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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,
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."
> "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.
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