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BitTorrent's Bram Cohen against Network Neutrality
wigwamus writes "BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen warns on potential 'absurdity' of Network Neutrality laws and concedes that his hook-up with Cachelogic is creating a system that might contravene Network Neutrality. He suggests there'd be no difference between big media footing the bill for their own upload costs of their offerings and subsidizing the consumer's download costs of the same."
Since he cashed in, like Shawn Fanning. Why should his biased opinion on this count for anything, when he's mostly interested in $$$$$? Might as well hear the spiel straight from the CacheLogic CEO. Besides, CacheLogic sounds like an Akamai wannabe.
"when you're talking about large file transfers going to very large numbers of people there frequently are significant costs involved"
While it would be terrible for an ISP to block Google or Amazon, it probably won't happen because neither service puts a strain on their resources. But there are internet uses which do put a strain on an ISPs resources. For example, while this isn't true today, it is quite possible that we will download DVDs which, even compressed using XVID or something, will still be a couple gigs a piece (maybe as low as 1GB). Imagine a Netflix/Napster-like subscription service for video downloads!
Currently, ISPs oversell their capacity because most of the time, we use very little of it. Like while I'm writing this comment, I'm using 0kbps and when I submit it, my connection will burst up to give me a fast experience. But if I was using a lot of this connection a lot of the time, my ISP would have a problem - and I don't think it's too hard for us to imagine IPTV or the like for the future which would present such a problem.
Personally, I would prefer usage charges (charges per GB levied against the user) than charges to the content provider. I'd rather pay for it myself than just get the content that a company will pay for, but it seems like Bram has realized that, with high-bandwidth services becoming more and more prevalent, there will be a point at which ISPs need to do something about that extra used capacity - whether that means charging the users sucking all that capacity or charging the content providers enabling the users to suck all that capacity.
I wonder if the internet is something that should not be left to capitolism, to media companies...because of things like this. Aside from the obvious privacy issues of a government issued internet (something we could probably get around...but hey, its not like they don't already see everything), I think a govNET could have some very nice benefits. I am of belief that government exists to do for the people only the things they cannot do for themselves, or things which there is little incentive to consider (pollution). The government doesn't always screw things up. They manage, for the most part, to get our mail where it belongs in a reasonable time for a reasonable cost. They keep our highways and our roads in decent shape for the most part. And they train and are capable of effectively (more so than other countries can) deploying troops in the event of a crisis.
I don't see how a govNET would be very much a different decision than the highway situation was...get the government to lay out tons of fibre optic cable to every home, and then the only upgrades you have to make are to the infrastructure. What a campaign advantage it would be to boast of pushing for fibre optic to every home, school, and office, for a REASONABLE cost. Considering the benefit we all get out of our highways, we don't pay that much tax to keep them useable. I think the same could go for the internet.
I know there are more important issues at stake than fast music downloads.
The internet has proven to be wonderful tool for people to communicate. TV and radio were supposed to fulfill these promises but big business has subverted them.
We have seen that bloggers can actually force big media to carrry there stories, that the internet is an invaluable research tool, and that it gives voice to the voiceless, from Iranian dissedients to disgruntled corporate employees.
The free music is a nice side beneift, but let's not lose track of our priorities.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I read TFA, and I find it to be very naive.
If there would be no Network Neutrality anymore, the following could (and probably will) happen:
- Netcache has to pay to the user's provider as well as for it's own upload costs it already has.
- The user still pays the same amount of money he does now.
- There is no incentive anymore to upgrade those main pipes, the company's that want good network performance to the end-user will just have to pay up extra.
- PROFIT (For big providers like AOL).
In the end, there will be no (speed) advantage to anyone. Everything will just get more expensive! This is what history should have taught us by now.
Network neutrality should be guarded!
I think Bram Cohen is just making a BIG mistake here! (Or he is simple misquoted)
If the services that Cachelogic offers violate net neutrality at some level, then the internet hasn't had net neutrality since the mid 1990s. Akamai and Squid Proxy do very similar things with data (replicating it in multiple locations for faster downloads). Cachelogic and Akamai still have to pay the backbone providers, just like everybody else. What violates neutrality is the backbone providers setting aside a certain amount of bandwidth (or setting up a second network) to make transfer speeds from some sites faster than others.
If the ISPs want to create a second network of their own to push their own media services at much higher speeds, let them. I equate it to getting your internet access from your cable company. Your TV and your net access come down the same wire, and TV is a media service, so that's really nothing new. If you don't agree with that, then you can think of it as whatever the ISP wants to provide being on a faster LAN (since it originates "locally"), whereas the rest of the internet is still on a WAN.
That said, the article's analogy to toll roads was an excellent choice, as anyone in the Northern Virginia area can tell you. When they first open, the toll roads are significantly faster but cost a fortune to use, with the promise that the prices will go down once it's paid for. But then it fills up to the point where it's only a tiny bit faster than the equivalent free roads, and the prices go up even more to cover the costs of expansion. After a few years, your choices are completely clogged free roads where you go 15mph, or a $3/each way 15 mile road where you go 35mph after the fourth or fifth mile.
The conclusion that it doesn't matter if the media company buys more bandwidth the old fashioned way or pays the ISPs for the use of a secondary faster network is spot on. However, the customer will end up paying the same amount either way, which means there is no advantage for the customer by switching to the new tiered network model.
This article seems to completely miss the point.
Bram points out, rightly, that one must be very careful with legislating network neutrality, to keep from forcing ISPs to deliver all traffic (DDoS, spam, etc.). He acknowledges that with a sufficiently broad definition, the Cachelogic scheme could violate network neutrality.
Of course, so would Akamai, in this case. The article gets the entire topic wrong. What they're discussing is not a QoS tier at the network level, but a single company's caching architecture that makes their clients' data go faster.
And the company isn't even a network provider.
Close, but no cigar.
So buy VoIP services from your ISP instead of Vonage or some other random net entity. Your ISP can guarantee their VOIP services have sufficient QoS so you get excellent quality phone service. Most cable companies are already starting to offer VoIP.
How can things like IPTV come into being if companies like Verizon are barred from building up and reserving the capacity to provide them? Why should Google, Microsoft, etc. be allowed access to that bandwidth since it's not impeding their ability to provide their services? Not allowing the telecoms and other large ISPs to do this would akin to not allowing Google to invest in dark fibre for its own purposes. Hmmm is that the smell of hypocrisy among the slashdot crowd once again?
Both sides are being dishonest here. The content companies have no right to the entire network, and the ISPs don't want to provide the full service that they sell. There is supposed to be an implicit gentleman's agreement that if someone buys a leased line, they won't face arbitrary tolls. That's the point that a lot of talking heads can't seem to understand. They think that the content companies want to be free-riders when all they want is to be able to deliver their content at full f$%^ing speed to their customers. The "toll" is more like a warlord in Africa charging a "toll" to let legitimate businesses use the government-built roads. The customers on both ends paid for the bandwidth. If there is a problem with not making enough money, then the ISPs need to go back and rethink the wisdom of charging only $15 for broadband.
Most cable companies are already starting to offer VoIP.
Yeah, often at *substantially* higher costs than what is available from the independent VoIP providers, and with no guarantee that QoS can be maintained once the packets leave your provider's network.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Did you even read the blurb?
"[Cohen] concedes that his hook-up with Cachelogic is creating a system that might contravene Network Neutrality"
Only an idiot would want legislation to pass that would make his current business project fail.
Bram Cohen is a smart guy, but he does not properly capitalize on his ideas.
This is precisely what he is trying to do. And he does take all those things about smaller sites, etc. He signed up with the big boys now. He want to clear the way for his "new" friends. He has no interest in what happens to the small timers. Make no mistake, he's using he "geek clout" to convince us that what's good for WB is good for the internet. I hope that nobody falls for it. Ah, the power of money. Quite a bear trap it is.
What?
you repeal the law of humanness. A totally free market would result in MEGABIGCO Inc. owning the world and everyone being some sort of electronic plantation worker for them, never quite making enough "money" to ever get out of debt to them. You will inevitably go from lot of companies to cartels to a monopoly, because that makes more money for the monopoly owners, and because humanness means that they will continue to impose their will on governmental processes. We already went through this crap and debate in our semi recent human past. it's been tried and found severely lacking. A "free" market means zero environmental regulations, what is in it for them? They don't care if their factory pollutes the water table over someplace, the bosses and owners will just live where that doesn't happen and buy up all the land around them to give them a clean environment, and stuff like that. It means no minimum wage,back to child labor, no safe working conditions, etc, because that is their historically proven over and over again humans as bosses track record back before these regs existed. This is *precisely* because companies are run by humans and megalomaniacs and greedsters strive for top dog positions all the time,and they get there, "by hook or CROOK", hence why those sorts of bad news policies flow downstream in the "giving orders" chain of commands structure, in government or business.
The "free" market is one of those things that it is easy to say and might sound sort of good in theory, but it won't ever fly or work as advertised without tremendous negative effects. For an example of an area with more or less "anything goes free markets", look at the horn of africa.
This falls into the same category that anything Linus says does for me. Just because you've had one good idea, doesn't mean we should listen to you about anything else. Bram doesn't sound like he knows what he's talking about, and he's using the position he gained by inventing something lots of people use to push his opinion. Linus tries that all the time, and I usually don't give him the time of day either.
-|BlackErtai|-
A big problem with western society today is this: We have seen how corrupt and untrustworthy people can be, and we attempt to codify what we want in our laws such that the reading of them is infallible enough to keep these corrupt and untrustworthy people from doing harm.
It doesn't work.
No law can be rigid enough to be interpreted flawlessly by everyone and yet be flexible enough to catch the exceptions that eventually crop up.
It requires human judgement to really tell if something contravenes the spirit of the law, and yet we tie the judges' hands with specific, rigid definitions of how to judge the case. We attempt to remove human judgement from the equation because we do not trust it. This is utterly stupid.
The only way to get Net Neutrality to work is to establish an ideal scenario of how the Internet should work, and giving judges the leeway to decide whether certain cases that crop up go against those established ideals. Yes, this also means selective enforcement, which is only a bad thing if you have bad people making the enforcement decisions.
If people would stop electing corrupt and otherwise untrustworthy invidviduals to positions of power, we would not have to worry so much about these things. It is the responsibility of the people to weed out the political landscape and leave only the trustworthy. Obviously we have been slack.
Judgement calls in cases like Net Neutrality are necessary, and if made by trustworthy and integrous people, will solve a lot of these bickering problems we have trying in vain to construct a law so perfectly worded that it can bend both ways backwards at the same time.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Actually, it doesn't. It covers what the ISP believes the average user with that connection speed will use. If every user of that ISP consumed the maximum amount of bandwidth 24/7 the ISP would have to raise prices significantly.
For those of us who build telco networks, this discussion of network neutrality is all just plain silly.
There are many ways to get internet data from source to desitinantion. If a company wants to buy into a faster or better connected network, that is the choice they make. That has always been the choice the content providers make. The customer does not have any implicit rights to the best path unless the content provider has made the choice to be on the best path.
As for building a fast lane, that is just a bunch of BS the telcos are pumping so that they can build a new internet which they control . . . for the sake of cheaper video transport and more effective cost recovery. Yep . . . it is all about money.
It is all just a big distraction. Network Neutrality is just a hand wave to keep your attention while the other hand is busy.
Telcos cannot transport cable TV (IPTV - iow non-reg content) on their broadband networks for free. So, they want to prioritize bandwidth at different qualities and different prices. They in turn will take advantage of the new price structure to keep their own video transport costs low. At the same time, they can sell it to the rest of the world as a diffentiated service offering for content providers.
This also acts as a way to protect their own IPTV offerings from internet based IPTV offerings.
This is sneaky on so many levels. And, if someone manages to enact legislation to protect the rights of the consumer, I cannot imagine how they would enforce it.
Leave the internet alone!!! You don't want it to be any more complicated than it already is. If half of the SlashDot readers actually understood what it takes to build/operate/support/maintain the physical internet, this thread would be completely different.
Brotha', then all our opinions are irrelevent. Everyone who uses the internet will be directly affected, both monetarilly and personally, by the presence or abscence of net-neutrality. To say that someone with an interest in the outcome of the debate cannot have a valid, arguable opinion implies that no one who is affected by the outcome can way in. And frankly, given that the passage of the Net-Neutrality bill will directly affect me, you're fuckin' right I'm going to have an opinion.
It's called Traffic Shaping but it's just an arm's race. In the end all P2P traffic will be encrypted and running over port 445 (SSL). One sound business model would be to charge consumers (us) for excess traffic... and stop with the silly limited "unlimited" services for rock bottom prices (here in the UK).
But there's no free market here no matter what. The majority of internet users are hooked in through local telephone companies (ILECs) and cable companies. Most endpoints in the USA are accessed by only one possible wire connection and 95+% are accessed by no more than two. That means almost all endpoints face a monopoly provider. There is no free market when the city or county prohibits build out of alternative connections and collects franchise fees for the monopoly providers. But a free market with fifty different companies each having rights of way across public property and every private property in the city the way phone companies do isn't really practical. It's a physical limitation as much as a regulatory one. You can argue today that the citizens of the cities should have come together at the founding and agreed to build municipal access conduit and allowed everyone to put in cables who could rent space. But that is not unlike the system we have with democratically elected city governments and franchise agreements. IT would have the same problems. So we have a limit on the freedom of markets available. When we have abundant last mile providers and each home in America has five or ten choices of broadband provider then no company would be able to abuse net neutrality. So we won't need it. But today we have everyone facing monopoly or cartel duopoly. One way providers want to abuse the monopoly is by extorting money through net non-neutrality. But the money they would extort is really a side effect of the municipal monopoly. They could never make money like that in a free market. So it makes sense from a free-market perspective to prohibit the non-neutral extortion.
Thats all well and good except that the barrier to market entry and not government created. They are fundamental to capitalism. Since it costs initial capital to enter a market, a company can not enter the market and be competitive immediately. There is a reason you or I couldn't start making cars that ran on butter tomorrow.
"Monopolies ONLY occur due to government licensing."
Ridiculous beyond comprehension. Learn about economics and its history. See: John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil. In an unregulated system, the natural equilibrium is monopoly.
"Not true. A provider of a product or service will provide what the consumer wants, including making sure that they abide by whatever environmental restrictions the market demands. Pollution is better covered by trespass and realistic tort laws than by regulation -- regulations of the environment today just move polluters around. The biggest polluter in the country is the US government, by the way."
First of all, a dichotomy between "tort laws" and "regulation" is patently false and intellectually shallow. Furthermore, pollution is not well-suited for tort law. Not only are harms that occur due to pollution often societal, but they are difficult to trace to individuals or companies as the cumulative effect brings about such negative consequences. Tort law focuses on private property and pollution harms the common good, public property and society in general.
"No, child labor has occured during the beginning of markets because the older workers were not able to adapt to the new markets. In most situations, children will be less productive if the government stops restricting how it pays employees. Minimum wage laws create unemployment because they rob uneducated non-productive people from finding jobs that won't pay them what they're worth until they prove their worth as employees. Many foreigners come into the country to work illegally for less than minimum wage, but quickly start earning much more than minimum wage once they've proven their worth."
Factually wrong. Its that simple. Child labor did not occur because older workers were not able to adapt. Its insulting that anyone would actually post such tripe. Children are not working in South East Asia for three generations because the older people couldn't adapt. Children didn't work in Western Europe and the United States from the start of the Industrial Revolution until nearly WWII because their parent's couldn't adapt. The children of children who were forced to work were also forced to work, are still forced to work at the same jobs.
"Go read Mises, Rothbard, Hayek and Goethe. You'll drop your Keynesian theories right quick."
Ah it all becomes clear. How about this - don't try and drape ideology as economics. The Austrian School is all about how economics 'should' be. Its horrible at predicting how things are. Its also fundamentally anti-labor (relying solely on the marginal utility to produce value has no fundamental origin of the system). There's a reason the Austrian school has been a fringe theory of economics in every society (except ironically under the National Socialists).
regulations, which brings us back to it won't work without them. And "insurance" for what? If there's no regulations, there wouldn't be any penalties of note for them to break in the first place, so not much need for insurance other than fire insurance. And as to public versus private land, again, historically, a lot of examples where private concerns who "owned the land" just dumped willy nilly. And none of that addresses child labor laws, workplace safety, etc.
It does no good if all or most (really, I am forced to speak *most* generally on this topic) the business ignore any workplace safety, you can take your labor down the street and almostbigco inc has the same lack of caring.
I realise in the real world there are exceptions, there are some voluntarily concerned and well meaning businesses, but taken as a general topic and to an endgame, I can't see how you will stop the giant greedsters from taking over, short of periodic violent uprisings and heads on pikes. You either have some thought out regs or you don't. If you go the route of regs, you will never have this theoretical "free" market. How about the stock market? With no regs, how would you ever hope to beat the corporate insiders trading? It would destroy confidence in the market (already low) virtually overnight.
Myself, I prefer "fair" market concept, some minimum but very well enforced market regulations and business regs. I think it could be greatly fixed/enhanced by disallowing the concept of a career full time politician or governmental worker inside the bureaucracy, but that is another subject entirely.
You won't be able to eliminate human weaknesses or vices, so all you can do realistically is remove as many ways as possible for them to be realised on the "potential victim" population.
If you post a story that is contrary to he status quo, it never reaches the front page. If you post a comment you are then modded down. Are there any sites where minority opinions are actually allowed ?
You must be an idiot to reply to the trolls in the first place.