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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."
I worry that if a law is passed to solve bandwidth problems today it will take 20 years to repeal it when there is no problem. Could Net Neutrality work out the same as the Spanish-American War Excise Tax?
From TFA: "One reason, perhaps, is because if toll roads are to be allowed on the internet, then someone has to build them, and that means jobs for the hardware boys."
Possibly the biggest problem with the 'net neutrality' debate is a mass lack of understanding of how prioritized services would be implemented. It has little to do with hardware. One can forgive mere journalists for such a network faux paus.
The thing about prioritized traffic is that the last mile makes the biggest difference. So, if come big media company pays its ISP to prioritize its video traffic, it won't amount to very much unless each and every last-mile provider on the Internet everywhere configures their equipment to treat that traffic with the same priority.
In fact, even on the backbone, its the same story. As soon as a packet crosses onto another provider's network, it may no longer be routed with any priority at all.
The only thing that can be know for sure about the effect of prioritizing IP traffic is that other traffic will slow down. Like VOIP 911 calls, for example.
The most, and possibly only, practical way to improve the performance would be for the telcos to make good on promises made 10 years ago to run high capacity to every home. Promises used to get lots of money from the government, which they never delivered on.
Perhaps the best thing would be to support "fail fast" for telcos. Never bail them out - the sooner a telco goes under, the better. Artificially keeping them in business supports investment in outmoded technology and outdated business models and managment structures. The 'dumber' a network is, the better it works. By allowing telcos to go under, investment in newer, faster technology is naturally encouraged.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
This guys a fuckin' nut!
He makes dark deals with the movie and music monopolies and now claims he can circumvent Net Neutrality.
Just let him bob and weave in his dark corner with his soiled money and let the rest of us move on to the real world please!
this is about the podcasters, bloggers, and startups...if you make them pay twice, then you are taking away the nets key advantage to old media -- easy access to all, anyone can create, not just consume...dont let the Bells take that away, dont let a few billionairs control out thoughts, news and entertainment, we broke that mold, DONT RE-BUILD IT!
Long story short: he is wrong. He didn't take into account what would happen to smaller websites if Network Neutrality was no longer the norm. I don't really want to go into why Network Neutrality would be a good law because this is Slashdot, and I assume most of you already know. Bram Cohen is a smart guy, but he does not properly capitalize on his ideas. His statement regarding Network Neutrality just further proves that seeing the world in $$$ is not his forte.
The dude had one good idea and now he's struggling to monetize it. He's hardly impartial. Network neutrality isn't about not having to pay for the bill for your uploads, it's about having to pay the rest of the net too. Without peering, the internet will turn into a content delivery network much like cable television, and I guarantee that I won't subscribe to that. That'll be the day when I rent an excavator and start burying fiber myself and peer to other folks like me.
you have the problem right. the isp's will have to build out a lot more capacity to be able to deliver these new, rich media services. this debate isn't about neutrality it is about WHO PAYS.
right now the consumer pays but rates are as high as the market will bear. isp's sre not going to be able to raise rates, so they are looking to the beneficiaries of the extra bandwidth to pay for the costs.
gooogle makes more profit than comcast on a much smaller revenue base. the internet content providers get a relatively free ride. they can afford a 10% drop in their profits and absrb it to help pay.
the alternatives are that consumers get socked or that we don't get the networks upgraded aggressively. the whole net neutrality thing is a gambit of the PR agencies, trying to frighten the consumers so that their is political pressure to protect google's profits. don't let anyone convince you otherwise
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."
Subsidize? Subsidize?! I have to wonder what Cohen is thinking. If he thinks that the telco's plans will result in cheaper internet access for consumers, then he's an amazingly naive optimist. Only competition will force prices down and quality up, and its just not happening. My choices here are roadrunner, which goes out for days at a time versus SBC dsl, which for about $40/mo tops out at about 2.5Mbit at my range from the CO. Meanwhile I can only look on in envy at my friends in verizon markets who are on FIOS, while SBC/ATT continue to pledge lightspeed for my city "real soon now".
The consumer always pays, by definition. This is about adding billable layers to skim more profits from those consumers. I mean us consumers.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
As much as I respect Bram, I'm not going to include his voice as being relevant for the net neutrality discussion.
Anybody with a vested interest cannot add anything other than personal slant to the discussion.
I'd be willing to wager that something like Bittorrent, which seems to have a habit of choking/flooding a connection, would be prioritized flat at the bottom of the list unless otherwise paid for.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
So let ISPs start giving priority on bandwidth for some things, and maybe limit bandwidth for others. Over time, let people yell and scream, and companies figure out ways to provide premium services without irking their customers too much, and ten years from now when everyone has 25-megabit connections no one will care because even "low tier" bandwidth will be enough for a couple of high-quality video streams simultaneously.
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.
/. readers think they love, but in reality create cartels and monopolies that keep many people out of competiting with big companies.
That's not true. The reason we have MEGABIGCO is because of preferential treatment such as:
1. Regulations -- Creates a very high barrier to enter a market
2. Subsidies -- Creates a financial incentive for the cronies of the law
3. Licensing -- Creates a cartel that prevents the proper number of competitors
4. Taxation -- Allows the government to create the first 3 preferential treatments
MEGABIGCO won't occur in a free market if there are no barriers to entering that market. Some barriers are those that many
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.
Monopolies ONLY occur due to government licensing. All the big companies that people think were monopolies (or are) have always had to compete to stay on top -- but there has always been competition. If you look at the past, the few companies that were branded a monopoly were actually given significant preferential treatment by the local, state and federal governments. There is no monopoly in a free market because anyone can enter the market to compete.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hah! The Horn of Africa ended up in a slushpile of overlords because of government restrictions on firearm ownership and capitalism. Preferential treatment of the elite few creates these overlords by law, not by anarchy. Even now we're seeing great leaps and bounds in technology and markets through people attempting to overthrow the regimes that were put there by the previous governments.
Yes it will take time, but free markets have been left to the black market because the only people who want to compete are criminals. Regulated markets in the U.S. have taken us from the #1 producer in th
I remember when the internet wasn't so large and easy to access. We all got along fine... who cares about all this? if they make using the 'net cost prohibitive then people will just find better and cheaper ways to link their computers. I don't need some big telco to wipe my ass for me
--we can make our own backbones.
P.S. the telcos and carriers have no leverage because if they deny google access to their networks then all their customers will drop them.
But there are. There's the email delivery problem, as well as providers which block ports essentially for their convenience, with no oversight (not just SMTP ports but also e.g. web ports). While that would be fine if there were a free market, and you could just pick a competing provider, that's usually not the case when it comes to a high-bandwidth connection. Providing high bandwidth connections to homes requires regulation for various practical reasons, which results in semi-monopolies. What those semi-monopolies are allowed to do with their control over household and business connections needs to be regulated. The only question is exactly how.
Something similar applies as you go further upstream, into the Internet cloud itself: Tier 1 providers are an oligopoly which also benefit from regulation that allows them to do what they do. Once again, the question isn't whether there should be regulation, the question is what the regulation should be, and what rights and protections customers should have.
While I share the trepidation at what new legislation might bring, simply leaving it to the market isn't going work, because the market isn't even close to being "free". The reason this is coming up now is because big corporations are actively looking to consolidate their competitive positions now that the Internet has become so central to the economy, as well as looking for ways to replace profit centers that were undercut by the Internet. Sitting back and hoping that they won't do anything nasty and won't abuse the power that they've been granted by existing laws is hardly rational, either.