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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.
Read radical news here
"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.
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.
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
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.)