for p2p networks. The minute an ISP cuts p2p users off that customer is going to look for someone else.
The Internet may turn into TV, but with one big difference. I can host a website for a ridiculously small fee, that can't be done with TV. There is no reason to crack down on customers with servers because nobody runs their own sever, it's too cheap to let someone else maintain the hardware/software for $5/month.
This is a good discussion to have, but I don't think any of it will ever happen for one reason. Bandwidth is too cheap. Technology and Infrastructure has improved to the point where broadband access via cable, DSL, wifi, microwave, satellite or traditional T1 is available in most locations. The telcos are attempting to create a false scarcity. The networks aren't overloaded and there's no reason to think the technology can't keep up with further adoption. This means that even if some providers do start charging for premium access to some sites, it won't last. The competition will always be able to undercut them because the bandwidth isn't a real limiting factor.
My prediction is the idio telcos will get some law passed, lose the common carrier status and then find out the their proposed revenue model doesn't work.
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And what difference is that?
Blocking is blocking. Period. When you start saying "well, in this case, blocking is OK", then you open up the door to what we have in front of us. It doesn't matter whether its a site, a port, or a specific protocol. In all of those cases, the ISP has inserted themselves between you and your endpoint site/host so they can make decisions for you as to what does and does not get passed between you and the other party.
One could certainly argue that there are real positive uses of this model -- like closing port 25 on residential IP's -- but by doing this, don't forget that you give the ISP's a slippery slope that they can travel down. The way IP is designed, I should be able to get a packet of content (ANY content) from point A to point B, as long as both of those points exist. The travel route and the content of the package are irrelevant.
That's it. That's the internet in a nutshell. Anything that is done between point A and point B (filtering, spoofing, blocking, whatever), is by nature, altering the transmission. So if you want to block, fine, but don't call it the INTERnet. Call it a "bunch of networks that might be able to talk to each other, if allowed"
We know that every single packet from every single customer CAN be inspected and approved or denied by anyone in the middle of point A and point B. The question is: Are we, as a society, going to allow our Internet Providers to selectively choose what can and can not be sent between the endpoints?
(I didn't mean to but I think I just gave a resounding support post for net-neutrality.)
If there are enough ISPs available to you that you are able to make that choice, then great. For a lot of people, however, there are only a few broadband ISPs available in their area. Those people will may be able to "choose an ISP with a different business model". If a sufficiently large amount of people are in that sort of situation (and I submit that they are, or could be in the near future), then allowing the ISPs to pick and choose which web sites get "preferred" access and which don't means that those ISPs could then act as a chokepoint between producers and consumers. The fear is that then the Internet would end up like cable television: a few hundred "channels" to choose from, and if you want to start a viable web site, you'll need a few hundred thousand dollars to do it, because you'll have to pay $$$ to the ISPs to "carry" you.
Needless to say, most people would prefer the Internet to work the way it does now. Producers and consumers should should pay $X per unit of data transferred, regardless of where that data is coming from or going to.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The telecoms love to play this off as a Regulation vs Non-Regulation issue but they don't really care about that; they just want what's best for them.
The telecoms don't want regulation when it comes to Net Neutrality but as soon as a town says they want to run a municipal WiFi then they run straight to their State or Federal lobbyist to push for regulation against muni-WiFi's
Don't be dragged into a Free Market vs. Too Much Regulation argument. The telecom's don't care about that and you shouldn't either. These issues are purely about what's best for the future of the internet.
-- Tom
The direction of slant is not nearly as important as the degree of slant. NPR and the BBC are not dead center on all things all the time, but they are close enough to piss people off on both sides of an issue. However, when was the last time someone on the far right got pissed off at FOX?
This is why people make fun of fox we know all news has some bias but FOX is so far from center it's basically propaganda.