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Hardware Firms Go Against Crowd on Net Neutrality
An anonymous reader writes "Some of the largest hardware firms in the world, like Cisco and 3M, have sent a letter to U.S. policymakers asking them not to be too hasty on mandated net neutrality laws." From the News.com article: "'It is premature to attempt to enact some sort of network neutrality principles into law now,' says the letter, which was signed by 34 companies and sent to House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. 'Legislating in the absence of real understanding of the issue risks both solving the wrong problem and hobbling the rapidly developing new technologies and business models of the Internet with rigid, potentially stultifying rules.'"
I personally believe that the government has no business regulating net neutrality. The government will be lobbied to the point where the bill actually does more damage than having a law in the first place.
If you need proof of this just look at the anti-spam laws around the world that safe-guard "e-marketing".
I actually suspect that this is going to go away by itself. Who is going to pay for this service? Imagine Google's reply to this: "You're going to make my traffic slower if I don't pay this fee? Well fuck you very much! In fact, I'm going to go to a new bandwidth provider who doesn't try to extort me.
I doubt the PHB's have done the maths on this either. History is a great teacher, perhaps they should pick up a history book. Back in England in the 19th century the price of sending a letter was calculated depending on how far it has to go. Somebody realised that the cost of calculating the tariff actually costed the mail company more than extra profit they were trying to make. They introduced a flat fee and improved profits overnight.
Ask yourselves this, how much is going to cost ISPs to administer this monstrosity? Suppose Google's homepage has to traverse 5 networks to go to my PC. How is Google's fee going to be split across these networks? That sounds like a big fucking pain in the arse to me. How many accountant's salaries am I going to have to pay to remit these funds? Balance this cost against how much additional profit are they are going to make. How much money can you make off bandwidth when it's literally pennies per gigabyte at these scales?
Simon
What companies will profit the most from a tiered, fee-for-QoS internet? The hardware companies which make the products to do this stuff...
Trolling is a art,
...capitalists defend other capitalists' right to profit by harming consumers.
Now sports.
Our lawmakers' real constituancy has spoken.
How does a 7-person democracy cut a pie? Into 4 pieces.
If the US wishes to regulate content within the US, then so be it. Legally, they can decide what goes on inside their borders. But the internet is a global network; regulation across national borders has never really worked. Off-shore banking, anybody? Are we going to see off-shore datacenters (aka Sealand) but on a grand scale?
If you were one of the companies selling the hardware that's necessary to create a tiered Internet, would you advise lawmakers to mandate net neutrality? I'm surprised that they don't take a clearer stand against it and only say that it's premature to discuss it at this point...
"Imagine Google's reply to this: "You're going to make my traffic slower if I don't pay this fee? Well fuck you very much! In fact, I'm going to go to a new bandwidth provider who doesn't try to extort me."
Its not the bandwidth provider they have to worry about -- its Peer Connections.
For instance, if you want to connect to the folks that are on AOL, they may mandate that if their user want to connect to your service, they want a cut. After all, it is costing them money to allow users to connect to your service.
At least this is how they see it, forgetting for the moment that the users already paid for the ability to connect to other services.
But no, its not the 'bandwidth providers' they have to worry about -- its the companies that the end users are using that are demanding the money.
Charging someone like Google, or any other company for that matter, will start a flurry of billing. Charge Google? Sure! Then Google charges back for the services the ISP subscribers use. In the end it'll still be a net wash as far as profit goes, and just a lot of wasted energy and money chasing it all down.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
At last, someone who understands exactly why Cisco, 3M, etc. would write such a letter. Mod this up!
Please don't do your job yet! Hear us out first.
'Legislating in the absence of real understanding of the issue risks both solving the wrong problem and hobbling the rapidly developing new technologies and business models of the Internet with rigid, potentially stultifying rules.'
You're all too stupid to know what to do. Let us educate you monkeys on the correct decision to make, so that we can keep doing the stuff we want to. We promise you'll come out of it looking good.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Sorry for the ignorance, what's net neutrality?
God gave Linux, the devil gave BSD, and a hacker gave Bill the MS-DOS - anonymous
"The groups say the Federal Communications Commission must be given power to regulate broadband providers that might want to do things like charging content providers extra for the privilege of faster delivery or other preferential treatment."
Preferential for those who pay more for it, as far as I can see this will just make the price of a high speed connection go even higher?
Is this the price of progress? Or should we be grateful that these companies want to completely change the system in their favour?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
So the hardware manufacturers are of course siding with the people they can't afford to displease: their customers. All aboard the Anti-Net Neutrality bandwagon!
That's what it boils down to: the people who run the infrastructure of the Internet vs the people who provide the content. So one has to wonder when it will dawn on the telecoms and their lackeys that if there's no content, who needs the Internet. Even now, at Google, plans are being set in motion... I suspect they will start to build their own network, to bypass the current providers. Scoff if you will, but their stock is still strong, they have loads of capital and they are a ubiquitous name in conjunction with the Internet. If they build a netowrk to support their systems, people will come.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
"...and hobbling the rapidly developing new technologies and business models"
So yeah, enforcing net-neutrality, or making ISPs common carriers would destroy the market for replacing all back bone routers with Cisco QoS capable routers. I fail to see how a profitable business opportunity for a hand full of companies out weighs the freedom and equality of service for all online service providers.
If the ISPs are NOT common carriers, can we sue them for transmitting child porn?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
In other words you're a "the market will solve everything". Yeah. Look at how well it worked with music.
Original Article:
"Some of the largest hardware makers in the world, including 3M, Cisco, Corning and Qualcomm, sent a letter to Congress on Wednesday firmly opposing new laws mandating Net neutrality--the concept that broadband providers must never favor some Web sites or Internet services over others."
Here's how I read this:
"Manufacturers of multi-layer traffic-shaping hardware sent a letter endorsing a business model that would require heavy deployments of multi-layer traffic-shaping hardware"
It can further be broken down:
"Money Good. No make law make us lose money."
No doubt the hardware companies have a vested interest in this and speak from a biased perspective. However, while most /. readers are well informed on such issues, most members of Congress aren't.
.xxx domain will increase porn on the internet and make it easier for kids to view porn. They can't grasp the simple concept that currently there is plenty of porn that is easy to access, and a .xxx domain will actually help filter that content away from kids.
There are the same folks who seem to believe a
Do we expect these guys to understand and make a good decision regarding the future of the internet? With that it mind, I echo this message. Don't rush into a decision. Perhaps if they take their time one of two favorable outcomes will emerge.
1 - Logic and reason will win out and good legislation will emerge.
2 - Congress will release they have no fucking clue and just leave it all alone.
I'm hoping for the latter over the former.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
When I worked at Cisco, the big plan in many of the product groups was to move the intelligence away from the edge of the network as a way to keep Cisco routers from being commoditized.
Yea Net Neutrality is something that the government shouldn't be regulating. But there's a reason the government is regulating it - the business community is unwilling to deal with the issue.
There have been a number of cases in the past where the government says "Clean up your room. If you don't clean it, we'll clean it for you and we guarantee you won't like what we do."
If Cisco and other large hardware vendors are so nervous of the government intruding on the Internet (as they should be), then they should be talking to AT&T. Once the major ISPs drop their crazy notion that they should be paid extra for something they're already doing, then the need for government intervention is eliminated.
The actual quote was:
"Legislating in the absence of a real corporate profiteering of the issue risks both solving the wrong problem and hobbling the rapidly developing profits and profit models of the Internet with rigid, potentially not-quite-as-profitible rules.'"
It makes me feel somewhat tearful. Maybe we have taken too much from the ISP's, and only paid for it at both ends of the tube.
I thought voting Republican was enough to save the little guys. Now it seems we have taken too much from the ISP's and manufacturers of networking equipment, in our haste, in our greed.
I thought I could get away with just paying my monthly service charges, and installation fees, and bandwidth excess charges but I was wrong. For years I have been trying to take something for nothing, and now we as a society have paid too high a price: only moderate profits for ISP's and Telco's......
3M and Cisco stand to make a lot of money selling routers that will handle this kind of tiered internet pricing.
Look at handsoff.org. It's a BLATANTLY obvious front for the telecoms. Well, somewhat blatantly obvious, they didn't really try to hide it because they put their logos on it. But they do make it sound more grassroots than it is. They did buy out some smaller grassroots organizations, and from what I hear some black politicians (some article on alternet.org). But don't be fooled, it is still an operation controlled by "Ma Bell".
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
The reason a legislative approach is being taken is because that is the approach the telcos are taking. Technically, if AT&T wanted to just make more money to upgrade service they could renegotiate tiering and bandwidth agreements. No legislation necessary. The thing is they don't want to make more money to upgrade service, they want to use this as an excuse to introduce tiered service. And there are legal impediments to them introducting tiered service. Tiered service is like honey for monopolies and duopolies. It reinforces the only barganing chip they really have which is to not to just say "We're your only choice." but "We might not let you on our network, and we're YOUR CUSTOMER's only choice."
Net Neutrality in my mind is comparable to forcing the Bells to allow other people to sell telephones that hooked into their network.
This is just sad. This isn't an issue where there are valid points on the other side about why it might be good to have a tiered internet. It's CEOs and CFOs against the rest of the earth, and the fact that they might win demonstrates how badly our government is put together.
Naturally, the companies that make and sell the hardware would be VERY happy to see a tiered internet. But I highly doubt that this opinion is reflected by most of the employees of the company. They are regular people who will lose-out on this just like the remaining 99% internet users. It is sad that a handful of people at the top who stand to make money on this have decided a policy.
If I worked at a company that did something like this, I would start a coup d'état and happily leave if I lost. I wonder what the buzz is within Cisco this morning?
Your translation is little different than slashdot-english, except we think everyone is a monkey. e.g. "those stupid users", "consumers are sheep".
"Please don't do your job yet! Hear us out first."
The cry of every slashdotter when the world at large doesn't go their way. e.g. "Whaaa! Don't sentence that downloader until you read slashdot first".
They want this trash because they can sell improbably expensive networking gear to starry-eyed ad executives. The fact that net neutrality -- the de facto standard until today -- brought them to this point is irrelevant.
Yes, I know they're publicly-held companies; yes, I know that their apologists will shrug and say they have to be utter bastards. Not the point.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Ask yourselves this, how much is going to cost ISPs to administer this monstrosity? Suppose Google's homepage has to traverse 5 networks to go to my PC. How is Google's fee going to be split across these networks? That sounds like a big fucking pain in the arse to me.
Actually, connecting to Google is usually easier than this, thanks to points of peering and the like. From where I am, Google is just 10 hops away, and most of these take place between my ISP and a subsidiary. The last two hops are a direct gateway to google, and the Google server itself. OK, maybe I am just in a minority here.
So, managing the costs could be a lot easier. What I'd like to see is how big ISPs are going to explain this to their customers: if google home page takes 2 minutes to load on a high-speed DSL link, a lot of people -- even non-geeks -- will start howling. If Yahoo AND Google take a long time, everyone will start researching Net Neutrality, and will demand it from their ISPs. Large companies such as Verizon and AT&T could shoot themselves in the foot with this, and find out -- the hard way -- that this was a bad idea, when they see thousands of people leave them for competitors.
I have said this before, and I'll say it again: a true "net neutral", user friendly ISP could be a very good business model for the future, if big telcos feel like enforcing this stupidity. What I'd like to see is a joint-venture between, let's say, Google, Yahoo, Amazon and other big 'net names to create that sort of company. They certainly have the money, the motivation and the technical skills to make this a roaring success. Plus, Google has bought dark fiber, and they all have experience in managing huge networks and technical infrastructure.
This being said, the rest of your example is spot-on: flat rate postal service is a good way to explain this nonsense to non-technical people.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
yeah, but they don't.
Then again, I don't think $12 is unreasonable for a CD, if all the tracks are worthwhile.
It's not a business issue, it's a freedom issue. They shouldn't have the right discriminate information flow in any way. It's just not an allowed business model period, any more than Toyata has a say where you drive your car.
Perhaps the politicians are muddling things up and need to slow down, but nuetrality must be observed in the end. Governments exist to protect us(in theory), and legislation will do that because trusting companies or the market is gambling with liberty, and unacceptable.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Well, your first sentence says it all, doesn't it?
I read three tomes by Robert A. Caro on Lyndon Johnson. At some point in time electricity company was forced to sell electricity at a lower rate, which the company strongly opposed to. The government won, and later the company had to admit that they made much more profit. This story is not to demonstrate that government always knows best, but to demonstrate that free market also doesn't always know best. Your popular belief is as wrong as the opposite. The only valid point is, look at each issue individually.
Other points not discussed in your contribution: Inertia from consumers to change provider (with all the concommitant hassle, especially now you can't take your e-mail address with you).
Another casse in point: Here in the Netherlands we have to pay for all kinds of banking services, each with their own rates. Only boring IT guys got happy because of this. I think it is completely in line with current behaviour of companies to start inventing all different kinds of things to charge for. xyz packets will be more expensive than pqr packets. You see the same thing (at least over here) with Internet over your phone. One pays megabucks per megabyte. SMS the same thing. Compared to the number of bytes required for voice it is nothing, but they are charged at a premium.
There is also the contagious nature of the behaviour. If one provider does it, and charges another provider, then the other provider has to pass on the cost, and will start doing the same. And on it goes.
I'm perfectly happy with laws that require ISPs to pass thru any packet irrespective of its type.
Sorry I just took another look at the article. I am an idiot. I also can't quite figure out how to post stuff...
You cite the cost of that, and that is a valid concern. However, consider that no one proponent of this program will face the complexity. Using your example, each of the five networks will bill Google individually. There's some billing cost, but it should scale well: only paying "clients" are billed.
The complexity you cite will be faced instead by the content providers. In your example, it is Google that must track costs and issue payments to five different connectivity providers.
And Google already sees this as a Bad Idea. So while I agree that you're presenting a real cost, it's not a cost about which the proponents of this plan are going to be concerned.
> "Imagine Google's reply to this: "You're going to make my
> traffic slower if I don't pay this fee? Well fuck you very
> much! In fact, I'm going to go to a new bandwidth provider
> who doesn't try to extort me."
You miss the point. It's not Google's bandwidth supplier that's the problem here. It's *YOUR* ISP. They say to Google: Hey - we have a million users, unless you pay us $X, they'll get 1Kbytes/second to Google and 1Mbytes/second to Yahoo. There is no "somewhere else" that Google can go to. Since the ISP's that get their funding this way will be able to charge their end users less, you'll start to see lower cost (to the consumer) ISP's popping up who get their funding from the sites they provide high bandwidth to.
Who loses? Well, anyone who uses Wikipedia for example. Will Wikipedia be able to pay the top 100 ISP's a few million dollars a year? Certainly not. So you'll find that access to Wikipedia will be dog slow from these low cost ISP's and access to "insert soul-sucking megacorporation here"'s encyclopedia will be fast...albeit advert laden.
I have a small web site of my own - people seem to like accessing it. Will they still come to it if it's uploaded at 1 character per second? No. Will I pay a dozen ISP's for the privilage of providing free information to their customers? No. Hence, all the 'little guys' who make the Internet such a rich and interesting place will *die* - and the Internet will be like cable TV - advert ridden - and showing the views of maybe 10 companies with 'ratings' and such determining what you see and content sinking to the lowest common denominator. Instead of Wikipedia we'll have soap operas.
So what a non-neutral net does is push the funding of the Internet from consumers (who demand good service to the places they happen to want to visit) to corporations (who will now be the only viable information providers). It's a VERY serious matter.
In an ideal world, consumers would realise this is a problem and refuse to buy Internet service from ISP's who don't practice net neutrality. However, because 99.999% of subscribers don't know anything about this issue, they'll choose whichever ISP is cheapest regardless of the fact that they'll be cutting themselves out of access to the more interesting places on the net.
So - is this a case for government intervention...sadly, I think it is.
This is the very same problem as with telephony where the government requires all phone companies to string expensive wires out to teeny-tiny non-profitable communities so everyone can have a phone. Without that, you would either have to pay a small fortune for a phone if you lived in a small town out in the boonies - or you wouldn't be able to get one at all. The 'universal service' provisions of the telephony act make that a fairer situation.
It's the same deal with the Internet - ISP's should be required to provide service to little web sites and big ones equally and let the consumers decide where they want to get their information from.
In the end it'll still be a net wash as far as profit goes, and just a lot of wasted energy and money chasing it all down.
Spoken like someone who's not a lawyer.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
I am sure that there are a whole stack of Business Process Patents already in the wings ready to sue every business out there because they are now using a Non-Neutral Net. Maybe I can patent using premium traffic services to do Web Searching.
They see the winds are blowing slightly in favor of the anti-net neutrality crowd, so while this letter does add their voice, at the same time it makes them seem not to be speaking from blatant self-interest. They try to act as if their voice is semi-neutral and hopefully have more credence acredited to it.
If the scales were tipping towards the net neutrality crowd they probably would have sent a stronger message. If a corporation doesn't see a great need to express a yes/no political opinion they generally don't, as they don't want to alienate any potential customers.
People like Rep. Sensenbrenner in Congress who advocate totalitarian controls over your internet use or a private business that can't legally tell you what to do except through a contract you signed with them? Quite frankly with the way that Congress is these days, I wouldn't trust them to regulate our local parking meters, let alone our section of the Internet.
As far as anti-competitive behavior, like the Madison River issue, goes, there are existing federal legal mechanisms for handling them. It's not anti-competitive for Verizon to only sell 25% of their network. It's their loss if their customers want to pay for better access, but can't get it because Verizon is reserving too much of its network for its own service.
The problem is, as always, government regulation at every level. There are enormous government-imposed costs on starting your own broadband or television service. The best way to create a competitive market is genuine deregulation, like ending all taxes and regulations on the construction and development of local private networks. All of them. Toss that spawn of satan out with the bathwater and be done with it.
Now let me ask y'all this. If Sensenbrenner gets his way, raise your hand all of you who want the government to be your ISP via municipal services. That's a straight ticket to getting no sympathy from the court when your privacy rights are screwed by the government.
I pay for my network connection.
The content providers pay for their network connection.
These connectivity companies now want to start extorting a double payment out of the content providers.
What the fuck is there NOT to understand?
If they fucked up and aren't charging true price for a network connection, that's not our fault, or the content providers'. But this is racketeering, plain and simple.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Network neutrality and Qos don't contradict each other... as long as the customer and not the content provider is paying the bill.
Each ISP can tell his customers "for extra 10$ you get priorized network access"... the market will show him if someone is willing to pay. But when they try to charge the content providers (Google, ect.) it's nothing else than an extortion.
Your reference to the fee to send mail is interesting. But the same can be said for road tolls. It almost always costs more to run toll booths than the gain in money to support the roads. The tolls actually mostly support the tolls. Yet it doesn't prevent most areas from keeping up their road tolls. It would make much more sense to drop them and use local taxes to support the roads, but in today's government logic just doesn't prevail.
Developers: We can use your help.
Then again, show me a $12 CD where all the tracks are worthwhile, from a RIAA affiliated label.
I pay that much for CD from a lot of local independant bands at their concerts, but part of the big label business model is to only allow a few good tracks on a long album. If the band records 12 outstanding tracks, the label will require them to spread those out over several different albums to maximize profit.
To get back on topic, it is the same principle here. The low bandwidth, non-interesting traffic on the net the "non" common carriers don't care about. But all of the traffic that people really like, they want a cut from as many places as they can get it. The problem is all of these top tier service providers want to retain their non-common carrier status to avoid the restrictions that are specifically enacted in law to keep them from pulling BS like this. Common carriers are restricted from charging both ends of a communication.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Imagine Google's reply to this: "You're going to make my traffic slower if I don't pay this fee? Well fuck you very much! In fact, I'm going to go to a new bandwidth provider who doesn't try to extort me.
Google isn't being extorted by their immediate provider, they're being extorted by networks that they don't have agreements with. Moving to a different upstream provider isn't going to change anything. A point you seem to have sort of figured out here: Suppose Google's homepage has to traverse 5 networks to go to my PC. How is Google's fee going to be split across these networks?
Back in England in the 19th century the price of sending a letter was calculated depending on how far it has to go. Somebody realised that the cost of calculating the tariff actually costed the mail company more than extra profit they were trying to make. ... Ask yourselves this, how much is going to cost ISPs to administer this monstrosity?
Well, we have these nifty things called computers that are really quite good at doing mathamatical calculations. In fact, they're good enough that a single machine from this company called Narus http://www.narus.com/ can monitor traffic several gigabits a second, for use in billing processes exactly like this. These machines might also have some other uses, but I wouldn't know about that.
Hell is other people
More like Metallica. ;)
"Beer good! Fire bad!"
Charge Google? Sure! Then Google charges back for the services the ISP subscribers use.
A lot of this discussion ignores how transport really works in the Internet. Having dealt with backbone issues since 1993 (ack! that's like... 200 dog years or something), let me share some perspective (apologies for length and anonymous - have a slashdot stalker/former employee who's off his meds to contend with):
How transport works
Contrary to a constant misnomer, there is not "a" backbone. There are numerous private networks operated by companies at various lower levels of the OSI model. Some own their own fiber and cable, while others lease IRUs (irrevokable right of use) - sort of like having a 15-year lease on a condo. Some have used the model Bob Collet (original senior executive of Sprintlink and CIX board chairman) was believed to have coined of "tier 1/2/3" providers. In this model, a tier 1 provider is sufficiently geographically diverse and connects to others via multilateral and more commonly (these days) bilateral connections to other tier ones. Traffic traveling between tier 1 networks is usually handled without settlement if there is not significant disparity between networks. Settlement is a nice word for fee, incidentally. Tier 2 networks are those that predominantly connect to tier 1s for their transport, and they pay the tier 1 for it. Tier 3 in the model connect to tier 2 for their transport and also pay.
Google transport
Google buys transport from several tier 1 networks. These networks have agreements with other networks to exchange traffic with each other, each bearing their own cost to get to the place where they meet up. These networks also have lots of tier 2 and 3 customers who pay them money for access since these 2 and 3 tier networks cannot afford the cost of an international high-capacity backbone which is pretty much the requirement before someone will enter into a bilateral (I'm horribly oversimplifying). Google has paid for its transport and probably has service level guarantees of traffic performance through the tier 1 networks it pays. Some DSL outfit like Verizon may buy transport from another tier 1 provider who connects to Google's tier 1 providers. If Verizon's access to Google sucks, it should get a better tier 1 or pay for its own circuits directly to Google. Seeking to charge Google for that transport is bizarre and not how things work - sort of like making rivers run backwards (which usually requires an act of Congress).
Eyeballs vs. Content
This "Google must pay Verizon for access to their eyeballs" issue isn't new. It's been fought since some first saw it rise in 1995-1996 when some NSF-connected tier ones decided to mess with PRDB (policy-routed database) routes and limit access to NSF nodes (as the NSFNET was operated by ANS under NSF contract - separate and lengthy discussion). NSF was the content of the day and a few, such as the BBN NSF regional acquisitions (e.g. NEARNET and other nonprofit networks which were acquired by the for-profit BBN and instantly pushed into a network access battles) decided to try to limit access in order to extract more fees.
BBN got hammered then, and again learned the hard way with the whole Exodus and Genuity battles. Again, one party which was mostly consumer customer oriented decided to charge the producers of content for access to those consumer eyeballs. The result was similar to the response your local cable TV outfit would get by threatening HBO that it would be dropped or relegated to one channel if it didn't pay the cable company fees for access to their eyeballs. HBO knows consumers will just switch to Dish or DirecTV. BBN learned when numerous commercial clients dropped their T1s and switched to a network that wasn't inferior in its access.
Bandwidth Hogs and QoS?
There is a real issue here, but it isn't what the consumer broadband providers are telling you. DSL and Cable Internet have numerous QoS issues, are mostly obsolete standards incapable of provid
Bandwidth providers are now just providing a path for bandwidth to travel. The source and destination of that data and type of data are not revelent. They want to add a layer of supervision to that simple service so that they can collect fees based on the content and/or source and destination of that data. Basically equivelent to adding a middle manager to a service that many would say did not need managed. This middle management is not for stability, not for accounting purposes, not for increased productivity, not for a business advantage, not for easier management, not for the advantage of either side of their customer base, and not for security. It exists for the sole purpose of extracting fees from people making more money then they are. Imagine having to pay more to make a long distance call to Google then if you called Bill's flower shop, both serviced by the same exchange. Imagine Sears having to pay the USPS more money to send third class mail then Johns hardware store. Imagine a large trucking company having to pay more per gallon for diesel fuel then you because they are larger. This is the exact opposite of the buying in bulk is cheaper way of doing business and really makes no sense at all.
The only way this system will work is if a majority of carriers join together and all start using it. Then the "users" (content providers and computer users) will have no choice but to go along. The smaller guys will get screwed and the internet as we know it will be tiered FOREVER into two groups, extremely big business and the others. This also raises the bar and makes it harder for new and up and coming businesses and causes reduced competition and innovation. Look at the state of cell phones in the US. If you are satisfied with your current cell phone provider, it is only because you are stuck in a contract or because they suck a little bit less then your previous provider.
Some of the discussion is in terms of quality of service traffic shaping versus net neutrality. But they are different things. You can implement QoS in a neutral way, for instance by treating streaming video differently than e-mail. Streaming video needs continuous throughput to work well; e-mail works just as well in sporadic packets. So setting your Cisco to treat the two differently enhances the one without cost to the other. It's, in real terms, neutral.
But if you set your Cisco to give better QoS to verizonporn.com streams, and to make the streams from qwestadult.com choppy (presumably because you're Verizon, or have been paid by them) that's not neutral.
Traffic shaping where different classes of packets are given different routing preferences should not be restricted by law - within reason it improves the Net for everyone. Traffic shaping where the origin of the packets causes them to be treated differently is not neutral, not "common carrier," and should be totally illegal.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
You are correct in stating what the potential problem is. But I have yet to see anything which makes me think that goverment intervention is needed to prevent that from happening. Market forces will keep ISPs in line. If an ISP starts throtling Wikipedia, then users will switch ISP.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
How I have explained it to non-technical people seems to work as well for me, I ask them if they would enjoy getting charged for an incoming call from the originators telco, or because they want to call a family member not on their service the service may be crappy if it even gets through. This pretty much sells them on the idea that tiered internet is dumb. For the pseudo-technical people, I just threaten their favorite site and explain that everyone is already paying for service, the major companies just want more money.
> What I'd like to see is how big ISPs are going to explain this
> to their customers: if google home page takes 2 minutes to load
> on a high-speed DSL link, a lot of people -- even non-geeks --
> will start howling.
I think you overestimate the end user and underestimate the ISP.
In this scenario, the ISP will be advertising $2 a month DSL (maybe even *free* DSL) on a tiered service. If some end-user complains that (say) Google and Yahoo are dog slow, they'll phone the ISP to complain and the answer will be "Hello, EvilISP at your service...Oh Google is slow! Well, EvilISP's 'quality search provider' is Microsoft - you'll find that if you use them for your search needs, everything will go a LOT faster! Thank you, have a nice day."...and 99% of customers will swallow it...especially because they are paying $2 a month instead of $25 a month for DSL.
You can just see the NetZero and AOL adverts now. As big ISP's they can negotiate with the big information providers ("We can deliver a million hits an hour if you pay us $X, if not, you'll lose a million hits an hour to your competitor") - that revenue will allow them to drop their end-user prices to near zero - and almost no Internet users will choose to pay $25 a month so they can access Google instead of Yahoo or Encarta instead of Wikipedia.
The real losers are the Internet sites that provide free information without adverts. They have no revenue stream and hence no way to pay the ISP's. Wikipedia will die in the face of Encarta because Microsoft will pay the ISP's to deliver customers to them and Wikipedia is a charity that cannot. Microsoft (or some other big corporation) can literally buy the online encyclopedia business - irrespective of the quality or neutrality of the service they provide.
Net neutrality is the single thing that makes the Internet interesting - without that, it's going to be just like cable TV.
I think you're greatly under estimating the consumer. The average person with decent internet access as it is has accepted that there is an X dollar amount that they must pay every month in order to maintain their connection.
For example, I pay Cox Communications each month and in return I get unlimited access to the web (well, as unlimited as my bandwidth allows). What your proposing (rather, what I'm going to pull from your comment) is that it won't be the well established companies that pioneer this method, they have too much at stake if they're the only one adopting this. It will have to be some start-up that tries to make it's way in to the market by offering low-cost high-speed internet. Now, you've got this ISP throttling some sites, and making others faster, how does this benefit the user? If I wanted to pay $9.95 a month for dog-slow internet, I'd still be using (for example) NetZero. Now what good is it to me the consumer if the only sites I can access at a decent broadband speed are "Microsoft.com" or "CNN.com", absolutely none.
Now perhaps there is a small sub-section of the general populace that would adopt this, but I think that in the end any company trying to use these tactics of moving the cost of service off of their customers on to the "content providers" will quickly realise, it ain't happening.
To coin a phrase "It just don't make sense." Also another major downfall these companies would have to look out for is just being "kicked off" the net by the major back-bone holders.
I dunno, I just see this as being more US-centric FUD, ooh the big bad companies are out to make money by "extorting" the "good guys", it's already being done, and I'm the one being extorted. Wake me up when I've got fiber to my house, a dedicated range of IPv6 addresses for every computer in my home and bandwidth that would make a script-kiddie nut himself all for less than $50 a month.
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
Not such a good analogy, since Toyota is selling you a car while ISPs are renting you bandwidth. A better analogy would be a landlord saying 'this house is cheaper than others, but you can't have pets and you must be silent after 10pm.' There is nothing wrong with this business model in the general case, because you can always go somewhere else. The problem is that ISPs are close to monopolies in their area of operation - people don't have much by way of alternatives, and the barrier to entry in the market is very high.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I connect to the internet through an ISP (ATT) who charges me different rates depending on how fast I want to go. I decide whether faster down/up load rates are worth the extra dollars to me. From ATT's perspective, I'm consuming so much of a limited resource and they're charging me for doing so.
Other than scale, how is this different than Google or Yahoo? If they want to go fast (and it's probably in their financial interest to do so), they'll pay. If they're consuming more of a limited resource, why shouldn't they pay more?
I know it's bad form to reply to one's self, but really the only "content providers" that I imagine would be willing to pay for an ISP's customers to view their message would be advertisers, and they've currently got a much cheaper alternative. spam.
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
You give the consumers too much credit. They will switch to the cheaper ISP. If they have a choice of course. If I want broadband in Seattle I basically have two choices, Comcast or Qwest. What if they both decide to throttle wikipedia?
Will the average consumer even realize that it is their ISP doing the throttling? They most likely will blame wikipedia.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
I done learnt me somethin' new today!
/me goes into cruise control for the rest of the day
The same way that if an operating system gets all buggy and filled with viruses and vulnerabilities, then the users will switch operating system...
Unfortunately, that's not going to happen either. The users will keep using what they have always been using and what they are comfortable with, and they will tolerate, even enjoy, any raping that the big corporations will shove up their butt, and then they'll demand more.
Cell phones, ISP's, operating systems, WalMarts, gas... the average customer doesn't want to make the effort to vote with its dollars.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
now, if my ISP decided they did not want to pay some company a fee to use their ultra-fast backbone that connected my ISP to the internet at say 100MBps (for sake of argument), I would not expect my ISP to offer me a connection that was 150MBps, knowing that 100MBps is the fastest I would ever see. Even if they did try to pull this off, I would be freaking pissed if I decided to pay say $100 a month for my ISP's fastest connection if I was seeing speeds that were equal to their lowest quality and cheapest connection (kind of reminds me of the Comcast cable internet i have right now...)
We don't have Net Neutrality, we haven't had it in a long time.
'Legislating in the absence of real understanding of the issue risks both solving the wrong problem and hobbling the rapidly developing new technologies and business models of the Internet with rigid, potentially stultifying rules.'
Currently a service provider can pay a fee, part of which goes to your ISP, to get prioritized access. It's called Akamai.
Even more insidious are caches. An ISP reduces its peering traffic load by caching the most popularly accessed sites. This improves incumbent site performance for the ISP's customers creating a barrier to market penetration for competitors. The ISP makes money from this by not spending the extra cost to retrieve popular data repeatedly.
Net Neutrality laws would prevent ISPs from providing support for new technologies. For example, if a new Internet only broadcast network were to attempt to establish a new distributed live videocasting service by putting distributed streaming peers hosted by the ISP, these new laws would prevent the ISP from allowing the new venture to pay a fee for this service.
I find it laughable that people is the US are suddenly so concerned about net neutrality while they have been sitting around for the past two years watching the telephone and cable systems converge into monopolies. The two problems are closely related. Even more troubling were the FCC rulings that eventually killed the small independent ISPs.
If you want true, market driven Internet service, the government is going to have to mandate the decoupling of the carrier from the ISP. Specifically I direct you to the Utopia project in Utah as documented in the May issue of the IEEE Spectrum.
There is a simple reason these hardware companies are asking Congress not to legislate net-neutrality. If telcos are allowed to charge providers for "premium" service (essentially the service we have now before they start throttling back the non-compliant), they will need extensive and expensive upgrades to their networks. Guess who they'll have to buy them from?
At the moment, the growth curve for hardware revenue has been hitting a plateau as most networks mature. Refreshment is like treading water, which is death to your stock price. Network hardware providers must be positively salivating at the prospect that telcos will buy lots of new hardware (and software) to support pay-for-delivery service.
Telcos charge us for access to content and now they want to charge content providers to send it to us. Isn't that a bit like both a car buyer and a car manufacturer paying the dealership to sell someone a car?
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
It's not an issue like that.
This is really an issue about increasing "the machine's" control over more aspects of human behavior.
There's this evil presence that wants every step you take licensed, regulated, audited, taxed, appropriate papers stamped...
As long as the boundary of acceptable human behavior remains inside this little box, it doesn't matter whether the system is efficient or not.
That's why in a few years, you'll need Monsanto's permission to grow crops... so no one is ever capable of living off the grid.
Likewise, you'll need AT&T's permission to run a website... and then all websites will fall under the auspices of stiffling corporate bureaucratic control.
"If I want broadband in Seattle I basically have two choices, Comcast or Qwest."
Lucky dog. I'm so far from the phone company that smoke signals would have more bandwidth than DSL. So it's either Comcast or a big bonfire...
Its not merely comparable, but with the increasing popularity of VoIP, it is the exact same thing.
Which is, of course, why the telcos are so eager to find any excuse to get rid of it. They've always wanted to be free to leverage their monopoly on the wires to control everything that attached to them, and every business that relied on them, which is why they were subjected to common carrier laws and broken up to prevent in the first place.
Now they're re-merging and looking for ways to render common carrier controls irrelevant; by comparison to what is being sought here, Microsoft's market distorting power was small change. The kind of dominance the colluding telcos would exercise would be more analogous to the old Standard Oil monopoly.
Oracle supports RealID. Cisco supports tiered service. This is not a surprise. Just as managing a database of every person and handling the distribution and security of that database will be a complicated and expensive task, the router burden from tiered service will mean a lot of money for Cisco. On the other hand, it probably is true that lawmakers have no idea about the technology involved. It is entirely likely we could hamstring ourselves with blind legislation. Often, many overly ambitious attempts to control traffic through routers ends up imploding because of the impracticality of complicated rule sets and associated load. I'd say this is probably more the case, and would be reluctant to put some kind of legislation in place until we understand the issues better, which is exactly what the hardware vendors are saying.
At least, theoretically speaking. Charge the end-user on a per-bandwidth-consumed basis. Voila. People who want to stream movies or torrent huge files will pay a premium. The rest of us who just web browse, check email, play networked games, and occasionally view a video clip...we pay the same (or less) than we do now. This way nobody's bandwidth is artificially limited. The only limit is how much you want to buy.
ISPs could give people an initial "bucket" of bytes in exchange for a base monthly charge. No charge until that bucket is exhausted, after which they start paying. Basically, have it work like cell phone plans. Would this be annoying? Sure, a little. Would it be more fair? Probably.
The government will be lobbied to the point where the bill actually does more damage than having a law in the first place.
If you need proof of this just look at the anti-spam laws around the world that safe-guard "e-marketing".
What kind of argument is this?
"The government will be lobbied to the point where the bill actually does more damage than having a law in the first place. If you need proof of this, just look at the laws that prohibit dumping of toxic chemicals into waterways, or the laws that prevent false advertising, or the laws that forbid discrimination in getting loans/housing/jobs."
Yes, lobbying can ultimately have a negative impact on laws. But it's ridiculous to say, "Hey, the government screws things up sometimes, so we're best off having the government do nothing, just in case they screw this up, too."
As for "pennies on the gigabyte", just how many gigabytes do you think AT&T, Sprint, Level3, and other top tier ISPs transmit and receive per day? For example, this article estimates that YouTube alone transmits 200TB of data each day, paying possibly as much as a penny per minute for this bandwidth, or in the ballpark of $1000 a day. They're currently being charged by their ISP based solely on bandwidth. But what if, say, Time Warner could take their pound of flesh, saying that since YouTube hosts video, they should pay a premium to deliver content to TW's end users (the ones, mind you, who are already paying $40 a month for Internet service)? Claiming this kind of money from the top content providers on the 'net adds up fast, and when combined with the additional incentive that the cable and phone companies have to prevent competing VoD and VoIP services from using their networks, you better believe that they'll implement whatever procedures are necessary to make it work.
Besides, your analogy to the 19th century post office doesn't stand up, either. We have this nifty invention today called the computer, which "can run things 900 to 1200 times better than any human" (and that was back in 1982). But seriously, the contract itself can be negotiated quickly - the ISPs are the ones calling the shots in most cases, so there's really not a lot of negotiation that has to happen - and the metering can all be achieved through the routing equipment.
Routing equipment which will be manufactured by companies like - guess who - "3M, Cisco, Corning and Qualcomm".
1) when does the revolution begin?
2) what form should it take?
Should it be:
The thing that makes people squeamish is that information shouldn't obey capitalistic control since it doesn't meet the analogy correctly. There is something far better that frees information and ensures those that produce it are payed appropriately. Here the only long term successful choice seems to be something like a tax system where people choose where the money goes but should have access to it all. That is, they aren't LEGALLY prevented from accessing it, sharing it, telling someone else about it, singing it, dancing it, whatever. Then tack on any sane laws addressing privacy concerns (selling med records) or claiming work is your own when it isn't, if possible.
Originally I was all for net neutrality, but now I'm thinking differently about it (not because of this story, I haven't even bothered to RTFA):
I think multiple "cloud"s (you know, the cloud that represents the Internet on your network diagrams) are the next logical step for the commercial Internet. Currently, users and content providers pay for the amount of bandwidth they desire along the "last mile", but once data goes into the "cloud" all packets are equal. Now I don't understand why the government has to do anything, but if I were a network owner, I would build a second "cloud", faster than the first, and try to charge a premium to content providers to send their info into that "cloud" instead. This seems perfectly fair to me.
Now the problem is that the "public" Internet is largely run by private companies, and if they go build this second "cloud" maybe they'll neglect the first. But probably they won't. There will still be lots of groups who won't want to pay the tolls to send their data on through "express cloud".
I don't have a problem if this is what they want to do. But, if they want to take the existing "cloud" and start partitioning it, I wouldn't want to see that. Still, I'm not sure what I would like the government to actually do on this issue; nationalization wouldn't work (or be good), and regulation makes us dependant on the current players and politicizes the whole thing.
I think that when something gets regulated, the industry tends to become more concerned with complying with the regulations to make the government happy until the next time they can convince them to give them a better regulation deal, than they are about improving service for their customers. Regulation also seems to have the strange effect of allying the companies who should be competitors and making their customers their opposition. And then we expect the government to be a neutral third party and oppose a "fair" solution.
Anyway, so I guess I'd say let backbone owners do what they like to try to improve their business in competition with each other, and let content providers and consumers keep the owners in check with their dollars. I only see a need for the government in this if someone develops a monopoly, or some sort of collution starts going on.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seus
The problem with your view is that you are not taking into account the competitiion that the new low-cost high-speed internet provider will cause. For already well-established ISP, it's a major threat, just as NetZero (when they first popped up) was to AOL. So what do you think they are going to do to compete? If you guessed that they would have to lower cost for service, which in turn means finding other avenues of revenue, ie. tiered peer connection fees, then you would be on point
The universal service stuff was in exchange for de facto monopoly status for local service. Copper was subsidized and given to companies by the government, in exchange, the companies were required to offer service everywhere.
The presumption is that this is more efficient overall than having four companies operating in rich areas and none in poor areas.
Compare it with the cell phone networks.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Actually AC --
:-)
I agree with ya. Thats why my first line was "QUOTED" -- I was quoting from someone else that thought incorrectly.
So good job of summing up the rest of what I just said though
I used to work for a very large midwest ISP. I did tech support. I would get calls constantly about our horrible service. We would drop connections, have hours of down time, lose emails, etc. I actually told some customers who were cussing at me I would cancel their accounts for them. I never had a single customer cancel service ever. I worked from 1996 to 2001. The only customers we ever had cancel where happy customers.
Most people don't have ISP choices. I can choose Comcast or Verizon. My girlfriend's only choice is a small local cable company. We'd have to switch to dialup to protest.
Hrmm, let's see here. Telecom providers want to charge for best access to their pipes. Telecom providers buy LOTS OF NETWORK HARDWARE. Suddenly, hardware providers agree with them! I am shocked, SHOCKED to find them in bed together!! SHOCKED!
See where we diagree is the level of competition these two companies would pose, as an analogy using a well understood market, automobiles, do you really think that BMW loses much business to Kia? The value of accross the board high-speed internet, vs. the value of cheap sometimes fast internet is such a disparity that they could almost be different markets, in the very least I feel they're different segments within the same market that have very little overlap (comapre current dial-up with current broadband, this will just fill a niche between the two markets, if it exists at all.) And before anyone cries censorship (which no one might, but wth.). It isn't nearly as bad for those people that choose this middle tier pricing scheme, they still have access to the data, just at much lower rates. Compare with nations like China, which completely block access to information rather than just throttling the rate at which you can access.
And anyone using this service, would doubtfully be the intended market for sites such as Wikipedia, kernel.org, etc. Most likely the people choosing this will be the Aunt Tilly's of the world, happily emailing on yahoo and hotmail at super-speeds. And those sites will pay their "extortion" bills through increased advertisements predictated by the ip addresses of the people actually using this service.
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
I read three tomes by Robert A. Caro on Lyndon Johnson. At some point in time electricity company was forced to sell electricity at a lower rate, which the company strongly opposed to. The government won, and later the company had to admit that they made much more profit. This story is not to demonstrate that government always knows best, but to demonstrate that free market also doesn't always know best.
While the free market does not "always know best" it is the best method we've been able to use for figuring it out. Not that that applies in this case. A government enforced monopoly on the public right of ways needed to install power lines, makes the power industry anything but a free market.
Similarly, the internet is made up of ISPs, many of whom are one of only one or two companies with the right to run "last mile" lines through the government controlled right of ways. They are granted a whole range of privileges as common carriers that give them special rights in exchange for impartially moving whatever data they are given. Now they want to renege on their half of the deal? Fine. They can charge anyone anything they want in a free market, but they should lose their common carrier privileges exempting them from prosecution for copyright violation, libel, slander, kiddie porn, etc. they have on their gear. Likewise, any company that requests it should be given equal access to all the public right of ways they are using. Finally, they should have to pay back all the money the government spent subsidizing the lines they are using in order to provide a public good. They are a business, not a public good; let them act like it.
I'm perfectly happy with laws that require ISPs to pass thru any packet irrespective of its type.
Agreed!
It must be nice to have the choice of several ISPs. Unfortunately for a lot of people there is only one choice in providers. Even if there are more than one provider what is stopping them from both doing the same "tiering" of their access and then you still have no real option but to live with it.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
Market forces will do aboslutely shit.
The few big telcos there are will collude and we will lose net neutrality.
Customers will end up paying more for the internet or will not be able to access the sites they want to at the speed they are paying for.
The hardware companies are for this because to implement a tiered internet, those same big telcos will have to buy new hardware. What a suprise.
No - you'll see the big boys making higher profit margins - this is how Big Business works.
New ISPs won't have the user-base it takes to get a significant ammount of money out of content providers to even try cutting into the marke this way.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
The market will cure all. I'm still boggled by the literally TWO choices I have for a reliable ISP.
"The Market" is no magical thing. It's not natural, it's not a cure-all. Markets are formed by rules and regulations. Net neutrality is a reasonable imposition on the market for bandwidth.
If you doubt the Market is artificial, ask why we don't just get rid of contract law. I mean, buyers will just gravitate to sellers who live up to their contracts, right? No need for enforcement.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Your analogy sucks.
BMWs are nicer to sit in than a Kia, but both will get you to where you want to go at the same speeds.
With an internet connection, the only factors are relablity and speed. Nothing else matters.
I just read some of the comments in this tread, and it seems like the real fear is that ISPs will start demanding that content providers pay for perfered access to the "last mile". That is something I would oppose, unless they weren't allowed to call it the Internet, because it wouldn't be that anymore ... if someone was trying to sell such a service, I think there would be a case for what ever agency takes care of advertising standards and consumer protection.
Although, I'm not convinced that more regulation is needed, existing laws and "market forces" might take care of things.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seus
Hrmm, let's see here. Telecom providers want to charge for best access to their pipes. Telecom providers buy LOTS OF NETWORK HARDWARE. Suddenly, hardware providers agree with them! I am shocked, SHOCKED to find them in bed together!! SHOCKED!
You've hit the nail on the head here. Cisco and the gang have been trying to sell people on the new management and Quality of Service features for years. They can make a pile of cash selling ISPs the gear they need to know what traffic is coming from and going to a given location, what QoS that "customer" has paid them, and guaranteeing that the level is enforced. In fact, I work at a company that has tools that let them do that (among many other things) right now. I have stock options and profit sharing and stand to make a pretty penny myself if ISPs are not held to the same standard as other common carriers. I'm more than willing to not make that profit in exchange for things being done properly. Cisco and many others smell green. I've heard more than one network gear operator use the metaphor of the arms dealer. Arms dealers are in favor of more lax UN restrictions of arms buildup and invasion of neighboring dictatorships? Gee what a surprise.
Um, they do pay more. Oodles more than you do. Net neutrality isn't about not paying for bandwidth, its about this: Lets say you have an ISP (we'll call it "Comcast"). Lets say that Google has an ISP, let's call ("AT&T"). Let's say, for illustration's sake, that Comcast's network doesn't directly connect to AT&T's network, but they both connect to another backbone provider (we'll say "Verizon"). So the connection from you to Google looks something like this --
You Comcast Verizon AT&T Google
Currently, you pay Comcast for a certain level of bandwidth in each direction, Google pays AT&T for a certain level of bandwidth in each direction, and Comcast and AT&T each have an agreement with Verizon covering the bandwidth of their users being transferred, in each direction, over Verizon's network, which instead of cash is likely an in-kind ("I'll carry your users packets, you'll carry mine") agreement. Every bit of bandwidth is paid for, in cash or in-kind, on every network that carries it, and he who asks for more capacity is paying more for it.
What the telcos want is to allow Comcast and Verizon to demand that Google negotiate, individually, an additional payment to them each directly, or face having Google's packets dropped when travelling across their networks -- and they particularly want that ability to impose those charges on people providing services, surprisingly enough, that compete with ones where telcos already are the main provide (VoIP competing with regular telephone service) or want to dominate (like video-on-demand, or advanced portal services like Google.)
You forgot the last option:
3 - Congress pockets bribe money, makes a speech about bettering the internet, and then says a prayer thanking the gods that the overwhelming majority of American people he represents only believe what the TV tells them to.
Most US citizens are in rural areas, and most rural areas have little to no choice of their ISP. I live in Central NH. Sure it's NH but I'm in a densely populated suburban area, and I have 1 choose for a broadband ISP, ONE! that's it, I use them or I don't have internet service at all. Despite their monopoly they're reasonably priced and they've been helpful when I have problems they're not a major provider so I think that even without net-neutrality they wouldn't be doing anything stupid... I do however fear for my brethren who live in Southern NH who's ONLY available service provider is Comcast. Some random areas also have the option of Verizon DLS... but if the proverbial sh*t hits the fan that's not much of a choice at all.
Regardless of how nice it would be to think that the consumers would drive the marketplace it just wont happen, most people put up with crappy service because they're too lazy to switch providers, ISPs would have to start murdering babies to get people to drop their internet service altogether... throttling wikipedia certainly wont do it.
Collector's Edition
Stop with stupid anologies! You don't "rent" bandwidth at all. Ugh.
ISPs aren't 'close' to monopolies, they ARE monopolies. Sure you can get SpeakEasy, but at some point they will HAVE to connect to an ISP which is one of the big telcos which want a tiered internet.
I'm all for a free market, but Adam Smith's Invisible Hands are tied here.
Most people are lucky to have two broadband options: DSL and cable. These companies are granted monopoly status on broadband services by governments by being given access to our public right-of-ways and subsidized by taxes for rural build-out.
In return for allowing them to string wires and fiber all over the place, it is perfectly reasonable for us, the public, to demand that the services they provide be neutral to the content we want to access over those connections.
There is such a thing as a natural monopoly. Streets and sewers are other examples--a city simply can't sustain competition, either because of limited land, or because the linear increase in maintenance costs for each additional competitor would make it impossible for competitors to make a profit.
Wifi, WiMax, etc. are no solution, they are merely a stop-gap. Wireless connections, for all their technology advances, are no match for the 1:1 connection of computers over a wired network once they become saturated with users. They also depend on unlicensed spectrum, another limited resource that should be protected from being usurpted by yet another large company who decides that "he with the most APs wins" at the expense of all other personal and business wifi networks (cf: airport terminals).
In many areas, there are only one or two high-speed ISPs, and there are substantial barriers to entry. But even where that is not the case, the problem exists that it may not be your ISP, it may be one (or, more likely, all) of the major network providers. Even if you've got some local high-speed ISP that doesn't throttle, say, Google, if all of the major telcos start getting flaky with Google's packets when they travel across their networks, and if your ISP doesn't happen to own cable that directly connects to Google's provider, you are screwed. You aren't getting Google, and switching ISPs won't likely help.
And that's what the telcos want to do -- use their power over the network lines to destroy existing and other new providers of services they'd like to monopolize. Its classic leveraging of existing regional monopolies to other markets, on a grand scale.
There are a relatively small number of large players that would make up the bulk of this proposed revenue stream to the ISPs. Google, Yahoo, EBay, Vonage(*), MSN, etc. Interestingly enough, that lists starts to look a lot like a list of "destination sites" - the type of site that motivates people to get an ISP in the first place. These sites also have a large enough public profile that their press releases can saturate the media. If a sufficient number of these sites (X) refuse to pay, and if a sufficient number of major ISPs (Y) choose to not implement discriminatory service, then those ISPs that do will lose, both in public opinion and in business. And likely eventually in court.
I submit that X and Y are both suprisingly small. Now, if any major ISP chooses to do the right thing, and they happen to have any major sites as their customers, the ISP now has a very good reason to throw it's peering weight around against the misbehaving ISPs. There's one market feedback loop.
But what happens if all the ISPs go bad at the same time? That's when the government should get involved, and there are many angles based on existing law, ranging from collusion/anti-trust to removing common carrier status/busting 'em for kiddie porn. Interestingly enough, this can apply at a smaller scale for those areas of the country where there is insufficient choice of ISPs.
So I think a little saber rattling is just fine, but it is too early to consider new legislation. If the market starts going the wrong way, there's plenty of existing government mechanisms to encourage it to correct itself. I can certainly sympathize with a view that's skeptical of the executive branch's inclinations to take action, but substituting legislation is not a better answer.
(*) I think that the subcategory of sites making money off high bandwidth services like VOIP that compete with offerings ISPs make is a bit different than the relatively low bandwidth offerings of a wikipedia. I don't think there is really much risk to the wikipedia's of the world. The Vonages, OTOH, are on the front lines of a battlefield.
everyone will start researching Net Neutrality
Not if they throttle the news sites...
I think the largest problem these Baby Bells ate going to run into is support. They are going to be over run with support nightmares to the point to where people drop them like a rock. When Bellsouth announced they are going to do this, I, as a computer repair store, and networking consultant / designer, immediately dropped support for them. Me dropping support for Bellsouth affects over 2,000 people here. Most customers are on the local cable company which I gladly support for a smaller fee. Their owner is a net neutrality advocate as well as I. We see eye to eye on almost everything. Almost 500 of those 2,000 customers have moved from Bellsouth since a month ago. Now when someone calls, my statement is "We do not support Teired connections. You will have to contact your internet provider about that.". Then go on to suggest "Insert local cable & DSL company that is neutral".
With influence comes responsability, I pray that I am up to the task, and do it right.
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
This isn't a mere matter of the speed of your connection to your ISP. Don't say "the internet is already tiered" because you can choose to have dial-up vs. DSL or cable modem. That's missing the point. Your overall connection speed is your overall connection speed, which affects the speed of all the pages you browse. There isn't some imposed mechanism (i.e. tiered services) that discriminates the speed before it gets to you due to preferential treatment to higher-paying web sites. Quality of Service, etc. itself doesn't already create a tiered internet. The issue is, will the tiered internet discourage openness of the internet because it favors the wealthy? "Neutrality" of the internet is good because it allows the internet to remain open. Open communication, in turn, is essential to a free and just society. What exactly do you think will happen when only the rich and powerful have a voice on the net, while the marginal whistle-blowers (who are inevitably poorer and less powerful, which is why they are in the margins in the first place)can't get the word out because they've been choked from the net?
Capitalism is the best thing we have right now, but I don't think people should be sheep. I'm tired of hearing how Capitalism is great because it encourages competition that results in better goods and services, when in reality it has nothing to do with competition. Corporations don't go out of their way to encourage competition out of the kindness of their heart, etc. It's all about the elimination of competition by the most economically powerful, perhaps at any cost (i.e. our freedom). Take the lie and make it true. Do you want competition in the market so that we aren't forced into monopolies? Then level the playing field by discouraging a tiered internet so that you don't have to be rich to be heard on the net. To me, it isn't even a question of whether or not the internet should be tiered.
So now the question is, do we think the government can do this competently, or do we have faith that neutrality can be preserved without intervention?
If this hasn't been mentioned or if anyone has concerns as to what Net Neutrality is there are many articles online that describe the pros and cons. Once such article is found on Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. ~Albert Einstein
The problem is that the proper regulatory stance is responding to actual harm, not conjecturing about possible harm.
It is at least as likely that the market will correct this: if AOL users cant access Google because Google refuses to pay AOL a higher rate, AOL's customers will leave. That's the whole value to a competitive market.
"Stumble before you crawl"
Imagine a cash grab where all of a sudden toll booths appeared all over the place on what were once public roads. Cisco and its ilk in this scenario are people expecting to sell toll booth hardware. That they are lobbying for their interests and against yours is not surprising.
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
Most US citizens are in rural areas
I usually don't comment about statements like this, but this one is so clearly erroneous that I have to speak up. According to the Census Bureau http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/censr-4.pdf, 80% of Americans lived in a "metropolitan" area in 2000. Fifty percent live in suburbs and the remaining 30% live in central cities. Even accepting the fact that some of the suburbs have rural portions, it's simply not the case that "most" Americans live in rural areas.
From http://www.majorityleader.gov/:
Boehner: Budget Victory Demonstrates Republicans' Commitment to Fiscal Discipline
WASHINGTON, D.C. - House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) today issued the following statement after House passage of the FY 2007 Budget Resolution:
Hastert is the Speaker of the House, not the Majority leader. If the summary can't get this basic fact right (or maybe it was the original article?), why believe any of the rest of it?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
> There is no "somewhere else" that Google can go to.
> Since the ISP's that get their funding this way will
> be able to charge their end users less, you'll start
> to see lower cost (to the consumer) ISP's popping up
> who get their funding from the sites they provide
> high bandwidth to.
LOL. Can't fool me with that one! As if we'd ever see that happen. (Or just as likely, we'd end up getting the same speeds as Europeans, and we're "saving money" by paying just as much.)
NEVER NEVER NEVER trust telecommuncations companies and former monopolies. They never have customer best interests at heart. Never.
You may want your ISP to pass all traffic equally but I want my ISP to give priority to timing sensitive apps like VOIP and possibly gaming over things like email and bulk file transfers. If you don't like how your ISP manages their bandwidth then switch to another ISP. What's that? You only have one ISP available? Well then THAT's your problem. Let's fix that rather than allowing congress critters to become our system admins.
Where does the law allow CEOs to do the following:
1) Take money from you at arbitrary rates and through arbitrary means (taxes).
2) Regulate your public and private right to speak.
3) Control your use of your own property without any contract being signed.
4) Allow you to be detained in secret prisons and tried in secret courts outside of the US Constitution.
5) Allow their agents (law enforcement) to spy on you, record everything you do online or say over the phone, kick your door in on flimsy evidence and do all of the following carrying military-grade armaments that you have to have permission from them (machine gun license) to own.
6) Draft you from your home, ripping you away from your spouse and children who might be materially dependent on you to send you off to fight against someone who you might not even consider your enemy.
7) Regulate everything from the chemicals you put in your body to the type of music you can lawfully make or sell.
8) Make you subject to all manner of liability in how you conduct your business, allowing your life's work to be ripped from you by a single, pissed off employee whose only harm may be hurt feelings.
Yes, those CEOs are a mighty powerful class. Congress and the President don't have shit on them.
It's *YOUR* ISP. They say to Google: Hey - we have a million users, unless you pay us $X, they'll get 1Kbytes/second to Google and 1Mbytes/second to Yahoo.
And if they go through with that, the ISP is going to get X00,000 angry users flooding their support lines, complaining that Google (or whatever other customer favorite site) is loading too slow.
The ISP's will spend more money answering those calls than they will bring in from the content providers who do decide to pony up the protection money. And that's why I don't believe net neutrality laws are needed -- if the ISP stops satisfying its customers, the market will correct the situation itself.
All of the CD's I own are almost all good tracks. However, I've only bought about 5 CD's in as many years.
If I want broadband in Seattle I basically have two choices, Comcast or Qwest.
If you have access to Qwest DSL then you probably can also get Speakeasy or one of a dozen or so other ISPs over that same line. Sure, Qwest still runs the physical line but the TOS is up to whatever ISP you choose.
Moderate regulation can be a good thing - it can mitigate the "profit no matter whom it hurts" pradigm that is at the core of the modern ultra-aggressive business model. Moderate regulation does mean "thuh terrists has wun". In fact it keeps many who might otherwise do you harm at bay.
Of course, there's nothing stopping Quest from charging more or less to the different ISPs using the Quest DSL backbone, based on throughput. Where does it all end?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
You are just guessing. Since Qwest owns the physical network, they might impose the same rules on speakeasy.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Very interesting and knowledgeable comment. Perhaps you can answer a question I've always had:
To my mind, the only reason the telcos have any ability to even fight this fight is their government-sanctioned monopoly on the last mile. Basically as long as most consumers and small businesses have to start their traffic on telco copper, the telcos can restrict their access to all the other "backbone" providers. If that monopoly were broken, then a consumer could in choose whether they wanted a net-neutral ISP or a paid-content ISP. The market can dictate who ends up connected to what kind of "backbone"/peering arrangement. Many consumers might well opt for the paid-content ISP, since it would basically be a TV+phone+internet bundle, while businesses and geeks and those visiting Wikipedia would go for net-neutral service. And that's not even mentioning the myriad other benefits breaking that monopoly would have: true competition between all ISPs, lowered cost of local service, and no stupid games like forbidding bandwidth-sharing. The beginning and the end of this problem is the government-granted monopoly the telcos have on last-mile connectivity.
So I say cut the following deal: back off on enforcing network neutrality, but use regulation to open the last mile to all comers, including wireless mesh, broadand over electrical, etc. With that resolve, the market can resolve how bandwidth should be apportioned.
Does this make any sense?
Now what good is it to me the consumer if the only sites I can access at a decent broadband speed are "Microsoft.com" or "CNN.com", absolutely none.
Time-Warner owns CNN. I think a problem here is that CNN could pay TW "funny money" (just shifting a few numbers around on paper) and claiming that they aren't unequally charging content providers - thus giving CNN an advantage over other services on TWs networks.
There's so many problems with this scheme... I don't usually support government intervention in the free market, but there should be some law that says you can only charge your customers for service.
I think people don't understand the problem well enough because there really doesn't seem to be a whole lot of outrage at the idea. Imagine a Verizon cell phone users calls a Cingular Cell phone user. Each one is paying their provider by the minute. But now Verizon wants the Cingular customer to pay a fee, too, otherwise they'll make the connection very noisy. It just can't possibly work that way!
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Every gigabyte they send has a cost, they may have a large connection (or three) but they also pay for the traffic going over that link.
You're also forgetting that what the telecoms are proposing here isn't just looking at how much, but also where it's going. so now, they'll pay for an OC-12, by the gig AND a fee to make sure their customers get a good connection.
It's the third part they're objecting to. They already pay large amounts of cash for everything going in and out of their datacenter, why should they pay _more_ for guaranteed priority?
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Not trying to flame here but...I think the idea and concept of what net neutrality is/was/will be is not only being mis-understood, but also mis-used.
One way to look at it. Net neutrality means that all bits are the same. I put mine in the pipe you put yours in the pipe, and they are treated as equals, arriving as fast as possible. That is probably the most basic definition, and the one that most people are wanting to promote.
The above definition is great and wonderful for how the internet and its current services operate today. However, when/if VoIP and streaming [fill in blank] start to become more prevalent this model simply will not work unless the pipes are sufficiently large to handle all of this traffic.
What I think may not be a bad idea is to have QoS available for services that require it. Then all other traffic would default back to best effort. However, that would assume that applications and protocols didn't "cheat" and mark themselves as needing QoS service.
ISP's could continue to offer different service packages by filtering traffic at their site level and either append/prepend packet header information for QoS before sending over the WAN.
More or less the problem isn't what net neutrality is/isn't, its that the current structure of the internet is not going to gracefully handle the new services that are trying to built on top of it. I'm starting to think that the free market will be the best way to determine what works and what doesn't. If the current telcos offer to restricted of access then there will be new entrats. Its already been rumored that Google may be getting into the game, so just because the current players are big and bullying doesn't mean that they can't get wiped out tomorrow.
Bottom line is that both the short and long term winners are going to be the hardware providers...
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
The point is that most people have one choice for broadband. The fortunate ones have two.
Where I live, I have one choice. Comcast. The limit for DSL from Qwest is one building over. For satellite, your dish needs to be pointed south. My apartment faces north.
That is the main problem with this tiering crap. Most people that say "the market will sort it out" don't seem to understand this. There IS NO market when the government granted monopolies control the access. What am I supposed to do if Comcast starts throttling access?
Dial up. Either dial up or move.
As a random thought, how could this affect housing prices? This has the potential to affect selling prices for houses. Houses where there's one choice for broadband may not sell as well as other houses in the area with a couple choices. It's possible.
You're right, there's nothing at all wrong with Qwest charging more or less to different ISPs based on throughput. Customers SHOULD be able to choose different levels of service based on their needs and pay accordingly. I serve email for a number of small businesses, store backups remotely for some of them, have a dozen or so VPN connections connected to me at all times and a bunch of other things. It doesn't make any sense that I should pay the same or be subject to the same limitations as Grandma who only checks her Yahoo email once a day and that's about it.
"Read Cisco's "Building MPLS-Based Broadband VPNs" if you want a clue on just how bad DOCSIS and DSL are."
Can I borrow $60.00 from you? Or at the very least use your personal information to save to "my account".
I have to admit, I'm just a little skeptical about the hardware folks motivation. If net neutrality falls by the wayside and ISPs start charging content companies for packet transport, the natural question is how will they keep track of who owes what?
The answer: new and more expensive hardware. Big suprise that the hardware vendors are very interested in net neutrality dissappearing.
Let's just get community wireless mesh up and running and let the ISPs deal with THAT!
What?
Customers SHOULD be able to choose different levels of service based on their needs and pay accordingly.
Except in the worst case scenario we're hurtling towards, we're not. If Google doesn't pay Qwest, then it may be that NONE of Qwest's subcontractors will be able to connect me to Google, regardless of how much I'm willing to pay (short of writing a check for millions in Google's name).
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Everything you said assumes that there are enough users in any one area to support two different business models: One based on neutral and one based on non-neutral.
Even if there are enough users... if the only broadband provider in town decides they're going to offer one service, you're stuck.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Access generates a huge amount of value. And it does so in so many different ways that the transaction costs from trying to sort them all out and bill for them would eat a lot of the profit (as another post in here pointed out w/r/t the mail system).
Furthermore, the net being neutral generates additional value. Specifically, it favors experimentation & entrepreneurship over dealmaking and conglomeration among the large corp's. The market can fix this -- and generate a neutral net -- only if corporate players can turn this value into profit. And indeed they can, over the long term, but the short term profit to be had from dealmaking & extortion is probably more attractive to most of them.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Of course they're against it. They both stand to make a lot of money selling upgrades and new equipment to enforce network unneutrality.
What I truly detest from people like this is their public spin that we shouldn't worry about it until after we have a huge problem from it, after which it will take a lot more effort to recover from than performing a little preventative maintenance on it in the first place.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
How do you figure?
i ng/kia-rio-1.4-16v-range-1004915.html
"In the Z4 2.5i with manual shift, this unit delivers 0 to 60 mph in 7.1 sec. and achieves the amazing top speed of 146 mph. Its projected EPA mileage ratings are impressive too: 21-mpg city/28-mpg highway with the optional automatic transmission, 20/28 with the 5-speed manual." - http://www.bmwworld.com/models/z4/engines.htm
"The top speed of 111mph is achieved courtesy of the 96bhp developed by this power unit. This too is better than most other 1.4-litre engines in this sector that typically average 75 to 80bhp." - http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/car-reviews/car-and-driv
Just because your speed is limited by laws in your locality has nothing to do with the capabilities of the technology, any nerd should know that.
And again, I'll say that a BMW is a more reliable vehicle than a Kia any day, this is a personal bias but I'd like to see you prove me wrong with details regarding the lifespans of vehicles from both manufacturers.
I say my analogy stands, and you're just a troll.
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
If my ISP started enforcing this start of thing, I would start using the onion router network to bypass their stupid bandwidth limits.
I could even see a Google Onion Router application if ISP's started bringing in these charges.
If you aren't far left by the age of 18 you have no heart. If you aren't far right by 30 you have no brain.
I think that the broadband companies are going to charge for the uses that need insane amounts of bandwidth. Think about how much bandwidth would be used if 30% of a cable ISP's customers are streaming video at 600 Mb/s for 10 hours a week. The ISP would need to spend a lot of money to build up their infrastructure so this 30% of customers can watch Lord of the Rings. The 70% of their customers that don't suck bandwidth get screwed over by the higher costs resulting from the infrastructure upgrades. The cable companies get a double whammy because customers would get drawn away for their TV services as well. Don't worry about Wikipedia or Google search, they won't be affected. Only the principal of net neutrality will.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
The telcos all want it so there won't BE any place for google or anyone else to go to if net neutrality isn't codified into law somehow. They want to be paid for both ends and and ADDITIONAL payment for the middle someplace. ALL the bandwith is already paid for, they want a fee to keep doing what they are doing as soon as they artificially throttle selected targets for NEW ADDITIONAL extortion payments for google or whomever to be able to go back to what they were already getting as to access and price.
This just ain't that hard to see.
The market DOESN'T WORK when cartels that act as monopolies arise. Want some more proof, you ever see any HUGE price differences with gasoline at the pumps? I sure haven't and I have been buying gasoline since it was roughly 15 cents a gallon (I got it as low as 12 cents before). We allegedly have a lot of different gasoline brands, yet they are always within a few token pennies of each other. That's the result of an unregulated sellers colusionary cartel, which although technically isn't a monopoly, in practice it might as well be.
This deal with the net is they smell a sweet way to extort more money for doing nothing but throttling selected customers who have deeper pockets than most, which is an artificial scarcity sales price inflation dodge very similar to when enron ordered some plants to drop bulk transmission when demand was real high, driving up spot to absurd levels.
Our entire society runs off of data transfer now, it has become a necessary utility for generic business, as such, it needs pricing and access regs to keep people and outside businesses from being gouged, which is all the non-net neutrality would be, a normal high stakes gouging because a small handful of really large companies could all go there at the same time, and they would, if it isn't stopped now. I don't like new regs either, but the alternative is to let them boys write their own regs, which always results in them getting richer and everyone else getting poorer..
Agreed, but I think my point is being misunderstood. I'm not supporting this scheme, but I'm against what I feel would be uneccesary legislation. My major point is that anyone trying to use this scheme is doomed to failure, and if I'm wrong and this does succeed then American Consumers are dumber than I give them credit for. But like most things, a free market generally is pretty self regulating, if something is a good idea and makes sense to enough people, they will invest their money and time in it. If it's a bad idea and harms the consumer than the consumer would be idiotic to invest their money, time, and effort in to the idea.
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
Actually, no. MySpace was started by some guy, just like LiveJournal, Slashdot, Google, Flickr, etc. Think of a website that was created by a big well-funded company. MTV.com. I'm trying to think of other examples, coming up blank. Help me out if you want, people.
So, pretty much, you'll get nothing new at all, if you believe lack of net neutrality will cut out the little guy.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
The original article is wrong... 3M makes a variety of products including Scotch Tape. 3COM makes network gear. -merv.
you're right, my use of the term "rural" was innappropriate for the area I was attempting to specify...
basically most people live in an area not big enough to have more then 1 or 2 choices.
Collector's Edition
Suppose Google's homepage has to traverse 5 networks to go to my PC. How is Google's fee going to be split across these networks?
Thats simple: It's not. All five networks will demand their own payment. In addition to the money Google is paying to their own ISP. In addition to the money I am paying to my own ISP. In addition to the money that already changes hands between all 5 networks.
The worst part of this, that nobody seems to realize, is that this is double-blackmail for Google. If google fails to pay Network F and Network F retailiates by dropping 50% of the packets coming from Google, not only is this slow for the customers of Google, but Google will have to pay their ISP for the extra bandwidth required to resend the packets. Ah, but 50% of the retransmits will be dropped, and 50% of THOSE retransmits will be dropped... any math majors around to tell us what google's final bandwidth bill will be? Ignoring that, all of these retransmits will be flooding the network with even MORE bandwidth... wait, wasn't that the so-called "problem" the telco's were trying to "solve" (when it comes to corporations, lies are par for the course)?
Google would do better by simply refusing to pay, and posting a small website reading "Your ISP has decided not to permit you to connect to Google. Please use Yahoo." with the Yahoo link popping up a search for contract law specialists in the customer's area who would be more than happy to explain to Google's customers how they are not receiving the internet service they contracted for.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Yet another capitalist who can't differentiate between harmful and nonharmful market activity.
...or deliberately chooses not to, as is often the case.
Isn't this called extortion? What? It's called capitalism? Hm. Perhaps I'm missing some nuance.
... is the poor tech support guy on the other side of the phone. when joe six pack calls in asking why [insert website] is coming in slow. you hit every opther website and it's fast. but they've tried it on other [isp here], etc. etc. try explaining the whole concept to him using words of five letters or less. and then all those "competive" gamers, home day traders, etc.
the revolt of the phone tech support hasn't come yet. but it will be just one more straw on the camels back
Gee, networking hardware companies want to avoid laws which might prevent the creation of an entirely new market for them - routers, filters and flow regulators that adjust the delivery speed of packets depending on manually configured technicalities rather than just routing as efficiently as hardware is able, putting technicians and programming personnel back in the loop of a field which their own hardware has practically automated, requiring new more expensive routing tools and techniques, and a whole new gob of employees to be trained, certified and rented on an hourly basis to companies that used to just have to buy simple hardware and a couple of good tech guys. I think I'm gonna be ill now.
I dunno....a BMW would in general, be faster than a Kia, and has better suspension so that it is also more manuverable at higher speeds.
A Kia is generally not built for performance....it is there ONLY to get you from point A to point B....without any sense of style, or speed.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
BMW always scores in the bottom 1/4 or so of Consumer Reports reliability rankings. Kia is down there too with the other makes I'd never buy. It doesn't matter though, I don't know anybody who buys BMW because they're reliable.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Ummm, it doesn't? That's the entire net neutrality point. Absent these safeguards companies like SBC have incentive to offer Google and Yahoo special deals: say, whoever pays us more gets 50% more traffic than your competitor. As long as they're careful, the slowdown will be relatively minor. Your average consumer is completely incapable of determining why Google is a bit slower than Yahoo; maybe Google is overloaded. Maybe your ISP is throttling you.
The claims that some sites will be totally blocked off are implausible; if Google stopped working an ISPs customers would be furious. But a slight throttling of a non-compliant site's bandwidth would work just fine.
This isn't about saving the consumer money. Broadband rates are pretty reasonable already. This is about a new source of revenue for ISPs. This is about figuring out how to charge twice for service. I pay my cable company for my broadband. Google pays for its network pipes. My cable company shouldn't be asking Google for more money.
This isn't hypothetical worrying. The CEO of SBC wants to charge both you and the content provider. The CTO of BellSouth wants the same thing. They're both essentially claiming that because I run a web site that their customers visit, I'm somehow "stealing" from them, completely ignoring that their customers already paid them so they can get access to my site.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
This point is often lost on "free market" proponents. A strong legal system of contracts and regulations is an important factor in success of an economy. Countries without those structures fare very poorly - their economies tend to be dominated by corrupt, inefficient companies, or everything is decided by family connections or "warlords".
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Then there's a simple solution, if say a "google" ever gets appraoched by these CEO's demanding money about this, or they notice the throttling some other way block ALL ip's belonging to those ISP's, or even better redirect to a site with a notice saying "Due to the actions of your ISP we are not going to allow you to use our service."
Now for Google this might not be such a grand idea, but imagine it was your bank, or your insurance agency, that would put me in a mood to switch ISP's very quickly.
While not the most elegant solution, I still DO NOT believe that the government of the United States, or any nation for that matter, has any right to legislate what can or cannot be done with regards to the internet. THAT is true net neutrality.
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
Not quite. Google's response would be to light up the thousands upon thousands of dark fiber they've bought and introduce their own broadband service. Imagine it: "Want truly fast broadband at a symmetric 7mbps with no discrimination based on what sites you're trying to access? Choose GoogleDSL - faster than your Verizon/SBC/Ma Bell DSL or Comcast/TW/Rogers/Cox/Adelphia cable modem, for about the same price."
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
For instance, if you want to connect to the folks that are on AOL, they may mandate that if their user want to connect to your service, they want a cut. After all, it is costing them money to allow users to connect to your service.
Perhaps Google, Microsoft and other companies being victimized by this extortion tactic ought to band together and return in kind. Any ISP that demands payment for packets would receive a counter demand for payment for access. After all it costs Microsoft et al money to allow AOL users to connect to their service. Shouldn't AOL pay them?
e.g.
AOL threatens Google or Microsoft with throttled traffic to its users unless it pays.
Microsoft, Google (et al) ought to respond by collectively cutting off all traffic to AOL until it pays THEM.
It won't take even a dense AOLer long to see that their internet is suddenly 'broken' as his msn messenger, yahoo, gmail, google search, msn search, yahoo search etc are all non-functional, and he'll blame AOL when he sees that nobody else is having the problem.
AOL can't win a war of attrition with the big content providers. Users want that content, and they'll switch ISPs to get it.
Right, of course, because when google loads slow and the rest of the net doesn't, the first thing Joe Average is going to think is "it's my durn ISP!"
As others have stated, the market isn't some magical all knowing, all loving sky god that corrects all injustices.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
But there is an important point you are either ignoring or missing. The "American Consumer" will have NO choice in the matter. The "Free Market" will have no affect on this. The reason is, for most people, there is no real choice. Its either broadband or dialup, not a variety of broadband options. Even for those with choice, its usually only 2 options, maybe 3 for very lucky folks. I guarantee you, if this thing goes through they will ALL do it. They ALL want to do it, and are salivating at the thought. It will not, I repeat NOT, affect the price of internet for the consumer. They want to do this because they want to make more money, not shift the source of income. There is nothing good in this plan for the consumer what-so-ever. I am not normally a proponent of goverment nosing into market affairs, but sometimes it is a necessary evil. Sometimes they are the only one that can do something that will benefit the consumer. Those times when there is no choice to allow the market to shake it out by itself. This is one of those times.
I paid $3k for used 1995 Kia built car (badged as something else) in 1999. I now have almost 120K miles (90K miles my own) and I have done NOTHING to it but change the brakes, fluids, filters, tires, and spark plugs, all of which you at a bare minimum, also have to do with the BMW because they are wear items as well. How much more reliable could the car get?
Let's assume I do "break down" sometime because of reliability. Is that worth $30K-70K in extra cost worth it? Your poor attempt to justify a car your neighbors and "friends" would approve of as a reliability issue is lame. Any amount of further replies by you is not going to change my mind so do not waste your time responding. I've heard every possible agruement in the past and yours will be no different. I sure the same applies in the other direction as well.
Personally, I'm not all that worried about the issue. At worst its going to mess up the internet for a few months to a year before the telcos realize thats they made a miztake.
By making content providers pay more they are eliminating much of the rich diversity that make the internet so usefull. In essence they are shooting themselves in the foot because they are taking their 'product' (Essentially the internet is their product) and making it less usefull. Guess whats toing to happen then? People are going to drop their high speed connections to the internet and go back to dial up because they don't need 3MBps to view an internet that is only coming to them at 1KBps. Nore do they really care to use it as much because most of what they went to use it for is pretty much gone.
I read three tomes by Robert A. Caro on Lyndon Johnson. At some point in time electricity company was forced to sell electricity at a lower rate, which the company strongly opposed to. The government won, and later the company had to admit that they made much more profit.
I agree that tired traffic is not on their best interest, but in a normal market when big companies can't act in their own best interest, small companies and alternatives fill in the void. We don't need the government acting in the best interest of mega corps while the little guys linger. And if people can't muster up enough energy to create viable alternatives, that is likely a far more compelling arguemnt that the problem isn't that bad, or that regulations are stiffling, than it is that the gov needs to micro-controll large companies for the sake of the social good.
I don't think people understand what they're asking for. If the gov has the power to microcontroll the big guys, then they by default have 10 times the power to mess with us and the small guys.
"Google's response would be to light up the thousands upon thousands of dark fiber they've bought and introduce their own broadband service."
Sadly, the telecom regs have recently said that those already in don't have to share access to the house with anyone else.
All the dark fibre in the world mean nothing if you can't get it to the house.
Most people would say HTTP should be prioritized over BitTorrent, right? Now the problem...
Suppose all BitTorrent is suddenly made to look like HTTP? Standard HTTP requests over port 80?
Or maybe 443 -- should HTTP be prioritized over HTTPS? Certainly not -- do you want people to start choosing the "unsecure" version of a site just because they know it'll load faster?
Anyway, there's a much simpler solution: Buy enough fiber to support all of your users at the bandwidth you advertise giving them. If you can't, then stop claming 9mb/sec, and give them a 100 mbit pipe, and charge them a finite amount for each bit they send -- maybe charge a different amount for download as for upload. Adjust your rates until your pipe is never quite saturated, and offer some free software/hardware to let users rate-limit themselves.
That way, no matter what you use it for, you'll have the most bandwidth and the least latency possible. When it gets too expensive for users, they'll start using less. If everyone's willing to pay enough, add more pipe.
That's what a world with net neutrality would look like. Now, if the government regulated how much they could charge per bit...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
> What's that? You only have one ISP
> available? Well then THAT's your problem. Let's
> fix that rather than allowing congress critters
> to become our system admins.
That happens alot. But despite that there are still
plenty of people with one choice, for a variety of structural
reasons ranging from being between wireless ISP startups to
fatal troubles getting the telco to set up the sizeable wire to
the Internet proper, to just plain bad luck.
Plus, it takes three entrants to make a robust market, and 95+% of
the populace is in a place with no more than two provider choices,
because wireless can't compete where cable and DSL are both present.
That means choice might not help you.
IMHO the correct solution is to deregulate bandwidth. I think this
country right now loses more money than it gains by having monopoly
telco or cable carriers. But that's long, hard sell.
It's *YOUR* ISP. They say to Google: Hey - we have a million users, unless you pay us $X, they'll get 1Kbytes/second to Google and 1Mbytes/second to Yahoo.
I see your points, but I don't see that sort of threat working against Google (or any search engine). Google's response to the ISP might well be: "And if you do, nobody will ever find any website hosted by you within the first 1,000 results of a Google search." That should cool the ISP's jets.
In fact, I wonder about the practicality of that kind of "extortion" at all. It might be that the larger, more lucrative targets are also those with the ability to fight back in that way or some other, while the smaller targets (Wikipedia, etc.) are too small to pay enough to make the "extortion" worthwhile. But I admit that does leave the "some sites pay for a speed advantage" problem.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
You are assuming the telcos will allow the consumer to make a choice. If the choice is between slower DSL and nothing, most consumers will choose the DSL.
One thing I understand about the telecom companies is they're given "common carrier" status by the government, meaning that as long as they don't regulate who talks to whom, they're not liable for anything that their users do with their network. So if two terrorists use Qwest's telephone network to plan an attack, it's not Qwest's fault because they're not actively listening in on everyone, they're just providing a neutral avenue of communication.
So I think the ISPs and backbones should be allowed to charge Google et al for tiered access, as long as they give up common carrier status in the process. Then, when a pedophile uses a chatroom to lure some kid, and this traffic goes over Verizon's network who practices tiered access, then the Verizon executives can be held personally accountable for the fate of the kid, and be executed along with the pedophile. When a terrorist plans a massive attack of some type and this goes over Qwest's tiered-access network, the Qwest executives can be tried for treason and executed.
Now for Google this might not be such a grand idea, but imagine it was your bank, or your insurance agency, that would put me in a mood to switch ISP's very quickly.
If it's so easy to switch ISP's, you are very fortunate. I have a choice between two broadband providers, both nationwide corporations. I think we can agree that the nationwide conglomerates are the ones more likely to get greedy for more revenue via a tiered internet. So, basically, if this thing goes through, both my ISP options will probably sieze on it, and I'll be screwed. Either I take the throttling, or I go to dialup (and maybe still have to deal with throttling).
While not the most elegant solution, I still DO NOT believe that the government of the United States, or any nation for that matter, has any right to legislate what can or cannot be done with regards to the internet. THAT is true net neutrality.
Let me see if I can transport this logic to a more evocative scenario... Basic human rights are more evocative than internet access. More important, most would argue. So would you say that no government has the right to legislate what is and is not legal treatment of a human being? I would hope not.
We need laws to criminalize inhumane treatment of other human beings. Why would we not need laws to criminalize the subversion of the free (as in speech) network of information that is the internet?
The only person who should have the right to charge me more for access to site X than to site Y is the person who runs site X and produces its content.
The possible abuses of tiered internet as currently formulated are ridiculous. Imagine a pressure sensor underneath the entrance driveway to your favorite supermarket, counting the number of cars going in. Now imagine that the government declared that the supermarket had to pay a special tax proportional to the number of cars entering their parking lot, to cover the usage of the road to the supermarket by its customers. Would that be fair in any sort of way? Both the customers and the businesses already pay taxes that, in part, pay for the road systems. So why should the business be charged a per-customer fee on top of that.
He could have used google but it's a newbie question not a troll.
You are correct in stating what the potential problem is. But I have yet to see anything which makes me think that goverment intervention is needed to prevent that from happening. Market forces will keep ISPs in line. If an ISP starts throtling Wikipedia, then users will switch ISP.
I half agree. History and the design of the Internet tell us that by the time ipnapping becomes noticeable (which it needs to be by definition to have any effect on the bottom line), there will be several ways around it all of which will cost the carriers more than they make in additional profits.
Does this mean that the companies won't do it? No. Corporations do not have the sophisticated checks and balances of an evolved biological system. Like Goldstein's rats or Sony, they cannot stop hitting the pipe even when they realize that it is killing them.
Personally I say let them die but I also realize that they're going to do a lot of damage when they start thrashing.
<sarcasm>Soooo.... would that mean 99.999% of the web user will vanish into some "commercial" web, and leave the "real" web for people who have a clue, like it was in the good old days before the corporations infested it? </sarcasm>
- By their own principles, any market that is subject to govt regulations is non-free. i.e. all markets that exist right now.
- If the market does not start out free, the free-market, Darwinistic forces don't operate right. Something else -- maybe cronyism -- is operating.
- Therefore, when they say "just leave it to the market" they're not saying "leave it to the free market". They're saying "leave it to whatever sort of market there is out there."
- To me, this is like saying "whatever power structures exist are free/fair".
- I'm tempted to reply at this point 'well... government regulations exist...'
Seriously, I'm not trying to bait people. Someone who has this view please explain to me.My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
"Imagine Google's reply to this"
Google, "You want to charge us more? Well how would you like to not be returned when someone looks you up? That's right, two can play this game."
Precisely. This is one of the more gaping holes in the "free-market will fix all ills" line or reasoning. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" requires a lot of pre-conditions to function, none of them provided by the markets themselves, and instead existing as external requirements. Such as an ability of consumers to comprehend value and thus for them to make rational choices when "voting" with their dollars, which is a pre-condition to competition. Whole schools of thought exist dedicated to separating the dollar "vote" from rationally ascertained value, chief amongst them "branding". Marketing, combined with technological complexity of the products sold, has long since destroyed the "better moustrap" type of consumer choice, and with it the foundantions of any sort of "free-market" in many domains. And no governmental involvement was needed in this, such self-destructive devolution is apparently an inherent property of the marketplace in real-life (as oposed to theoretical pipe-dreams of libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and other "classical capitalism" types).
The market's barely big enough to fit 2 ISPs in the same area.
They're more likely to do exactly the same thing, and then use it to cut prices to the consumer in a price war. The consumer will get lower prices, to a shit Internet.
That's what market forces will do.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
I work beside a large garage. I see more BMWs get trailered in than Kias...
As long as telcos can lobby rediculous laws banning things like residential networks then they have no right to complain about regulations that don't happen to give them extra pofits.
That's not going to go well. You'll call up your ISP and complain; they'll quite honestly say, "We're not blocking you; they're blocking you. You'll have to take it up with them." As a potential customer of First Bank of Example, it's going to look really bad if I try to visit their web site and get a "we refuse to serve you because you use EvilOnline." Why, EvilOnline works for everything else I do, so it must be FBoE's fault!
Doesn't have the right? In what strange way? Sure, we can't regulate an ISP in France, but we're talking about regulating businesses doing business in the US. You want to do business in the US, you have to play by US rules. Telecommunications companies live under piles of regulations.
The government is not the only group we need to be wary of. Participants in a free market have every incentive to break the free market and make it less free. Imperfect and delayed information, barriers to entry, and natural monopolies mean that the real free market isn't quite a wonderfully self-regulating as theory would suggest.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
One of the most terrible outcomes of this recent issue is the conflation of the terms QoS and Net Neutrality. By disambiguating these terms, the issue becomes much clearer.
QoS was designed into the protocol stack to allow a network provider to provide priority routing for realtime types of service over non-realtime types of service in the presence of contention for limited bandwidth. The idea is that basic services such as HTTP, FTP, and other non-realtime types of service are useful even when the link is temporarily slow, so they use a low priority. Types of services like VoIP or streaming video become completely useless below a certain bandwidth threshold, so they use a higher priority. Overall, the priority is set based on whether the given type of service is useful in the presence of low bandwidth.
It is also worth pointing out that tradionally, QoS only comes into play when there was more traffic passing through a router than the router could handle in a given instant.
The QoS protocols were never intended to discriminate based on network endpoints. If EntityX and EntityY provided the same type of service, QoS was not intended to be used to give EntityX an artificial boost over EntityY.
So keep in mind when thinking about Net Neutrality that you are discussing a whole level of issues over top of traditional QoS. In its basic form, shaping traffic based on protocol types, QoS causes no harm. Only when traffic shaping is done based on endpoints does the topic stop being QoS and start being Net Neutrality. Most likely, the traffic shaping you are referring to in your post prioritizes based on protocol types and applies those prioritization rules regardless of endpoint; therefore you are talking about QoS, not Net Neutrality.
A completely separate issue you bring up that bears consideration is the idea of what constitutes an ISP. Many organizations allow their employees to use the Internet, nominally pursuant to organizational goals. I doubt any one would object to such organizations applying whatever limits on use they want. On the other hand, commercial ISPs exist to sell Internet access to people, and should not apply traffic shaping policies, especially when only a small number of ISPs are available in a given market.
University Internet connections pose the most complex problem, but ultimately they too break down to simple categories. Within the context of administrative offices, labs, and classrooms, the university is clearly like any other organization and within its rights to limit Internet connections. However, many universities also share one Internet connection between offices/labs/classrooms and residence halls. Often, the students living in residence halls are required to pay some fee for the Internet connection (often rolled up into the costs of the dorm) and are prohibited from using an external ISP. In this context, universities clearly act as ISPs and should have the same obligations as ISPs. I am hoping that one of the outcomes of this issue is that universities are forced to differentiate their policies between office/lab/classroom and residence Internet connection, or give resident students a choice in ISP.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Oh I forgot telco lobbies have managed to get laws passed in many states that forbid communities from doing this. God forbid actual market forces get to foster competition in the telco, cable TV and ISP arenas. Does your state allow it?
"In the Z4 2.5i with manual shift, this unit delivers 0 to 60 mph in 7.1 sec. and achieves the amazing top speed of 146 mph. Its projected EPA mileage ratings are impressive too: 21-mpg city/28-mpg highway with the optional automatic transmission, 20/28 with the 5-speed manual." - http://www.bmwworld.com/models/z4/engines.htm
i ng/kia-rio-1.4-16v-range-1004915.html
/.).
"The top speed of 111mph is achieved courtesy of the 96bhp developed by this power unit. This too is better than most other 1.4-litre engines in this sector that typically average 75 to 80bhp." - http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/car-reviews/car-and-driv
Um, who cares? In the US, the max speed limit you're likely to find (AFAIR) is 85mph; Kia's can go 85 as well. Then you start throwing in other stats, which are irrelevent as well. An internet connection has exactly two features anyone cares about; reliablity and speed. Well three, if you count price.
Just because your speed is limited by laws in your locality has nothing to do with the capabilities of the technology, any nerd should know that.
This is why your analogy sucks; ALL cars are restricted to maxium speeds by law, so that fact that it COULD go faster is more or less irrelevent.
And again, I'll say that a BMW is a more reliable vehicle than a Kia any day, this is a personal bias but I'd like to see you prove me wrong with details regarding the lifespans of vehicles from both manufacturers.
People that I know whom own BMW's don't tell you how reliable they are. Honda and Acura owners will. BMW's have alot of known problems, some of which they know about and haven't (last I heard) fixed. Such as the power window motors burning out after 2-3 years on the 3 series. At any rate if you really wish to compare, just go to Edmunds and research yourself.
I say my analogy stands, and you're just a troll.
I say your analogy blows, because cars aren't really that similar at all to an network of computers. You may think I'm a troll if you wish, but troll's don't usually have Excellent karma (I know, you can't check unless you pay for
Your effective speed is capped by law (which, by the way, I find fault in, for some of the reasons you mention).
So lets assume you follow the law, a BMW won't get you there any faster than a Kia (actually if you drive significatly over the limit, past what a Kia can do, you'll likely get there later, having been pulled over).
How does an internet connection have style anyway? Thats why the analogy sucks.
So if airport security sees some guy carrying knifes, automatic weapons and a large canister marked with the text "DANGER ! EXPLOSIVES !" towards an airplane, the proper response is to do nothing, since no actual harm has yet been done ?
Sometimes it pays to prevent harm rather than just trying to fix the mess afterwards.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Which has nothing to do with the matter under discussion. Besides, at least Azureus and GTK-Gnutella can tag bulk transfers as such.
But you wanting your timing-sensitive games and VOIP to work dependanbly is, apparently, everyone's problem.
Is there any difference between choosing US congress or US big business ? After all, the latter owns the former, or so everyone keeps on claiming.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
So if airport security sees some guy carrying knifes, automatic weapons and a large canister marked with the text "DANGER ! EXPLOSIVES !" towards an airplane, the proper response is to do nothing, since no actual harm has yet been done ?
I said regulatory response. The situation you're talking about is radically different: in my example, the question is whether or not to allow legally-acting individuals to engage in free-market exchange in order to determine the optimal solution, while in your example the question is whether to allow someone to bring the tools of crime to a plane. The difference is clear.
Your analogy is false.
"Stumble before you crawl"
Since the ISP's that get their funding this way will be able to charge their end users less, you'll start to see lower cost (to the consumer) ISP's popping up who get their funding from the sites they provide high bandwidth to.
WHAT?!
You must be joking. Do you seriously think they will pass the savings onto the consumers?
My cable bill has only gone up in the past 5 years and yet it didn't cost them any more to provide me the service then than it does now. Why am I being charged more? You say there is more people eating their bandwidth? Wha-wha-what? If they have more customers then the price for them should be going down and not up because they are making more money.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The only reason the telcos have any ability to even fight this fight is their government-sanctioned monopoly on the last mile.
Mostly, though the power of their lobby is incredible. Consider how many have successfully extracted cross-subsidies from their monopoly phone business to their competitive broadband business. A cross-subsidy is not supposed to happen if government regulators are awake. Consider if your power company decided that running grocery stores was more interesting, but like most oligopolies, underestimated how brutally competitive (and usually efficient) the grocery business is? Instead of quitting or competing, they obtain a cross-subsidy with regulatory permission - tacking on 10% or more to your power bill so they can pass that money off to their grocery business and unfairly compete. Nobody is permitted to compete with them in the power business, and they use that money to beat the other more efficient groceries out.
Incumbant local exchange carriers are using this extensively, and are increasingly seeking new universal service funds, plus many have taken advantage of the USDA Broadband low-interest loans (which had rules written to benefit mostly the incumbant LECs). I don't mean to sound bitter - actually, if you were the general manager of a 50+ year old phone company with old copper plants, you'd do anything to get money to start replacing it.
Basically as long as most consumers and small businesses have to start their traffic on telco copper, the telcos can restrict their access to all the other "backbone" providers.
That's the extent of the court's determination on the 1996 dereg. They don't have to unbundle or offer third party carrier access.
If that monopoly were broken, then a consumer could in choose whether they wanted a net-neutral ISP or a paid-content ISP.
In theory, though the technical side can be daunting. Think about where you split it off from wholesale to retail, and you can discover lots of interesting engineering issues (I've been a consultant to a community fiber wholesale project and this can be a real challenge). If you say wholesale is the bottom OSI layer and third party retailers can sell above that, you have a cabling nightmare as carrier selection is handled at the strand level. McLeod USA's founder now has a community fiber deal where you finance it, he has it built and manages it - and comes in with his own retail friends. It is presented as open, but the engineering specification does not allow it to be as open as most carriers would require. A solution I like is to move the wholesale level up to the MPLS management and use MPLS-TE, though to be fair, I haven't seen enough implementations first hand to see how it plays in the real world.
So I say cut the following deal: back off on enforcing network neutrality, but use regulation to open the last mile to all comers. Does this make any sense?
Your offsetting approach makes sense - except the ILECs just won the last-mile battle in court, have succesfully locked up many states from permitting muni construction (pros and cons - many munis tend to be targets for crooks to take advantage of and end up being worse than the ILEC).
Wireless has promise except the satellite networks have locked up the new quasi-unlicensed (permit-based) frequency which will rightfully put their high latency stuff to shame, and the FCC is back to using spectrum for auction as a Federal revenue generator. You'd think that ILEC purchases of LMDS and MMDS (which were bought to defensively take the frequencies out of commission and prevent competition), plus all the speculative purchasers, would have provided the commission with a good lesson.
Theoretically, but, not in practice. If you actually do happen upon someone going the speedlimit, you'll damned near have a multi-car collision.
On the highways here (having to commute a lot post Katrina), the avg speed is about 85-95 mph....and I rarely even pick up cops on my radar detector. So, in many areas....it isn't enforced.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Of course they oppose it - they'd sell the hardware that would implement traffic discrimination.
They probably see it as an opportunity to sell the world all new hardware, which will be 'compatible' with the new regime.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Congress has approximately zero chance of crafting a law that adequately differentiates between "Good" QOS shaping and "Bad" QOS shaping.
Read what I said again and note which word is capitalized.
Yes, it's possible to choose which business to give your money to and there are ways to increase that choice further. THAT is where efforts should be focused, increasing the number of broadband providers and customer choice so that we can all find one that meets our needs and punish the ones that try to play stupid games. As a sysadmin what I don't want is to have to choose between obeying some poorly written law or providing the best possible service to the customer.
We, the collective hardware manufacturers urge you to not invoke mandantory net neutrality law as this will interfere with out abiliy to sell net favoritism hardware.
Thank you.
Have a nice day.
Precisely -- this is exactly what the folks opposing net neutrality are saying. The very important subtext is, "they're fair so long as they benefit me." No market is inherently fair. Whoever believes this needs to pass me some of what they're smoking. No relationship centered around limited (or limitable) resources is inherently fair. Some party to the relationship almost always has the upper hand.
One thing that people almost always forget (or perhaps ignore) when quoting Adam Smith is that the world in his day was somewhat smaller. His economic examples describe situations where all the actors know each other. This forms a community, built around human mores, in which each actor has a vested interest in how that community functions. In a nutshell, his description of the "Invisible Hand" states that people in a community who are working in their own self interest are also working in the interest of the greater good. This largely seems to hold true -- people have multifarious motivations, which generally help balance out. Those people whose motivations are too skewed in one direction or another are usually considered unhealthy, or in extreme cases, pathological.
Now, we have corporations, entities that do not play by human rules. Think about it -- when the only motive is profit, behaviour rapidly approaches what would be called "sociopathic" if exhibited by an individual.
Consequently, when someone says "whatever power [and market] structures exist are free/fair", and when that someone is a corporate representative, you better damn well be suspicious.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Were building a lot of IP/QOS Packet throttling crap into our products, which we'll only won't be able to sell to China.
No.
It's SBC refusing to carry Vonage's traffic, because they don't want to subsidize their competition.
It's AOL (which is Time Warner, Warner Brothers, Time Magazine, Turner, etc.) deciding that Bugs Bunny downloads at a streamable speed but Ranma 1/2 must have bandwidth on their network paid for at both ends.
It's not the small guys. SBC's already threatened to kill Vonage and Skype traffic on their networks altogether.
Prioritizing by packet TOS field or heuristically detected service type = good, prioritizing by packet to or from address = bad.
Even a politician shouldn't have too much trouble with this concept, assuming goodwill from them - which, admittedly, is a rather large assumption...
Sorry, my bad.
How will the average customer know who plays games and who is trying to improve quality ? Unless you have a lot of technical know-how, you won't be able to figure it out from technical description of the prioritizing methods used by the ISP (assuming that the ISP will actually bother telling them to its would-be customers), and changing ISPs is a hassle, especially since you won't know if your favourite site is going to get faster after the change or not.
But as an Internet user, I want to be able to access all those free (read: poor) sites with user-generated content I use nowadays daily; I don't want to see them die because they are unable to pay the bribes to the ISPs to not be rate-limited to unusability.
I'm afraid that greed finally found a way to destroy the Internet.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
In my town, I have exactly one high speed ISP. It is DSL, and the phone company owns the cable and thus far hasn't provided a cable connection to compete with itself.
The other two choices are satelite and dialup.
Satelite costs twice as much, has daily download caps, and is unacceptable to me because of the latency. It is impossible to type over a four second delay, and my job requires that. VoIP would be crappy, too.
Dialup has rather obvious problems, the biggest noting be the obvious speed issue, but thatlocal calling area is very limited, and there are actually no other local ISPs besides the local phone company.(1)
So, tell me, what if the local phone company decides to start restricting sites, to an extent where it didn't piss off so many people that there was a widespread revolt?
Let's say it decided to start restricting political sites to one that would pay for access. Let's further propose that local citizens would be more than willing to donate to make sure their favorite political group was nice and speedy, thus leaving all others out in the cold.
No, I'm sorry. ISPs with competition can do whatever they want. But there are too many communities like mine where there are no choices, at all.
It, basically, is akin to how I feel about discrimination laws, or the current crap about pharmasists not giving out medication based on religious beliefs. I'm fairly libertarian, so sure, privately operated business should, in theory, be able to discriminate against whoever they want, however they want. In reality, however, many people have one or two places they can get, say, food or medicine from, without a lot of hardship.
So it doesn't really matter if this is an 'actual' monopoly or just a 'competing choices cost twice as much' monopoly. If there is just one practical choice for something needed for a large group of people (and, like or not, internet access is 'needed' in the modern world.), then whoever's providing it shouldn't be allowed to fuck with it. They want to fuck with it, they are free to split their business in half and compete with themselves, or offer two competing services from the same business.(2)
1) And, remember, coming in to start up a local ISP that doesn't go though the local phone company is going to cost a good deal more than one that does.
2) This, more than anything, is why I have problems with Walmart and their 'moral' stances they take on things. Do you know how many places I have to buy, say, video games within 50 miles? That's right. Walmart. Any video games not sold at Walmart have almost zero penetration in this community. Or CDs, or DVDs.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
They aim to make a lot of money selling hardware to provide a tiered internet and/or block certain traffic. Of course they oppose Net neutrality.
meh
If this happened 10 years ago, would we have google?
Think about it. Microsoft could have payed this additional fee for the sole perpose of keeping competition out.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They will not be able to sell new products that would implement these preferential traffic controls. The real reason is that law will be bad for them, because they want to be in that market (and many other companies). So do we want to have "free incoming calls" to be a law or believe that the market will settle itself on something reasonable. With the way the corporations are pushing against internet neutrality, I think we need that law.
Simon says you know jack.
i will expect these companies to actually fight for net neutrality. why? because if bandwidth requirements increase, then companies will have to buy more routers, switches, cables, fiber optic, etc. then companies such as cisco and 3m will earn more.
now if backbone providers just stick with using qos and priority classification in their network, then why the need to upgrade equipment as 'non-paying' content providers will just be limited. their existing network will be for paying subscribers and paying content providers. the isps earn more.
hmmm....
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Of course there are market failures - whenever there are huge fixed costs (they lead to natural monopolies) - whenever there are externalities (positive or negative) - and a variety of other situations.
Market failures notwithstanding a state enforced monopoly (like power companies basically are) is certainly not the free market. Think of pollution for a case where the market fails, not telecoms or power companies - with the massive market power firms in these industries have - they are NOT free markets.
haha! you are cool because you made fun of windows! you are a hero! you are a linux fatty!
>>Legislating in the absence of real understanding of the issue
Is what is typically done.
Congress has a very bad habit of allowing "industry experts" (lobbyist) to consult (write), legislation about matters in which they have no understanding.
If the lobbyist have their way, they'll do the same thing to the internet that they did to energy policy.
Is that a SCSI connector or are you just glad to see me?
i was just thinking if this whole story might have
... u know ... yack-yack away about nothing.
...
it's root in the mci - verizon merger. verizon paid
8'440'000'000 us dollar for mci. that money is now
missing. verizon doesn't really have the cash to buy
mci (guessing) and had to borrow money, lots of it).
it was a long shot for verizon, because they exactly had
the destruction of net neutrality in mind.
with net neutraity gone it is simple for verizon
to get those 8'440'000'000 dollars back or anyway, get it
back faster. my guess is that if net neutraity survives
verizon and mci will be in deep pooh land (again).
verizon is not a tier 1 network provider. it is a cell phone
company that makes alot of cash with obvious cell phone services.
they have a completly differnt mentality about networks. cell phone
companies see a network AS THEIR OWN thing. it belong to them.
it is like a dark net that they need to route cell phone
traffic. this is completly hiden from the cell phone
customer. the customer to the cell phone company is a stupid
sheep person that just wants to yack-yack about meaningless thing
24/7 anywhere and needs the latest uber-super-duper gadgety stylish
cell phone to
a internet-network company like qwest or sprint are proud of their network.
they think data and computers. they know that it's about computers
that wan to talk to each other. they assume that 40 % of their customer
are computer savvy etc. these companys care about network neutrality.
it's just that they dont make alot of money (lot's of cash flow, but little
profit).
now a cell phone company like verizon sees this huge infrastructure
and with their "lets ripe off the customer mentality" see a huge opportunity
to "monopolise" said real network.
this is possible because cellphone companies have LOTS of cash, they have
a basic network (enough bandwidth for maybe 56k per customer since it just
needs to carry voice) but trementous amounts of profit. so there u go.
a small (infrastructure wise) company (verizon) can buy a big company
(infrastructure wise) and this is the whole problem. the cell phone
guys just dont belong into the real network word. they're just going to mess
it up.
im really sad mci didn't merge with qwest. the world would be a better place
today.
anyway my guess/feeling is that the whole issue around blowing up net
neutrality steems from the verizon and mci merger, having a cell phone
company in the internet "backbone" business and the need of verizon
to get back those missing 8'440'000'000 dollars
what we need is a bill that forbids cell phone companies (wireLESS) to own
wire companies. problem solved.
There. Nice and simple. The ISPs will drop this instanly, lest they use the userbase they have that use google.
I believe that this has always been the case and as such all ISPs completely ignore the packet QoS headers. If you want to do bandwidth shapping, you can only do it on your own outgoing connection. Everything else is beyond your control.
Most traffic shapers can actually analyse the packet data to determine the type. However, once VoIP is encrypted that becomes impossible.
Whatever happens, you can be sure we users will get boned in the end!
Great post, really interesting stuff, in fact much of it was on my "I should read up on this..." list. However:
Plus... there's a big bait & switch problem the cable and DSL providers have. Until now, nobody really could use that 9 Mbps!I've had cable for five years and I've always been able to use all of it at any time of the day. I live in a relatively "well-off" area of a city, where you would expect to have a lot of contention. I could go home right now and kick off a BitTorrent download that'll get me 1000kbytes/sec on my 10 meg link instantly.
The contention thing has always interested me. When I signed up, many people complained that the ratios on cable are worse than DSL (50/1 verses 20/1), so I was concerned about it. I think a lot of people don't realise that it's the weakest link in the chain that determines the speed. Only certain sites will be able to give me full power, and I expect that. Maybe I've just been lucky, perhaps I'm the only bandwidth hog on my segment. But as you say, it's going to get real interesting once everyone starts downloading video. Fortunately my cable co does video on demand for TV shows over their cable service so that ought to be the bulk of it, keeping it off my TCP/IP link. :-p
Personally, I think the upstream is going to be fought over more. Most people don't upload anything other than emails at the moment, but that'll change soon.
Actually, it's neither. It's the telecom companies that both your ISP and Google (who I assume act as their own ISP) use to connect with each other. It is those telecom companies who have decided that some bits (or electrons) are more equal than others.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
There are some wonderfully informative comments to this thread but back on the topic: why would the router mfg co's sign such a memo to their congressman?
theory: if you tier up the peering, you have to have more [though less busy] routers. A completely non-neutral net would seem to a user like a fragmented net with some locations taking rediculous turn around times on httpGet(). more tiers than the "one" tier we now have has to mean more routers [and more hops to get on and off some particular class of backbone].
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
600 kilobytes. I hate it when I'm trying to make a point, then make a stupid typo. :(
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda