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."

Comments

Bandwidth is already paid for

[rueger]

"...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?

Re:Bandwidth is already paid for

[eyrieowl]

Amen. I got some nasty responses to a similar comment I made on a net-neutrality post on digg. We pay for bandwidth consumed. In fact, most of us, the VAST majority of internet users, pay for MORE bandwidth than we actually consume. Now, I'm sure that the prices reflect that to some extent, but, there is no escaping the fundamental fact that this whole debate is not about fairness, it is simply about greed. I have not heard anything remotely convincing that the network providers are *losing* money...if they were, they would be sure to charge the users more money. But they aren't, and this isn't about them needing to rescue their business model somehow. It would be a terrible thing if *any* societal infrastructure were made non-neutral. There is no way that this would benefit consumers, it would ONLY benefit corporations.

Another one that speaks in a field with no clue

[unity100]

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.

Will it play this way?

[GPLDAN]

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.

My prediction

[bunions]

is that gradually the internet will become TV. ISPs already provide massively asymmetric connection with far higher down than up speeds. The EULAs already prohibit you from serving content - eventually someone'll start enforcing that. They'll start refusing to relay traffic that might expose them to liability, such as p2p networks and usenet.

I also predict a return to BBS-like behavior based on wireless mesh networks, but that's another post.

If this comes to pass, you all owe me a dollar.