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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.'"
If I worked at a company that did something like this, I would start a coup d'état and happily leave if I lost.
Since you don't, why not drive a truck bomb over to K Street instead?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.