Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
"...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
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 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.
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
Net Neutrality insists that the internet carriers (mostly ISPs such as Time Warner and AT&T) treat all traffic the same. The ISPs are proposing a tiered service level (that would violate Net Neutrality), where content providers who want their content to go through a fatter pipe would pay the ISPs for the priviledge. This has a lot of people (including myself) up in arms. Imagine a scenario where a new, exciting web application appears, but doesn't succeed, because the creators don't have enough money to pay for the preferential treatment, and thus have to go through the ghetto internet. This puts them at a large disadvantage to the already established players. Another side of the argument: I already pay Time Warner for my internet connection. Now they want to get paid on the backside as well? Lame all around.
Sometimes I doubt your committment to SparkleMotion!
At the basic level it is that all connections have to be provided the exact same level of service or network speed.
The two basic arguments are:
net neutraility laws good) Here the thinking and the reason they want net neutrality laws, is that large ISP and the companies that own the trunks and large communication segments would charge companies extra money to carry thier traffic. So for instance your ISP may require Google, since they are the big named one, to pay the ISP a certain amount per year in order that you as the customer can use Google at the same speed you could reach some unknown search engine. Google does not pay and you as the customer get a slow connection on your ISP equipment to the Google servers.
net neutraility laws are bad) It removes the abaility of companies to provide quaility of service packages. So if your ISP wanted to provide an extra service where packets that are marked as comeing from a gaming server would be given higher priority then other packets. With net neutrality laws that would be forbidden.
This explains it better than I could: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality
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.
> "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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Well, sure, that's the surface idea, in the sense that to get packets delivered at all (this is painted as "with higher priority", but since packets don't live forever, in practice this will become universal), you'll not only have to pay your direct ISP for the bandwidth, but pay every network provider over whose network your packets will travel for an additional toll for carrying your packets. Never mind how the cost of that is already built into your ISP's bandwidth charge, since interconnections are already covered by contracts which are paid for either in dollars or in-kind with agreements of "I'll take your packets, and you'll take mine."
Telcos could just raise their charges, or eliminate peering and charge bandwidth fees on interconnection, and drive these costs directly and simply down to the ISP charges where, if anywhere, they belong. The reason they aren't doing this is that this isn't really about charging for bandwidth, which they are already getting paid for. This is about establishing that a network carrier that is remote from, e.g., Google can charge a prohibitive toll to carry Google's packets across its network, thus allowing it to effectively shut-off Google from providing services that would compete with content services that that network carrier wants to provide itself. The immediate targets, from the comments the telcos have already made, are major portals (Google particularly), streaming video entertainment, and VoIP (the reason the latter is targetted is most clear -- it competes with the telcos telephone business; the others are targetted because those are markets the telcos want to get into themselves to set themselves up as content gatekeepers and to compete with the cable companies in the lucrative video-on-demand market.)
Destroying net neutrality is an attempt to leverage the telcos power over the last mile (often a regional monopoly, though the regions are growing with telco mergers) and the network backbone into the power to squelch competition by fiat in every field relying on the network.
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.
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!
You're talking about paying more to get a faster connection. The proposal is to give you a fast connection, and then artificially throttle when you connect to certain web sites, as a way of extorting money from those sites.
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.
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
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.)
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
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
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.
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?
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!
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
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 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.
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."