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Small Cable Groups Seek To Break Net Neutrality
saikou writes "CNet's News.com has a story on the first cable companies openly going against Net Neutrality. As usual, request for equal treatment is labeled as 'special favors', and Google is used as an example of company that should pay for a fast connection to the end user." From the article: "'I think what the phone industry's saying and what we're saying is we've made an investment, and I don't think the government should be coming and telling us how we can work that infrastructure, simple as that,' Commisso said during a panel discussion about issues faced by companies like his, adding, 'Why don't they go and tell the oil companies what they should charge for their damn gas?'"
Google, et al. already pay for their bandwidth! This is just extortion to get their traffic in a higher priority QoS queue.
Trolling is a art,
> Why don't they go and tell the oil companies what they should charge for their damn gas?'
Because the citizens paid for the telecom infrastructure.
Butt out, government, and stop regulating our industry (except when we want you to prevent people from building their own infrastructures, like community- and municipality-based WiFi networks.)
--When you buy proprietary software, you don't get better software. What you get is the right to complain about it.
OK, here's a question.
Let's suppose I order a cool Rubik Cube from eBay and they send it to me thru UPS.
Me = Client
ebay = Server
Rubik cube = data packet
Highway = Internet lines.
Of course, I'm asked for the money to pay the shipping and handling, right?
Right.
So why TF should ebay (or actually the original owner) have to pay for shipping and handling, TOO?
The oil companies aren't charging different prices for what type of car/truck you drive or where it's being driven to or from. The oil companies charge by grade of gasoline, just as the cable and phone companies already charge for broadband tiers (speeds).
I pay for Cable Company X to give me internet access, now they start slowing my access to Google, unless Google pays their higher fees. Am I not, as the user, getting screwed for my choice of Cable Company X? Now I get slowed access to the best search engine, and or other big sites (like Amazon, for example). Even if the cable companies paid for the infrastructue, am I, the user, not paying for the use of that structure? I sure won't be happy about paying for a deliberately slowed connection to my favorite sites.
Wireless mesh would really be the the communication dream come true. If we could just get an inexpensive highspeed 10km non-line-of-sight nodes....
:T:R:A:N:S:
we've made an investment, and I don't think the government should be coming and telling us how we can work that infrastructure, simple as that
Of course. And making the investment means you own the results. If the public wanted a say in the Internet, then they should have come up with the investment money to make it possible, instead of leaving it to the private sector.
Oh, wait.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sure.... the phone and cable companies put a lot of money into installing their lines and normally I'd say they should be free to do whatever they like with them. However, lets look where most of these lines are. Do the phone and cable companies own all of the land where their lines run? Hell no! They got an easements from the government and that gives the government some say in how these lines are used. If the cable and phone companies don't like that they can damn well buy all of the bloody land that their lines run through!
I'm waiting for my ISP (currently, BellSouth) to do this. I will take all of my business Net service (a decent amount... a lot more than a residential service) elsewhere. All it's going to take to kill this is for people to be aware, and for people to be willing to vote with their wallets. I know that I am. I'm even willing to pay more.
Welcome to capitalism. The government doesn't have the right to tell companies how to practice their business. The argument dismissing common carrier status went out the window when the government decided they had the right to phone tap anyone without any authorisation.
Common Carriers were supposed to be content agnostic -- meaning that all content (phone calls, faxes, anything passing over the phone line) would be treated equally and the contents would not be examined by the carrier. To deviate from this standard would mean that the carriers were responsible for the content carried by their network, including incriminating evidence that would make the carrier legally liable. The common carrier status protects the carrier as much as the individual subscribers.
But now with the willy-nilly wire taps, and complete lack of accountability in the government, carriers now believe they can do what they like with traffic on their networks and still not be accountable. And who would blame them for believing this?
So now you have carriers who feel like they control not only the networks but also the content on those networks in a responsibility free environment, and they will do what all corporations do: grab for da money. Why not charge extra for "premium" (read: basic utilities of the net) services? Sure, it's immoral. But it's also a capitalist society. We all know that the people who can afford broadband can also afford an extra 10$/mo to access stuff they used to access for free. And they're only there to feed the corporate beast anyway.
I can't fault these people for wanting to make more money. But if they think they can have their cake and eat it too, then they will be facing lots of lawsuits from individuals who's children have been exposed to goatse.cx because those same carriers (now content providers) didn't filter their content. The circle of life continues.
-Kurt
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
The government (DARPA) invented the internet--using public funds.
Federal law protects common carriers. In exchange for that legal protection, the public has every right to require "net neutrality." If the communications companies want to run their networks their own way, then they must give up all the legal protections they currently enjoy. They must become directly and fully responsible for the content of every message sent accross their networks. The RIAA is drooling.
Cthulhu for President! Why settle for the lesser evil?
Actually, they do tell oil companies how much to charge for gas: "whatever you change the other guy". Filling in lawn mower and Ford Ranger costs the same, per galon. You end up paying more for the Ranger, because it uses more. So I see nothing wrong with the government telling cable and phone companies the same thing, they can charge whatever they want per mmegabyte whether it's Google or C-list blog.
I work for a small cable company, and I'd get skinned alive by my customers if I aggressively lowered the QoS of google et al. That said, I don't understand what this whole debate is about. It's only the peer-to-peer and big-file-http traffic that causes any sort of spike in our traffic. If we were to charge Google for their traffic, it wouldn't amount to anything next to, say, iFilm/YouTube/planet(quake/halflife/etc) or local companies' ftpds and httpds that their employees connect to from home. Presumably the former couldn't pay for a reliable connection, and assuredly the latter would jump ship.
Anyone who actually implements anything other than net neutrality is shooting themselves in the foot.
Someone needs to just come right out and say it. The telcos and cable providers want it both ways. They want their customers to keep right on paying for service, and they want Internet sites/businesses to reach those customers.
In other words, they want to sell the bandwidth that their customers already pay for twice, once to the customer and one to the sites that the customer visits.
They want to sell you as a "product" to vendors, and they want you to pay for the privilige of being sold.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Content providers are already paying for some level of bandwidth on their end.
Consumers are already paying for some level of bandwidth on their end.
Bandwidth purchasers should be able to use what they are paying for - period.
If the pipeline owners are not making enough money because people are using what they are paying for, then they need to raise their prices.
I don't have a problem with different tiers of service offerings. I have this already at home - there are two or three levels of speed I could pay my ISP for. I imagine Google has similar options.
The inconsistency here is that the pipeline owners charge for tiers of service, but they don't guarantee any level of service - it's "best effort". If they want to start charging for specific levels of service and holding people's feet to the fire, then it better go both ways. If I'm paying for the "gold" level of service I better get it.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
There are two groups to look at here.
a) End point service providers. This is your cable company, or your local baby bell. They get data from a backbone out to your house. They also get some business data on there too.
b) The serious infrastructure builders. These are the AT&T, MCI, etc companies (some of which are affiliated or have business operations in group A as well) Who spend lots of money to build out fiber lines and other things which are not part of the common carrier network but instead are backbone links which to some degree string together the internet.
Group B has put tons of cash into making the internet BBF (bigger better faster). At this point they are wanting to do what all companies do and maximize the return for their shareholders. None of them are talking about making it impossible to get to google, or wherever. What they are wanting to do is offer higher speed traffic paths to these large companies for a premium.
To correct one of the bad previous analogies...
I order a pizza. I have a choice between Pepperoni Hut and Pizza Schmizza.
I can order from either for the same price, but I know Pepperoni Hut gets the pizza to me faster.
Why? Because Pepperoni Hut gives it's driver $.50 to take the tollway and lop 5 minutes off the drive time.
Who will I consistently choose for my pizza services?
End result Pepperoni Hut takes a hit on profit margins to provide faster services. Or I pay $.50 more for hotter fresher pizza.
As I was mentioning to my liberal arch-nemesis here at my place of employment on the same debate. When the internet started growing (thank Al Gore of course) it did so because of e-commerce, it did so because companies started investing in it. Before that point you had two groups financing the internet, the military and colleges (think back to Milnet/Arapanet days) and neither of them had any distinct desire to make money off the business world. At that point (Companies investing) the liberal college Birkenstock and long hair hippie net crowd sold a piece of their souls to the corporate machine (The military machine kept on chugging along and didn't care as long as they stayed out of the military networks...)
Hear that at the door? It's the corporate machine knocking.. something about collecting a debt.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
If the ISPs get to decide what to do with "their" infrastructure even if it was originally paid for by taxes, then we should get to decide what to do with our property, even if it's on the "right of way"!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I'm waiting for my ISP (currently, BellSouth) to do this.
Don't wait for it, let them know beforehand.
Tell them *WHY* you think that double-dipping is wrong.
What more is there to this?
Billions of dollars a year in extortion--I mean, revenue--for the telecommunications companies?
That's really all there is to it. They've figured out that they can't maintain the sort of growth that they've had over the past decade or so (because there's nowhere to expand to), so now they're trying to figure out ways to squeeze more money out of their existing customers. Because even if you don't realize it, everyone using the Internet is an indirect customer of the backbone providers. You pay your ISP, your ISP maybe pays another ISP, that ISP pays for a connection to the backbone. They get their tithe, it just goes via your local provider first.
And there's really no way to rake in the dough like making people pay for something twice. Here's what the backbone providers want: the source of the packets pays for access (a portion of which makes its way up the chain to them), the destination of the packets pays for access (also trickles up to them), and the source and the destination both pay directly for increased QoS if they don't want said packets to spend a few seconds in the purgatorial "low-rent buffer" on their way across the network.
It's just a protection racket, but without any of that messy kneecap-smashing business.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I rest my case.
These cable companies are being a bit shortsighted. This greed is going to come back to bite them in the ass. If they give up their Net Neutrality, all of the sudden they are going to have a responsibility for the traffic that goes across their network. This means the MPAA and RIAA will be lining up to sue them, they will have to put a stop to 'pirate' traffic and customers will leave them in droves. Many of the people I know only pay for high speed Internet because of 'illegal' activities.
Parents will start suing because little Johnny was looking at porn, terrorist victims will be suing because al-qaeda used the network, joe six-pack will sue because he got screwed on the time machine he bought on ebay, Grandma Johnson will sue because she sent all her money to Nigeria.
People do a lot of stupid stuff on the Internet. Giving up Common Carrier status could very well result in ISP's losing immunity for third party content and open Pandora's Box.
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We live in a political era where you have to show you are electable. "Electable" means being willin to say anything to win, and to say it in a way that shows no twinge of self-consciousness, much less shame. Politicians that show any kind of discomfort when lying and posturing are considered "stiff".
In other words if you don't show sufficient hypocrisy, you aren't considered credible.
We don't want visionaries, we want politicians who talk about how they have a vision. Actual vision is a sure route to ridicule. Mike Royko labelled Jerry Brown "Governor Moonbeam" because given California's size and propensity for natural disasers, Brown thought the state should have its own emergency communication satellite. In 1978 the idea was visionary, which in political terms equals "kook". Twenty years later it was reality.
Al Gore saw the potential of allowing the Internet to become a piece of national infrastructure for commerce, not just some obscure academic/military network. That took vision. Therefore, it's sure proof that politically speaking he's a kook.
No we don't want actual visionaries in office, any more than we want actual conservatives or actual religious people or actual war heroes. Content distracts the label on the box. No, what we want politicians who are resolute in their rhetoric but biddable to the will of their masters.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We should be talking about Pipes, not oil. IIRC, common carrier rules apply to the owners of pipes; they have to be neutral about who is allowed to buy for oil-width. If internet access had been defined as what it is -- a *communications medium, rather than an "information service" -- the same carrier rules would already apply to it. I think net neutrality people should focus their efforts on that. If it is an "information service" you would expect service's provider to be the source of the information I obtain through it. It is not that; when my sister sends me email she is the provider of whatever information is in it.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
So, what we have here is a big fat pity party where everyone and their grab ass brother is trying to get into the "screw the end user" game so they can make more money? Wow, they're all turning into the RIAA and the petroleum companies!
Yes. That's pretty much it. I think your oil company analogies are fundamentally flawed, as are all analogies drawn between electronic content distribution and distribution of a physical good: although oil is controlled in large part by a cartel, at the end of the day it is a nonrenewable resource. "Content" is not; I can copy Disney's Fantasia and give it to as many people as I want, and when I'm done, we all still have it. It's tough doing that with gasoline (though don't we all wish). Basically, DRM tries to make physical-goods distribution models work with strings of numbers, with mixed results. Or alternately, even if Disney decides to take their ball and go home, it's not as if "content" is in short supply, or is in any way a limited resource -- in fact, I would argue that the supply of content always exactly equals demand, no more and no less. People make content basically out of thin air when there is sufficent demand, and don't make it when there's not. The distribution companies have tried to create and perpetuate an artifical scarcity in order to maintain demand, and it's not working very well.
But this is all sort of unrelated to the issue at hand (tiered internet). The point here is simply one where the backbone providers and telcos/ISPs have turned loose a few MBAs to try and figure out how to increase revenue. Their solution is, in the absence of real competition, to try and extort people into paying for the same thing (transfer of bits from point A to B in a timely manner) two or three times. On the receiving end (direct payment to the end-user's ISP), the transmitting end (via however Google/Yahoo/etc. pays the bills, i.e. advertising), and in transit (by twisting Google's or the end-user's arm for increased QoS).
From a dirty business standpoint, it's like they took a look at the business model of the RIAA's member companies and decided they'd try to take it to a whole new level.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."